From: Reijer Grimbergen ETL GO JP> Date: 11 dec 1996 Subject: This week in Shukan Shogi (no. 665, December 11th 1996) This week in Shukan Shogi the most important games were played in the A-Junisen and in the C1-Junisen. In the A-class there were four games played: the two former Meijins Tanigawa and Nakahara played each other, while Morishita played Shima, Moriuchi played Murayama and Sato Yasumitsu played Mori. All games were expected to be a hard battle because all games were a player with the hope of becoming the new Meijin (Moriuchi, Tanigawa, Morishita, Sato) against players fighting to stay in the A-class. Surprisingly enough, there were no surprises :-). All higher ranked players won, which means that the former players can still hope to become the challenger. Of course, Tanigawa and Morishita are 1 step ahead of the other two at 5-1. In the next round Moriuchi has to play Morishita, which will either clear the situation or make it even more complex. At the other end of the table bottom ranked Shima (1-5) can be very glad Mori, Murayama and Nakahara also lost. Shima is placed rather high in the ranking thanks to his results in the class last year, so he is still in touch with the pack. Still, I think he will need at least two wins out of his last three games to save himself. In C1 the fact that leader Kansaki lost to Nakata Hiroki and Nakagawa lost to fellow Yonenaga pupil Sensaki has made this class almost impossible to predict. With only three rounds to go there are still seven players who have a chance to get to B2. Sensaki is at the top with 6-1, but he is a rookie in this class, so his position is very low. He is followed by Abe and Kansaki, both at 6-2, so they only have to play two more games. Waiting for a mistake are Nakagawa, Sanada, Kobayashi, Murooka and Nakata. Shukan Shogi's prediction is that anyone of these seven who manages to win all of his remaining games will promote. I think it will be two of the leading three players. The challenger of Osho Habu is not decided yet. Osho league leader Murayama lost to Nakahara, who took his final chance to become the challenger himself. Murayama is still ahead at 4-1, but is followed by Tanigawa (4-2) and Nakahara (3-2). Murayama has had health problems all his life and was not in a good condition last week, dropping important games in the A-Junisen and Osho. If he recovers in time, I have no doubt that he can beat Maruyama in the final round and challenge for the Osho title once again. Lady professional Nagazawa did not make much of one of her rare opportunities to challenge a professional in a real game. She played Tamura in the first round of the Shinjino, but started by oversleeping. She was 26 minutes late and the professional seems to be that time that you come to late is tripled and substracted from your thinking time (I wonder if that would work in European tournaments :-) ). After the game finally started, Tamura (the Anand of the professionals) used only 8 minutes to gobble up Nagazawa's Anaguma. A rather humiliating experience I guess. More next week, Reijer -- 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