From: Reijer Grimbergen ETL GO JP> Date: 26 apr 1999 Subject: Re: Championships? titles? Jeff Okamoto XFILES INTERCON HP COM> writes: >> Seven "Titles": > So does every pro get to decide for themselves which of the tournaments he > or she wants to take part in? Does their monthly salary depend only on > their ranking (which I guess is decided by the Meijin league they are in?) > or also on the number of tournaments they enter? > Thanks, > Jeff I do not think professional Shog players have a choice. Except for illness, they are supposed to play in all tournaments supported by the Nihon Shogi Renmei (the Japanese Shogi Federation). I have never heard of a player refusing to enter a tournament. If I am not mistaken, professionals get a game fee for every official game they play. This game fee used to be heavily based on the Junisen class they played in, but that system seems to have changed a couple of years back. Of course professionals recieve extra payment for winning a game and bonusses for getting far into a tournament. For most tournaments this information is hard to get (at least I never was able to get this information), except for the Ryu-O tournament, which is the big money tournament. Here is what you can earn if you got far into the 1998 Ryu-O tournament: Ryu-O match winner: 32,000,000 Yen Ryu-O match loser: 8,000,000 Yen Ryu-O title holder (match appearance fee): 14,500,000 Yen Ryu-O Challenger (match appearance fee): 7,000,000 Yen Finalists Challenger Tournament: 3,300,000 Yen Semi Finalists Challenger Tournament: 1,200,000 Yen It is not as much as Kasparov gets for a World Chess Championship, but I guess one can make a decent living from taking a couple of Ryu-O titles :-). Reijer -- Reijer Grimbergen Complex Games Lab Electrotechnical Laboratory 1-1-4 Umezono, Tsukuba-shi, Ibaraki-ken, 305 JAPAN E-mail: grimberg etl go jp URL: http://www.etl.go.jp/etl/suiron/~grimberg/ Tel: +81-(0)298-54-3316 Fax: +81-(0)298-54-5918