report by David Faldon, BSF President
The 2008 British Open Shogi Champion is Tony Hosking. The 2008 British Kyu Shogi Champion is Kingsley Pratt. Congratulations to them both! Tony and Kingsley will be off to Japan in November to represent Great Britain at the 4th International Shogi Festival.
These titles were decided at the 2008 British Open Shogi Championships, held in the beatiful grounds of Trinity College Cambridge over May 3rd/4th.
The format of the championship was a six round tournament with 30 minutes plus a further 40 seconds a move once the initial time allocation ran out. The two dan players (Tony Hosking and Steven Cain) played a three game match in rounds 2, 4 and 6, meeting kyu players in between. This meant that each kyu player met all of the other kyu players, plus one dan player.
In the dan match, Tony defeated Steve by 3 wins to zero, but I'm sure Tony won't mind me saying that the match was a lot closer than that scoreline would suggest.
In the kyu qualification tournament, the initial pairings were made with a pack of cards. Thanks to those cards, we had an exciting last round game: Kingsley Pratt against Tony Stebbings, with both players on 4/4 against their kyu rivals. As expected, it was a hard-fought game.
The overall results were as follows:
Tony Hosking, Kingsley Pratt 5/6
Tony Stebbings, Edward Ishiyama 4/6
Steven Cain 3/6
Lionel Kent 2/6
Chris Greetham 1/6
Peter Hingley 0/6
One remarkable feature of the tournament was the performance of Edward Ishiyama, playing his first shogi for many years and his first tournament with clocks. After losing his first two games to Tony Stebbings and Kingsley Pratt, Edward proceeded to win all the rest, including a calm and convincing win against the otherwise undefeated Tony Hosking in round 5.
Another feature of the tournament was the high number of closely-fought games. Even those unfortunate enough to finish at or near the bottom played very strongly in patches and can be considered unlucky not to have finished higher. More practice!
Still, it was generally agreed that the best players came out on top - so congratulations again to Tony and Kingsley.
In view of the tournament format, time had to be left at the end in case a play-off was required. As no play-off was required, we used the free time for an 8 minute 8 round blitz tournament between the 8 players in the Open Championship and myself. This was great fun, with high-quality shogi mixed with crazy time scrambles. At least one game was won on time with the winner having 2 seconds left on the clock!
The Blitz Tournament was a clear win for Edward Ishiyama, who finished on 7/8.
Other scores:
David Faldon, Tony Hosking 6/8
Steven Cain 5/8
Tony Stebbings, Kingsley Pratt 4/8
Lionel Kent 3/8
Chris Greetham 1/8
Peter Hingley 0/8
All in all we had a great time: lots of exciting games, luxurious surroundings, beer, curry and many laughs. Here's to the next tournament!