From: Chiaki Ito MAIL COM> Date: 5 sep 2000 Subject: MSO 2000 Dear Sekai no Shogi Kishi san, It was truly grateful to see many of you at the MSO 2000. I would really like to express my appreciation to many of you and the organizers, in particular, Pieter Stouten and Hans Secelle who dedicated such valuable efforts to the wonderful tournaments, It surely was a worth travelling half the way around the world from Thailand to London! This was one of the most well-organized, well-managed, and memorable tournaments I have ever attended in my Shogi life! Here are my comments and suggestion regarding the details of the MSO. I partially agree with Larry on the time control. My suggestion is 30 minutes and 60 seconds byouyomi or 45 or 60 minutes kiremake, instead. I think 60 seconds byouyomi is often reasonable for most players. In fact, many pros say, "if you dont come up with a good move within 60 seconds, you will not even if you take 10 minutes." This may not be true in some cases, especially in the complex middle game or long mating endgame. However, it is true that most of the moves people make are out of those which they come up within a few seconds the opponent moves. For this reason, 60 seconds byouyomi is justified as not too short or not too long. About the tournament format, I really liked the Swiss system. In Japan, I have hardly played a tournament like this format before and felt so bad whenever I kicked out of the tournament at an earlier round. I concentrated and enjoyed each game I played throughout the tournament because I know that each and every game counts towards my ranking. However, I thought for the MSO championship that 9 rounds may be a bit long because the winner can be decided at earlier round. In addition, I strongly suggest that the players get to play play-offs to decide the rank because the total number of wins of your opponent does not tell very much the difference between the players with the same scores. So my suggestion is to reduce the number of rounds and give more time for play-offs. Another suggestion is that I noticed that there are many players around 1 dan level, so it may be good to offer hands-on lessons by pros or advanced players targeting especially for those. It is hard to generalize all players around that level into one type, but from my observation of games at the MSO (which I really enjoyed!), I noticed that many of them do not know proper jyouseki. In fact, when I get to play with them, I tend to take a great advantage easily before the middle game just because of the knowledge of jyouseki. From my teaching experience, I feel that many of them have great potential to improve to 3 or 4 dan players if they get good instruction in jyouseki and some advanced advice in endgame. It will take years to learn jyosekis if they read from books. This is especially true for many because there are not many "good" English or foreign language jyoseki books available. If taught on the board in an interactive way, it is much easy and fast to learn! By this, I really hope that many of them reach 3 dan or 4 dan level because then they could enjoy playing even with the 5 dan or 6 dan competitive players in tournaments. Lastly, in the past I have earned trophies by winning tournaments, but this is the first time for me to earn medals and I really loved them! If any of you come to Thailand, please email me or give me a call. I am glad to take you around the city and, of course, give you a good Shogi training for you to be a 5 dan player! Best, Chiaki Ito PS. If any of you have any picture you have taken with your camera which I am in, would you please email or mail it to me? I was so excited about my games and about taking photos of other players that I have not taken a photo of myself! My address is ARCM, Institute of Asian Studies 7th Floor, Prajadhipok Rambhai Barni Building Chulalongkorn University Phyathai, Bangkok, 10330 Thailand