From: Reijer Grimbergen ETL GO JP> Date: 26 dec 1995 Subject: This week in Shukan Shogi (no. 616, 12/27 & 3/1) In the last Shukan Shogi of this year, most of the 32 pages are used for a kind of year summary. The most important events, the best games and again the survey into winning percentages of opening play. Of course I will not go into that, you have had the possibility to read it all on Shogi-L before :-). Headline of this week is of course Habu`s next step to reach the ultimate goal: win all seven titles. In the last game of the Osho league against Ariyoshi Habu was put under a lot of pressure, but one mistake in the middle game cost Ariyoshi dearly. The game between Nakahara and Moriuchi, that Nakahara had to win to force a play-off, was a very tough fight according to Shukan Shogi. Nakahara built an anaguma, and Moriuchi got the initiative. His position always seemed slightly better, but Nakahara built a good attack of his. Finally Moriuchi managed to stop the attack by some fine defensive play and won the game. At first sight a very good win by Moriuchi. This meant that Habu will get another chance to add the one missing title to his collection in the Osho match that will start on January 11th and 12th in Shizuoka. In the Kio there are now only two. Murayama beat Shima in the loser`s round and will now face Takahashi again for the right to challenge Habu. Murayama will have to win two games to become challenger, Takahashi only needs one in this somewhat peculiar knock out system. In the Kisei Tanigawa is the first one to qualify for the best eight. In the kisei there are three small leagues of four players. In each group, two players qualify for a knock-out of eight to decide the challenger of Habu. Tanigawa picked up his second win against Fukaura in group C. Most interesting (as always) is the fight in the Junisen. This week a complete round was played in B1 and B2. In B1 Sato Yasumitsu won again and has now a perfect score of nine wins. With still three games to play he is already promoted to the A-junisen where he will make his debut next year. He has a good chance to become the challenger in 1997, because of the enormous amount of work he puts in the game and his natural ability. Best chance to join Sato to the A-junisen has veteran Mori Keiji. He also won again and now has a 7-2 score. He is two points clear, with Tanaka and Kobayashi as his only remaining rivals. One point out of the remaining three will probably already be enough. In the B2 leader Inoue lost against the strong Fujii. Inoue now shares the lead with the surprisingly strong Urano, who won again and now also has a 6-1 record. Two wins out of the remaining three games are enough for promotion to the B1 class, since rivals Tosa, Waki, Maruyama and Izumi (all at 5-2) are lower in the B2 ranking. Finally, some more homepage news: I have added a list of professionals, both in Kanji and normal letters, for those who are interested in following professional news in Japanese for themselves. Hans Geuns and I will also start work on getting his Shogi Vocabulary on my home page. This will take a couple of weeks, even with a combined effort, so be patient... Reijer -- Dr. Reijer Grimbergen ElectroTechnical Laboratory Palcious Tsukuba 302 1-1-4 Umezono 1-24-8 Ninomiya Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki-ken Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki-ken 305 JAPAN 305 JAPAN E-mail: grimberg etl go jp Tel: 0298-59-1606 WWW: http://www.etl.go.jp:8080/etl/suiron/~grimberg Tel: +81-(0)298-54-5080 extension: 67431 Fax: +81-(0)298-58-5918