From: Reijer Grimbergen ETL GO JP> Date: 20 aug 1997 Subject: This week in Shukan Shogi (no. 700, August 20th 1997) This week's Shukan Shogi has no major title match games, but is a celebration of issue number 700. The first issue was published on December 28th 1983. Fourteen years ago Tanigawa had just taken his first Meijin title to become the youngest Meijin in history. Habu was then still only a 1-dan Shoreikai player. Shimizu was the strongest woman amateur player and is now the strongest professional woman player. Actually, there are now players in the Shoreikai that were not even born when the first Shukan Shogi came out. There is an amusing fake front page on shogi in 2011, when issue number 1400 will be published. Habu has just equalized the score by winning the second game of the 69th Meijin tournament which is played on the moon. It is the first year that computers are banned from the tournament, after a fast supercomputer has won almost every game since 2005 (a very optimistic forecast in my opinion :-) ). Also, because computers are so strong there is a metal detector and an X-Ray machine at the playing venue to make sure that no high tec contact with a remote computer is made. The use of every electronic device is forbidden, which includes telephone calls to the player's rooms to wake them up. This means that first the first time in ages, one could again see Habu's famous sleepy morning face. Other articles on this fictive front page are about the two clones of Oyama and Masuda, who have entered the Shoreikai and both have been promoted to 3-dan at only 10 years old, the youngest 3-dans in shogi history. Finally, Sensaki (then 9-dan), has succeeded in putting a rule into effect to end jishogi. If a player manages to put his king on the starting square of the opponent's king (5i for white, 5a for black), he will win, unless there is an immediate mate. This is called a "try" (taken from rugby) :-). There was actually some Shogi news in this week's Shukan Shogi as well, albeit very little. In the Ryu-O tournament the two favourites lost in the semifinals of the challenger tournament. Sanada (5-dan) played a great game against Sensaki and will now get his first chance to become challenger for a major title. His opponent in the best-of-three challenger play-off will be Kisei Yashiki, who continued his good form by beating Sato Yasumitsu, who will now have to wait at least another year for his second Ryu-O title. Interesting detail: Sanada was actually the scorekeeper of the Ryu-O title game played two years ago in China. He now has a chance to get to the other side of the table... Next week I will be at a conference, so I will have no time to write "This week in Shukan Shogi". Since there are a lot of big games, including the fourth game of the Oi-title match, I will probably write two articles in the week after that, if a paper deadline is not getting in the way... 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)298-54-5918