From: Reijer Grimbergen ETL GO JP> Date: 19 sep 1996 Subject: Re: This week in Shukan Shogi Sean Chasworth AOL COM> writes: > What is the hierarchy of top Shogi play? Each week in Shukan Shogi, I see > reference to A1, B1, C1, etc. These seem to be Top division, second > division, etc. Are there divisions above this? For example what is the Oza > match? Are there other names for the top division, or regular high level > tournaments? > Thanks also for the weekly translations of Shukan Shogi. > Sean Chasworth :) In Shogi there is no rating system (at least not an official one), so unfortunately there are different ways of establishing hierarchy in pro Shogi. The basic hierarchy is that of dan-grades. Professional players are rewarded grades 4-dan to 8-dan according to their performance in the Meijin tournament, which is the oldest Shogi tournament. The Meijin tournament is divided into five "Junisen" classes: A, B1, B2, C1 and C2. When a new professional promotes from the Shoreikai he receives a basic salary from the Renmei and enters C2 class as a 4-dan. If he promotes to C1 he will be given the grade of 5-dan and his basic salary will be increased. Promotion to B2 is 6-dan, promotion to B1 is 7-dan and promotion to the A class is 8-dan. The winner of the A-class Junisen becomes the challenger of the Meijin title holder. They play a best-of-seven match to decide the new Meijin. There are two complicating factors here. One is that grade promotions can also be won by number of victories. A 4-dan who wins 100 games as a pro in official tournaments also is awarded the grade of 5-dan. For 5-dan to 6-dan this is 120 wins, from 6-dan to 7-dan 150 wins, from 7-dan to 8-dan 200 wins and from 8-dan to 9-dan is 250 wins (needless to say, the count starts at zero after the promotion :-) ). As a result, there are for example 5-dan players and 6-dan players in C2 who have never been promoted to C1. The second complicating factor is that dan grades, once acquired, can not be lost. This means that old players, who took all of their live to get to 8-dan or 9-dan sometimes get easily beaten by young and hungry 4-dan and 5-dan players. Unless the Renmei decides to use its own official rating system, there is no real way around this problem. The most reliable source of current strength is the winning percentage of a professional in a season (which ends with the Meijin match in May). But even here there are serious problems. For example, most of the players in the higher Junisen classes do not have to play a lot of qualification rounds for other tournaments. Because of that, they play fewer games but against stronger opposition. As a result, their winning averages tend to be lower that those of the strong young players in the lower classes. For example, the current top ten is: 1) Namekata, 5-dan 0.790 (C2) 2) Goda, 6-dan 0.773 (B2) 3) Kamia, 6-dan 0.769 (B2) 4) Takahashi, 9-dan 0.762 (B1) 5) Kitajima, 4-dan 0.727 (C2) 6) Habu, 9-dan 0.722 (Meijin) 7) Kinoshita, 5-dan 0.714 (C2) 8) Yagura, 4-dan 0.714 (C2) 9) Naganuma, 5-dan 0.714 (C2) 10) Horiguchi, 4-dan 0.714 (C2) As you can see, there is no A-class professional in the top ten and Habu and Takahashi are to only "top" players with a 9-dan grade. Also, the Kisei title holder Miura is not here and he is clearly one of the stars of the season so far. As for the other tournaments, in Japan there are seven so-called "titles" (this word is also used in Japanese). Apart from the Meijin, these are the Ryu-O (biggest money tournament), Osho, Oi, Oza, Kisei and Kio. Games in these tournaments are used to add money to the basic salary of a professional. There are a couple of more tournaments for professionals, but these are not considered as important as these seven. However, sometimes the Zen-Nihon Pro tournament is referred to as the eight "title". Hope this clears some things up, 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