From: "Samuel H. Sloan (my real name)" AOL COM> Date: 25 oct 1995 Subject: Re: chess and shogi SHOGI AND CHESS Chess Grandmaster Jonathan Tisdall has asked a question concerning the psychological effects of playing two separate but related games such as chess and shogi. Do these games help each other or hurt? Grandmaster Tisdall wrote: "I am currently writing a book on chess psychology and training techniques. One thing that interested me was the possibility of using one game to learn the other. I would be curious to know of people's feelings about this, and particularly those who know shogi better than chess - that is to say shogi was their first 'language' - to see if there are useful points of contact in that direction." My observation is that when I first started to play shogi and Chinese chess, I was very concerned about this. For example, I often made blunders in shogi because I kept forgetting that the pawns in shogi capture by moving directly forward, and not diagonally as in chess. I also kept forgetting that shogi pieces in general have a hard time moving backward or, in some cases, do not move backward at all. The lance, the knight and the pawn cannot move backward at all in shogi. The gold and silver generals can move backward in a limited way, and not as well as they can move forward. Only the king, the rook and the bishop can move backward and forward with equal ease in shogi. This is in contrast to chess, where all the pieces, the king, the rook, the knight, the bishop and the queen, can move backward as easily as they can forward. For some reason, most of my worst blunders in shogi involved the silver general. I kept forgetting that, although the silver general can move one square directly forward, it cannot go directly back to the square from whence it came. It takes the silver general three moves to reach a square directly behind it. Similarly, in Chinese chess, the knights cannot jump as they can in Western chess. I kept forgetting that as well. It is understandable that in learning a new game, one would have difficulty in remembering the rules. However, what really disturbed me was that actually I started forgetting my chess. For example, in looking ahead and in calculating chess variations, I would think that a certain pawn could capture another by moving directly forward rather than diagonally. I never actually made an illegal move on the chessboard, but many times all my calculations were all wrong because I was visualizing that the pieces move as they do in shogi. In 1984, when I was just learning shogi, I played in the Japan National Championship of chess. I finished seventh, which sounds like a reasonable result, but actually it was a very bad result for me. (Japan is quite weak in chess, I suppose because of all the brightest and most talented players are playing shogi or go, where a good player can make a decent living and even hope to become a millionaire). Throughout the 1984 Japan National Chess Championship, I was plagued by hallucinations, based upon my continuously confusing the chess rules with the shogi rules. I asked International Chessmaster Larry Kaufman about this. Kaufman also plays all three of these games. He is clearly much better than I am at two of them, shogi and chess. (He might be better than I am at Chinese chess as well, but he has not played that game in about ten years.) Kaufman told me that he had once had the same problem, but that as time passed and he gained experience with these games, the problem went away. This proved to be the case with me as well. After several months of playing both shogi and chess, I stopped getting the games and the pieces mixed up. Since then, I have never had a problem with hallucinating the wrong game. More than that, I think that my experience with shogi has changed or affected my style as a chess player. I play chess more aggressively now than I did before. The effect of shogi is obvious. Shogi is a very aggressive game. Once a shogi player is on the defensive, he is almost guaranteed to lose. In shogi, you have to learn to make sacrifices and to throw yourself at the enemy king. One cannot simply grab an enemy pawn, defend tenaciously against an attack and win the endgame, as you can in chess. Among the many other differences between shogi strategy and chess strategy is that in shogi you can sometimes get away with marching your king right into and even through a cluster of enemy pieces. Because many of the pieces in shogi are relatively weak and cannot move backwards, if you can ever get behind them and then surrounding yourself with promoted pawns, your position may become impenetrable. Therefore, shogi players can often win a game by finding a hole in the enemy line that they can walk their king through. This never happens in chess. Because of this influence of shogi, I have found that in chess I have become much more willing to leave my king in an exposed position. Unfortunately, I must confess that this has not already produced favorable results. I have gotten myself checkmated by doing this quite a few times. However, this strategy has sometimes been successful as well. The following game is one of those occasions in which my shogi-derived strategy of marching my king into enemy territory has been successful. I am actually quite proud of this game, because I feel that it represents a contribution to opening theory. This game is from a standard opening line. However, White's fourth move of 4. Nc3 is a mistake, because it allows 4. ... Nxe4. White cannot capture with 5. Nxe4 because of 5. ... d5, recovering the sacrificed piece with the advantage to Black. Therefore, White sacrificed with 5. Bxf7. There are now two main variations: White can play either 7. Nfg5+ or Neg5+. In either case, Black can retreat with 7. ... Kg8 or Ke8. The problem is that in each case one of these retreats leads to a big advantage for Black, and the other one does not. There is only one correct response to each move. It is necessary to be careful. With colors reversed, there is a famous trap which goes: 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Nc3 Bc5? 4. Nxe5 Bxf2+ 5. Kxf2 Nxe5 6. d4 Qf6+ 7. Kg1 Ng4 8. Qxg4?? Qxd4 9. Be3 Qxe3 checkmate! As I was playing this game in a tournament with actual money at stake, I was trying to remember move move was which. I thought I knew the answer, but did not feel sure. I went into a deep think. Finally, I started thinking about a different move, one which has never been considered before, as far as I am aware, in the entire history of chess, namely 7. ... Kg6!!! This is a move that only a shogi player would consider. I spent about a half hour thinking about this, and finally I came to a conclusion: BLACK HAS A FORCED WIN IN ALL VARIATIONS WITH 7. ... Kg6. Although I have never had this game published, I have shown it to several strong players at the international master level. All of them have initially said the same thing. They have all said that there is no way that the black king can survive its march into enemy territory. Nevertheless, none of them have ever been able to come up with a refutation to my play, and I am convinced that there is no refutation. Black simply wins, by force. I must add that there is one reason why this might not be a theoretically significant contribution to opening theory. This is that with either 7. ... Ke8 or 7. ... Kg8 (if only I could remember which one) Black gets a good game. However, in my variation of 7. ... Kg6, Black actually wins at least one and possibly two knights, so Black clearly has more than just an advantage but actually has a forced win. Perhaps with computers (which were too weak to adequately analyze the resulting position back in 1987, when this game was played) or perhaps with the assistance of that well known Irish-American-Japanese-Norwegan Grandmaster Jon Tisdall, a bust to my variation can be found, but I think not. If anybody can find a refutation to the way I played in this game, please let me know. Sam Sloan [Event "Ramadan Open"] [Site "Abu Dhabi"] [Date "1987.05.21"] [Round "8"] [White "Embraj"] [Black "Sloan Ismail"] [Result "0-1"] [ECO "C55"] 1. e4 e5 2. Nf3 Nc6 3. Bc4 Nf6 4. Nc3 Nxe4 5. Bxf7+ Kxf7 6. Nxe4 d5 7. Nfg5+ Kg6 8. Qf3 dxe4 9. Qf7+ Kxg5 10. d4+ Kh4 11. h3 g6 12. dxe5 Bf5 13. g3+ Kh5 14. g4+ Kh4 15. gxf5 Bb4+ 16. c3 Nxe5 17. Qg7 Nf3+ 18. Kf1 Qf8 19. f6 Bd6 20. Qd7 Ne5 21. Qa4 Qxf6 22. Qxe4+ Kh5 23. Rg1 Rhf8 24. Rg5+ Qxg5 25. Bxg5 Kxg5 26. Ke2 Rae8 27. Kd1 Rxf2 28. Qe3+ Rf4 29. h4+ Kf5 30. Qh3+ Ng4 31. Kc2 Re3 32. Qh1 Ref3 33. Qd1 Ne3+ {White resigns} 0-1