From: DANERUD MARTIN TELIA COM> Date: 31 jul 2000 Subject: Shogi in the Czech Republic! Dear shogi friends, I just returned from ten days in the Czech Republic. I participated in the big chess tournament at Pardubice (1130 participants in four parallel classes) east of Prague. From Sunday I had a shogi leaflet in English distributed to all participants. Wednesday last week the organizers of the chess tournament had invited Club Paluba from Prague, which has activities in a lot of different board games. The responsible person for shogi, Vojtech Hrabal, World Champion of Abalone in 1998, and I were running shogi activities for thirteen hours except for me during my chess game. We had at least fifty people who came and tried shogi at the event. Several shogi sets were sold to interested people, and Vojtech got a contact list with 35 people for future use. There were not only Czechs at the shogi boards. Slovaks, Germans, Slovenians, Russians, Spaniards, and Poles took part too. Yesterday, a shogi event was arranged at the Culture and Information Centre of the Czech-Japanese Society in Prague. In the small informal tournament with five participants, Vojtech Hrabal turned out to be the strongest Czech player, but I do not think that Habu-san will have to worry yet... I would estimate his strength to approximately 7-kyu. Results: 1. Martin Danerud 4 points 2. Vojtech Hrabal 3 3. Peter Kral 2 4. SeisukeTsukahara 1 5. Milos Dubsky 0 At this occasion, the Czech Shogi Federation was also founded, and there will be an application for membership to FESA. If it will be approved, the Czech Shogi Federation will be the eleventh member of FESA. There was a great enthusiasm for shogi. This evening there is a new shogi tournament in Prague! Vojtech and Milos will take part at MSO in London. Sincerely yours, Dr. Martin Danerud Acting president of FESA