3rd Shogi & Bossche Bollen in Den Bosch on 8 February 2020

On Saturday the 8th of February 2020 a Shogi tournament is organized in Den Bosch in cooperation with the Dutch Shogi Federation. The tournament counts for FESA ratings.
There are 4 rounds.
The time control is 30 minutes with 30 seconds byo-yomi.
Before the first round we welcome the participants with coffee, thee and Bossche Bollen!
A Bossche Bol is a famous pastry from the city of Den Bosch.

Schedule
1000-1030  Registration and Bossche Bollen with coffee
1030-1130   Round 1
1145-1300   Round 2
1300-1400  Lunch
1400-1515   Round 3
1530-1645  Round 4
1700-1730  Prize ceremony

Afterwards several participants may go for dinner in a restaurant in Den Bosch!

Arbitre: Richard van Dalfsen / Tom Kau
Entry fee: 10 euro, including a Bossche Bol with coffee
Registrations: twanburg@gmail.com before 6th February
Prizes: Cups for top 3 and best female player. 4 Book prizes at random for the remaining players.

Prizes 2020

Location
Sociaal-Cultureel Centrum De Biechten, Vincent van Goghlaan 1, Rosmalen
There are plenty of parking places available. From Den Bosch central station it’s 4 kilometer, and it can be done with a bus in 15 minutes.

Standings 2020:

Participants 2020: (20)

The playing conditions will be comparable to last year.

2019
2018: Newspaper

2nd Shogi & Bossche Bollen in Den Bosch on 16 February 2019

The dragon of Den Bosch

On the 16th of February 2019 a Shogi tournament is organized in Den Bosch in cooperation with the Dutch Shogi Federation. The tournament counts for FESA ratings.
There are 4 rounds.
The time control is 30 minutes with 30 seconds byo-yomi.
Before the first round we welcome the participants with coffee, thee and Bossche Bollen!
A Bossche Bol is a famous pastry from the city of Den Bosch.

Schedule
1000-1030  Registration and Bossche Bollen with coffee
1030-1130   Round 1
1145-1300   Round 2
1300-1400  Lunch
1400-1515   Round 3
1530-1645  Round 4
1700-1730  Prize ceremony

Afterwards several participants may go for dinner in a restaurant in Den Bosch!

Arbitre: Tom Kau
Entry fee: 10 euro, including 1 consumption and a Bossche Bol with coffee
Registrations before 15th February
Prizes: Cups for top 3 and best female player. 4 Book prizes at random for the remaining players. 25 euro for the winner!

Prizes 2019

Location
Sociaal-Cultureel Centrum De Biechten, Vincent van Goghlaan 1, Rosmalen
There are plenty of parking places available. From Den Bosch central station it’s 4 kilometer, and it can be done with a bus in 15 minutes.
The location has a restaurant where you can get lunch.

Standings 2019:

Participants 2019: (26)

Compared to last year, the size of the playing hall is doubled, and there are only 4 rounds, which should give a bit more time to have lunch.

How to analyze your games using a shogi engine

Setting up the software
The first thing to do is to make sure you have ShogiGUI running with an engine. In an article of Mr. Takahashi it is described how to do this.
If you get the Gikou engine to work, great. This is one of the best engines. If you want to perfectionize, please check this or this article about how to install an even stronger engine. But those who are not comfortable with advanced computer magic rest assured: Shogi GUI with the default book and Gikou engine is already a wonderful tool! After starting the engine and opening the default book, it will look like this:

Getting your game in
Of course you can start moving around from the initial beginning and analyze shogi like this, but you might want to load a game in to analyze this with the engine. This can be done in a couple of ways, also depending on where you get it from. In 81Dojo there is a Kifu menu where you can save it as KIF or copy it to the clipboard. Then you can respectively load it in ShogiGUI using File-Open or paste it with Ctrl+V or Edit-Paste Notation. In case you played your game on ShogiWars, you can load the game using shogi-extend.com search by your username, then click on the ‘+’ button on the right in the middle, then you can paste inside ShogiGUI.

Understanding ShogiGUI
So there a lot of numbers, moves and variations, but how to interpret those?

Let’s focus on the book first. If the position is still in book, under book the moves are listed which were played before. Under Games you can see how often it was played, and under Winning% how succesfull this move was, from the perspective of which colour plays this move. So e.g. the move S57 scored 3 out of 5 wins. The move I played was P86, so here I diverged from the book moves.
Under the consider tab you can see the candidates suggested by the engine. There is also some information about thinking depth and thinking power, but those are not so relevant. In this case I have 4 candidates, and they are sorted by how strong the engine thinks the moves are:
1.S57(231)
2.B77(231)
3.L98(210)
4.P36(158)
The score is always for Sente, so (231) means that Sente is a bit better.
From the variations it seems, that instead of P86, which signals a Tower Mino, the engine prefers to make an Anaguma with moves like B77, K88, L98, K99, S88, G68, G78, G79.
That my move P86 didn’t appear here doesn’t mean it is bad. I think Tower Mino is perfectly playable in this type of positions, in just happens that the engine prefers the Anaguma castle. You can get an idea of how good or bad a move is by checking the evaluations one move later:

Here the engine recommends playing G41-52 for Gote, with an evaluation of (51). It means that Sente is still a bit better according the engine. An evaluation difference of 180 points is actually not that big, and this case it can be explained by a certain preferene of the engine from one castle over the other. Let’s look at a more critical example.

Improve your game by analyzing with the engine

In this position the confrontations have begun. I have a Tower Mino with 4 generals, and initiated the battle with Knight and Bishop. Gote has a nice High Mino and countered in the centre. I can catch the Silver here with P*56, but saw that my opponent could create counter play with P*66 G57 Nx65 etc., sacrificing the Knight. I thought it would be smart to insert P24 here, so later my Rook could dash forward.
The engine however indicates that the evaluation would drop from (969) to (0), compared to the highest recommendation, which is the direct P*56. A difference of about 1000 points can be considered a mistake.

Understanding and improving
So if something like this happens it is very understand to understand:
“Why was my move not as good as the best move”?
To understand this, it is a good idea to following for both lines the moves that the engine recommends first. For example, we can look at the line that is recommended by the engine, the immediate P*56. Looking a bit further, this indeed gives Sente a nice advantage. But isn’t including P24 Px24 a nice improvement over this line? After putting P24 on the board, it turns out that Px24 was not forced:

Looking at the suggestions for Gote, we don’t see Px24 in the first 4 moves. In fact, the 4 moves suggested all ignore the Px23+ threat and shift focus in the centre. As it turns out, P24 was played too late! When analyzing these lines, it indeed turns out that Gote has a nice control in the centre, and that Px23 will not be that severe. This reminds me of Hidetch’s words in the Glance Series: Play P24 before it’s too late. Too late means that it can be ignored and Ranging Rook side uses the time instead to counterattack in the centre. It also reminds me of Aono’s chapter in Better moves for Better Shogi: “Eradicating Reflex moves”. Sometimes a move looks forced, but it is important to always think if it is really forced and whether there is a better move. You can of course boost your progress even more when studying such books in parallel to analyzing your own games!
For the full game see this 81dojo-link.

Tips and tricks
-Save your analysis for future reference.
-If you notice the engine plays in a certain way in the opening, try it out in a real game!
-Try to improve over common joseki by using engine’s recommendations. Try to understand the differences by analyzing and playing.
-When understanding something, you can add a comment in ShogiGUI. It will help to understand and remember!
-Use an external back-up from time to time for the files you create in ShogiGUI.
-Don’t get blind by looking at the numbers only, always try to understand why a certain move is good or bad and check the moves yourself before playing them.