From: Reijer Grimbergen ETL GO JP> Date: 7 nov 1996 Subject: This week in Shukan Shogi (no. 660, November 6th 1996) This week in Shukan Shukan of course a lot of attention is going out to the great victory of Tanigawa in the second game of the Ryu-O sen. "Revival of the speed of light" is the headline over the article, referring to the name of the Tanigawa Shogi style: "Speed of light endgame". For a change, the account of the game I gave in last week's post is pretty much confirmed by Shukan Shogi. Habu may have had a slight edge in the early middle game, but an early knight attack was an overplay. The way Tanigawa attacked after that was really like his old self. Within a few moves he destroyed Habu's castle to win the game by a large margin. Game 3 is now very important to see who gets the edge in this match. I think I will be watching as much of it as possible on TV tomorrow, when it is played to a finish. Can't tell you anything about the early part of the game, because I just came back from Tokyo. In the Junisen a complete round in C2 was played. For most players this was the fifth round and thus the half way mark. The number of players with a chance of getting out of the 51 player C2 pit is slowly going down. In this round there were not many surprises. Yagura, Fujiwara and Kokura all won and keep their perfect record. In pursuit are nine players with a 4-1 score: Namekata, Hatakeyama, Ino, S.Sato, Okazaki, Kawakami, D.Suzuki, Ono and rookie Tamura. Among these twelve top players are many favourites for promotion, so I think three of these twelve will promote to C1. All other players will have to worry about avoiding relegation marks. In the A-junisen the game between Shima (0-4) and Yonenaga (2-2) was played. For Shima this was a "must-win" game to keep his hopes of staying in the top class alive. Shima got the early lead against Yonenaga's primitive Nakabisha opening after Shima played G3b on his first move. Shukan Shogi does not give any Yonenaga mistakes after that, only some strong endgame moves by Shima, so I assume that the Shima victory was rather straightforward. However, even at 1-4 he remains at the bottom of the A class, but within reach. The schedule of the Osho league is a complete mystery to me. Last week Fujii played two games for this league, and together with Tanigawa he has now played four games. On the other hand, Nakahara and Maruyama have played only two games. Anyway, Fujii beat Nakahara and then lost to Tanigawa and he is now at 2-2, while Tanigawa is 3-1. Sole leader, however, is Murayama, who beat Moriuchi in a gruelling game: the game ended in sennichite after 140 moves at 8:20 pm and the replay started 30 minutes later with both players having one hour. The replay was also a very tight battle with Moriuchi missing a win at some point. This gave Murayama the chance to pull out a brilliant hisshi to defend against Moriuchi's mating threat. Murayama is now 3-0 and the fifth round game he plays against Tanigawa will probably decide the Osho challenger. 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