From: "J. Andrew Lipscomb" <ewwa <at> CHATTANOOGA <dot> NET>
Date: 14 may 2001
Subject: Re: U.S. Shogi Championship

Larry Kaufman wrote:

> For qualification purposes, each player started with a number of points equal to
> his board number (starting from 0 for bottom board to 4 for top board), and received an additional
> point for each game won.  Ties were resolved by results in the side handicap games against the
> pros.  The top eight players proceeded to the A group, the other to B.  The system apparently
> worked quite well because all of the players in the A group were fourth or fifth Dan.

Hmm... by my count, that means that since all four top boards, at least three second boards, and at
least one third board will have 4 or more points, the fifth-board players were eliminated from
contention before they even started to play.  I can imagine someone being upset about that (but if
they were ok with it, then it's not a problem).