From: Sam Sloan <sloan <at> ISHIPRESS <dot> COM>
Date: 19 may 1999
Subject: Letter from Irina Rachel Novikov

Hello Sam,
Please send the following information to the shogi-l.

From: Irina Novikov
      shogifuture <at> yahoo <dot> com
      http://www.geocities.com/Colosseum/Court/3156

Shogi in Russia

First Shogi Tournament in St. Petersburg, Russia!!!

On Monday May 3rd, a small shogi tournament was held in the apartment of
Shpilev's family, in St. Petersburg, Russia. Five hours of non-stop shogi
playing. The idea of this tournament was to start up shogi activity in St.
Petersburg. Nine people were suppose to participate in the tournament, but
only six showed up, and five survived till the end.

Yurii Shpilev was the winner of the tournament. He won all the games. Yurii
is a programmer and used to play chess before. I taught shogi to Yurii and
to his daughter Galina (12 years old) about half a year ago, before I left
to Europe for my shogi journey. While I was in Europe Yurii and Galina
haven't played shogi, but now they started playing again with new
enthusiasm. Galina studies shogi almost everyday! Her aim is to prepare for
the shogi tournament in Sweden, in October. Galina started to design her
own shogi homepage, the URL of the homepage is:
http://underworld.fortunecity.com/caterpillar/963/

Second place went to Evgenii Fedoseev. Evgenii is a teacher of computer
science in school. He also found out about shogi from me about a half a
year ago. Evgenii is trying to teach shogi to his students at school. On
our next shogi meeting he is planning to bring few of his students
interested in shogi.

The problems of course arise with shogi pieces and byoyomi clocks. There
are no place in St. Petersburg where we can buy it. I had few sets of the
pieces and Yurii had one set, so we had enough for the tournament. We had
to use chess clocks, so we had no byoyomi this time.

Third place went to Timur Karaldin. Timur is 17 years old. He is finishing
high school this year.

Galina Shpileva and Michael Zak had 1 win and 3 loses. Michael Zak is 19
years old, he is a student in Business College.

Irina Novikov