From: Reijer Grimbergen ETL GO JP> Date: 10 feb 2000 Subject: This week in Shukan Shogi (no. 826, February 9th 2000) Not much professional action last week. The only big games were the games in round 8 of the Junisen. With Maruyama and Moriuchi as the two candidates for challenging Meijin Sato and no less than six candidates for relegation things are exceptionally tight this year. Habu and Morishita are out of the challenger race and can not be relegated and only play for a good position in next year's class. Maruyama played Tanaka who started with 3-2 but then lost two games in a row to be in serious relegation trouble again. He always plays very positively, also in this game where he attacked violently in the early middle game. However, Maruyama did not blink and played some really tough defence perfectly and won. It looked good for Tanaka, but the post-mortem analysis showed that the attack was not sound. Moriuchi kept things interesting with a convincing win over Kato to get to a 6-2 score, one win behind Maruyama's 7-1. Last year he caught up with Tanigawa in the final round (after which he lost the play-off game). Will he be able to do the same thing this year? Habu looked on his way to a straight win over Goda after some good middle game play. However, with both players in byoyomi he blundered in the endgame to give Goda a golden opportunity to win the game and get out of relegation trouble. Goda missed his chance and Habu did not give him another one. Nakahara has held his A class spot for 29 years (including 15 years when he was Meijin), but in the last couple of years he has been fighting against relegation to B1. This would be the first time that a Lifetime Meijin would relegate, so in that case the chance of Nakahara becoming a free class professional like Yonenaga would be very high. Nakahara played Morishita and needed the win to keep his chances in his own hands. He was a little unfortunate, since the material win of a lance for a gold looked very good, but turned out to be bad. A late mistake in the endgame sealed it. Big winner of the round was Tanigawa. With only two wins out of seven games he was at the bottom of the league. He must have felt a little nervous in his game against Shima. At first it did not look that way, since he got a strong position with some good middle game play. However, after that he wanted to win too quickly and sacrificed a rook for a bishop that was very risky instead of a simple winning line. After this, Shima took the lead, but he also could not finish. A mistake finally brought the point to Tanigawa at 1:42am, the longest game of the day. A tough game that must have taken a lot out of both players. Tanigawa must have been very relieved and because all his rivals for relegation lost, he now has his chances in his own hands again. The standings with one round left to play: 1) Maruyama 7-1 2) Moriuchi 6-2 3) Habu, Morishita 5-3 5) Tanigawa, Shima, Kato, Goda, Tanaka 3-5 10) Nakahara 2-6 As said, not much else noteworthy this week. Next week a lot more with the fourth game of the Osho match and games in B1, B2 and C1 Junisen. 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)298-61-3316 Fax: +81-(0)298-61-5918