From: GRIMBERGEN KUNPV1 PSYCH KUN NL Date: 24 jul 1990 Subject: Some more about tournaments Last week I recieved some questions by Klaus Blumberg concerning the list of major Shogi tournaments I provided for the Shogi Discussion List. These questions made me re-evaluate the information for qualification for all these tournaments and although the information I gave is correct, it is definitely not complete. This time I will try to clarify some details by adding some remarks. The first question was about the qualification for the Kio-tournament. I wrote that 33 players qualify for the finals. This number is correct, but of course it is not possible to play a real ("binary") knock out with this number of players. However, real knock-outs are only played in the Oza and Kisei tournament (knock-outs of 16 players). In other tournaments the status of the players is taken into account. Some players enter the knock-out at a later stage than others. In the Kio-tournament this means that about 100 players need to play qualifying rounds for 8 places in the finals. About 30 players enter the finals directly. This number changes every time a Kio tournament is held, the 15th Kio tournament had 33 players in the finals, the 14th had 36. The rules applied in these cases are only known by a few officials in Japan. In the Oza and the Kisei tournament, about 50 professionals are selected to play for 10 places in the finals. How this selection of 50 is done I don't know. This means that 6 players are pre-qualified. One of them is the loser of the previous Oza/Kisei title-match but how the other 5 players are selected I don't know either. The second question is about a second chance for losers, like in Judo. Indeed, a kind of second chance is provided in the Kio and the Ryu-o tournament. In the Kio you can still become the challenger after losing a game. Losing two games means definitely the end for title dreams. In the Ryu-o it is a bit more difficult. In the qualifying groups there are second chances, but only in the top-group it is possible to qualify for the finals by means of this second chance. In the other groups the second chance is used for promotion and degradation to other groups. In the finals of the Ryu-o there is no second chance. Only in the final stage, when two players decide who becomes challenger of the Ryu-o title holder, a best of three match is played, so it is possible to drop a game. All in all, it must become clear that knock out is the main tournament system for Shogi. Amateur Shogi consists almost entirely of knock-out tournaments without a second chance. The question by Klaus about second chances and the discussions about the Dutch Shogi Championship (which will be a knock-out without second chance starting 1991) show that it is very difficult for westerners to view knock-out as a fair tournament system to decide the winner. Maybe the Discussion List can be used to discuss all the aspects of knock-out tournaments. Best wishes, Reijer Grimbergen