September Shogi Open First Round Concluding

Yes, I am still here! The first round of the September Shogi Open over at BrainKing is still running. A good deal of the fault lies with me as I was extremely busy in the middle stages and was sometimes using upwards of 10 days per move. The tournament settings specify 10 days per move and BrainKing gives additional time for delays, so it's clear that this could (and has) run for months. Even so, I prefer to make my moves much more quickly.

That said, I am in the final round in our bracket, one move from mate, so the longest it will last is another 15 days if my opponent takes the full time before making his move, resigning, or letting the clock run out. At that point, we'll be at an interesting roadblock. Three of us will be locked in the #1 spot, each with 6 wins and two losses.

Player A beat Player B twice.
Player C beat Player A twice.
Player B beat Player C twice.
All three players won their other four games.

So each of us will have six points in total and our tiebreak number, as far as I can tell, will be the same. It will be interesting to see what becomes of this. Only one player can move onto the next round since the three players from other brackets all ended up with a higher point total.

One other thing I should point out is that Takodori has blogged about the availability of Trevor Leggett's book "Japanese Chess: The Game of Shogi". Apparently, this is a revival of his "Shogi Japan's Game of Strategy", which was published in 1993.