This page will be no longer updated and the site will be eventually closed ..read more

In 2010, I was contacted by members of Shogi France. One of their active members has just created a shogi site with a page that showed variety of opening moves. They offered to include the content in our site as this will nicely compliment with our site pages that explains what piece to move first. (I tried to explain up to first 3 or 4 moves and they were quickly becoming messy!) This site page showed a initial shogi board with possible opening moves. when you click on the board, it will advance to next position and again showed possible next move, until it steps through first 42 moves. The p ..read more

Many of the Shogi fans overseas are probably using Online platform to enjoy Shogi, because Shogi fans are few and apart from each other. You may have never touched actual shogi pieces. In Japan, there are Shogi dojos in many places where people play against each other using actual Shogi pieces. The YouTube video here are the game played between a professional instructor(at the left. He is ex-Shoreikai 3Dan) and high-ranking armature. So the game itself is interesting (10 seconds blitz), but I would like to share this to highlight how the pieces are placed on the board (They both used Ohashi st ..read more

There are two tesuji books that I wish we had English translated version available. They are called らくらく次の一手 1 and 2, published by Japan Shogi federation. The title roughly translates to “easy next move.” These books targeted beginner players and taught you basic Tesujis in forms of quiz that asks you for a next move. When I added Tesuji section on my site, one reader alerted me that there is a free tesuji book available in Mainichi Navigation publishing site and he provided me with a link. I was surprised to find out that this book was a compilation of aforementioned two books. (Mainichi Navi ..read more

Just added a new section “Suji and Tesuji” to the site. When I think about improving one’s Shogi play, There are three pillars that makes up one’s skill. Learn some Joseki (定跡 or Openings) Become good at TsumeShogi (詰将棋 or checkmate problems). Become knowledgeable of Tesuji (手筋 or tactics) Item #1 and #2 has been always a part of this site. for #3, we had Pawn Samplers where we looked at various Pawn Tesujis but there are more pieces in Shogi. So after 12 years, I decided to add some more material in this area. Currently it is just a few samples of these technique. Please check out this sect ..read more

My recommendation when learning Shogi, is to get familiarize yourself with piece with Japanese character on it. There are some symbolic shogi set and westernized set, but vast majority of Shogi material available online and in books form all uses Japanese characters. People who get used to them often says that’s easy once you remember it, but you really need to get used to it. Then one of the site visitors actually asked to create a feature to help people exercise the character recognition. This page is my attempt to create such a quiz page. Simply drag and drop a piece to matching movement ch ..read more

When I started this site in 2008, I used “Kifu for flash” by Kakinoki software to display shogi board and piece moves. When flash player medium started to lose its popularity due to security concern, I wrote a JavaScript alternative and start removing flash player contents. by end of 2020, flash player was no more as Adobe, the maker of flash banned it. In the meantime, JavaScript saw several revisions along with CSS styling language. In the original JavaScript implementation, I used Jquery calls to make programming easy for me. However, nowadays Jquery is sort of outmoded since modern JavaScr ..read more

Time flies and just like a old house, this web site needed some repair. Some of the apis that I was counting on was deprecated. Result: non-working rss feed, non working link etc., Those are fixed. If you find missing link, let me know. Some of the outside web sites exists no more or changed the domain names. I needed to go through and clean them up. Removed the last flash app from the kif notation page. Currently, all page uses javascript based animator. I have found 30 or so of commented kifus that I have never published. I will work on this in coming months. In the meantime, Shogi world h ..read more

I was going to add some Youtube resources in Internet resources page. the page itself is already quite lengthy and I think I need start thinking about folding the content quite soon. So I realized Youtube section needed its own page. It is currently available as a sub menu in Internet resources page. Expect this page to grow rapidly ..read more

It has been 7 year since my last post.  My work life was getting crazy and I really did not have time to study Shogi for the longest time.  Now because of the COVID situation, I have some extra time but no money :).  So I try to tweak the site UI and the first thing I have done was to delete my master CSS and its backup file by accident!   Rather than reconstruct the same old look,  I chose to go with responsive web site, so it should play nice with smart phones etc.,   Since the site was originally designed in mid 2000, there is still a lot of adjustmen ..read more