From: Reijer Grimbergen ETL GO JP> Date: 17 aug 1999 Subject: This week in Shukan Shogi (no. 802, August 18th 1999) This week another short report, since there was no title match game. In the A class the second round game between Habu and Morishita was played. Habu had started with a loss against Nakahara, while Morishita had beaten Kato. Morishita was therefore playing to join leaders Maruyama and Tanaka, while Habu was already fighting for his chances to stay in the challenger race. There was quite a lot of interest for this game, with Meijin Sato and Ryu-O Fujii closely following the moves from the press room. They must have enjoyed the close fight that resulted in a one move endgame where Morishita made a very odd mistake. He was sure that his move was threatening mate, while Habu was not threatening mate. When Habu just ignored his "mating threat" and played a mating threat himself, Morishita's face turned red when he realised he had made a vital mistake. So, both players on 1-1 after two rounds. It is already certain that there will be only two players with two wins after two rounds, a sign of how tough the A class Junisen really is. Unless Maruyama continues his winning streak until March next year, I doubt that there will be a runaway winner this year. The Ryu-O tournament has often been the stage where a new shogi star is born. This year, 5-dan Suzuki Daisuke is having a terrific run. After finishing second in his group, he beat Tanigawa in the first round of the challenger tournament and followed this up last week with a victory over Moriuchi. Moriuchi only managed to surprise Suzuki at move 4, where he suddenly switched to an Ai-Furibisha opening. Suzuki took 34 minutes to reply, mainly spent on trying to figure out why the next move was recommended by Fujii in a previous game they played. In the end, Suzuki decided he did not understand the reason for Fujii's suggestion, so he played a different move. I do not know how important this choice was in the rest of the game, but it seems that Suzuki was playing very well after that. He surprised his A-class opponent with a move allowing a simple bishop promotion which also picked up a lance. Moriuchi correctly judged that it was too dangerous to promote, but he made a mistake soon after Suzuki's surprising move and lost quickly. Suzuki still has a big hurdle to take on his way to stardom, since he will play invincible Maruyama in the best-of-three challenger final. Murayama scored his 18th consecutive win in the season (BTW, he is 26-1 for the year) against Inoue to qualify for the challenger final. Inoue was not supposed to be a push-over, since he brought a nine game winning streak into this game. However, Maruyama's winning streak seems to psych out opponents. Inoue tried an early sacrifice attack that looked promising, but turned out to be based on air. With some cool defending Maruyama quickly took over and never looked back. Who is going to stop this guy? 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