From: Larry Kaufman WIZARD NET> Date: 3 apr 2000 Subject: Rating the title contenders "Elo" ratings are now used not only in chess but in shogi. For example, the U.S. Shogi Federation, the European Shogi federation (FESA), "Shogi Dojo", the Tokyo Amateur shogi association, and the Japan Amateur shogi association all use versions of this system. However, the Japanese professionals do not use this system, and I have not even seen any attempt by amateurs to apply the system to rating the professional games, though with current computer technology it would not be very difficult. If someone has done this, I would like to know about it. Professional results are usually compared by such crude measures as games won, percentage, or prize money won, all of which measures are obviously of far less meaning than ratings would be. In the meantime, I applied the system to rate the games in the past five years played in title matches and in the "A" class of the Junisen. Of course this is a very incomplete list of the games played by the top players, and so these ratings are not very accurate. Furthermore, there are some very strong young players who have not yet made it to "A" class or challenged for a title. Nevertheless, they give a pretty good idea of what the ratings would be like if all the games were rated. I started all newcomers to the "A" class and all title challengers at 2700 if they were not already rated. That roughly corresponds to the chess system, where the top ten players are rated above that level generally. Here are the top 12: Habu 2984, Maruyama 2908, Fujii 2819, Moriuchi 2816, Tanigawa 2765, Sato 2763, Morishita 2736, Tanaka 2706, Kato 2695, Yonenaga 2687, Goda 2681, Yashiki 2680. According to these numbers, Maruyama is a huge favorite to take the Meijin title from Sato. We shall see. If you are wondering why the top ratings are much higher than Kasparov's 2851 chess rating, it is not because Habu is stronger at shogi than Kasparov at chess (that is impossible to judge fairly). It is because there are no draws in pro shogi (the few that occur are replayed), while draws are a majority of top level chess games. If draws in chess were replayed until someone wins (and the drawn games were not rated), Kasparov's chess rating would be over 3000. Larry Kaufman