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In the interest of posting shogi games, I'm moving this blog out of blogger.com to its very own site ! Make sure to visit www.shoginoob.com from now on !

My new best enemy

Meet my new bestest enemy evar : Ham Shogi - where "Ham" part is for the cute little hamster that plays against you. As you might notice, the page is full of wacky characters looking like japanese script, for the very good reason that it is japanese. Good thing that Shogi Shack gave us a very useful and thorough explanation on what is what on the page, otherwise you might hit the "Resign" button like yours truly.

Ham Shogi is helpful in that it allows any kind of handicap, for itself or the player, from none at all to king only.

When first playing it, I thought "Meh, king only seems for losers, and king and pawns only is only slightly better". So I decided to settle for the third highest handicap, which is king and pawns plus rook and bishop, figuring it would of course be relatively easy, removing all silver and gold generals, as well as lances and knights.

And believe it or not, I got crushed once again. I played 5 games against the hamster, and 4 of them were a complete waste. Most of the time, his bishop would enter my camp and get a free meal on pretty much everything that was floating around. By the time I could stop it, the hamster would've got a ton of pieces he could drop into my camp and/or simply checkmate my king. Huh.

The fifth game, however, was less of a waste of my CPU time. I decided to focus on defending instead of simply moving pieces around. The game lasted an impressive 35 to 40 moves. The hamster found a way to checkmate my King once again, but at least I could tell it needed to try hard. I would post the resulting kifu, but of course I ended up closing the tab before I could write it down. Oh well.

I understand that Ham Shogi is a nice match for beginners, so unless playing AIs is as bad an idea in shogi as it is in go, I think I'll try to get a bite of the hamster before going back online.

A first (tiny) step

Today, I played my very first shogi game on playok.com. I knew for sure I would lose, but even knowing this barely prepared me to such a disaster.

I might sound like I'm whining, but I'm not. It looks difficult for a Westerner such as I to learn to play shogi, since there's not much literature available on it. There is some information on the web, for sure, but it looks scattered all around. I know what I'm talking about : I learned to play go all by myself, without anyone to teach me. Right now, I'm on the verge of getting to 6 kyu KGS and I'm really proud to have come such a long way. The hard part, at the very beginning, was to find good sources of information. I regretted, later, not to have logged how I achieved my progress.

This is the whole point of this blog : to log my progress (or lack thereof) in the game of shogi so that a complete beginner could come here, some day, and get some guidance. I'm not going to give lessons or even advice ; I'd rather share my experiences and thoughts about the game with other beginners. For lessons, ask a skilled player ! :P

My very first step was watching HIDETCHI's excellent series of shogi lectures on Youtube. It gave me a solid understanding of the rules, and also helped me recognize the various pieces. If you choose to follow this series, I suggest you press Pause when you get problems proposed to you and actually try your best to solve them before being given the solution. I followed these videos up to #17, at which point I could barely understand what he was talking about. I'll certainly come back to it.

Another must-see for the aspiring shogi player is 81-Square Universe. The friendly people there seem very knowledgeable and eager to help new players. The quick links on the front page look very helpful, and make sure to stop by the forums to ask questions ! I know I will.

My next proposed step is reading the Shogi Shack website. The First moves section sound and look like it's exactly what I need.

So that's it for now. I'm leaving on vacation next week (honeymoon in London !), so don't hold your breaths ! Feel free to post other interesting links in the comments as well as, well, comments.

P.S. : If anybody actually reads this and knows how to embed a Java/Flash/whatever shogi viewer in a webpage, please contact me. I think it could liven up this dull blog a lot.