Welcome to ShogiShack!

Place to get a little knowledge about playing Shogi

Why would I want to visit this site?

If you want to get better at Shogi, learn more about it, or just simply enjoy taking a shot at new things, this is the site for you!!!

If you want to know the basic movement of each shogi pieces or learn the rules, you will not find them on this site. You can go to www.wikipedia.org and enter "Shogi" in the search box.
  1. Most people who start to play Shogi right after learning each piece's move seem to lack some fundamental philosophies on "what to do" and "what not to do." After reading this site, you will be able to judge most of these things by yourself.
  2. Most players lack knowledge of which piece to move first. I can somtimes get confused too. Do understand however,95% of the Shogi masters game start with only one of two moves. You better do the same. See here for those moves.
  3. There are "Shogi Checkmate Problems (Tsume Shogi)." These problems are similar to Chess Problems. Learning fairly short ones (usually about 3,5, or sometimes even 7 moves) will dramatically improve your closing moves. Have you ever missed a basic checkmate, and regretted it later? After doing these problems, that shouldn't be much of a problem to you anymore. See here for these moves
  4. Many of the articles on this site utilizes interactive shogiboard.  You will know that when there are playback buttons below the shogiboard. For those boards, you can simply click on the board to advance pieces, a right click plays back one move.
  5. Since it will be impossible to explain everything on this site, I will make many references to the established shogi sites. Most of those sites are Japanese. Not Japanse? Don't dread. Even just a little bit of knowledge about Shogi could lead you to understanding the whole page. See here. A little practice and you will be amazed how much you can learn.
Announcement
    Free tesuji book from mainichi navigation

    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. […]

    Friday, May 19 2023

    New Section added

    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. 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 […]

    Friday, Apr 28 2023

    Identifying Japanese Shogi pieces.

    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 […]

    Thursday, Apr 20 2023

    Incremental improvement

    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 […]

    Saturday, Mar 18 2023

    Old shack needed some repair

    Time flies and just like a old house, this web site needed some repair. In the meantime, Shogi world have evolved. Some of the new strategy has emerged. Although principles of shogi play has not changed, I have to figure out how I can update the site.

    Sunday, Feb 19 2023

You have to get used to the Classic Kanji Pieces

Like symbols better than Kanji? Too bad. Your going to have to get used to the Classic Kanji Pieces. Sure, it is much easier to see symbolic pieces rather than pieces with Kanji characters on them. However, most of reference materials that are available online are shown with Classic styles. If you don't get used to it, then you'll regret it later. It's better to learn now, than later. If you don't know what every piece stands for, then your opponent has a huge advantage over you, and your basically screwed. Trust me. Learning the Kanji on the pieces are easy.

As such, this site uses custom shogiboard applet which shows the shogi board like this. Usage should be intuitive enough, but please take a quick look at this short guide on how to navigate the board.

Other Useful sites

Shogi Entries on Wikipedia went through a dramatic improvement over last 10 years and I will not speak lightly on those articles any longer.  You will learn a great deal from Wikipedia site only.   Also , there are so many 'modern' reference points you can explore.  See Resources section of this site for more references.

The original reference below still exists and many of the references are still relevant altough some links seems to have disappeared.

The one site I wholeheartedly recommend is Takodori's Entrance to Shogi World.

This site introduces you to the variety of Shogi articles. In particular, You will want to take a look at "Basic Shogi information available in English on Internet (1)" for general Shogi information and "Basic Shogi information available in English on Internet (2)" for English literature on various Shogi techniques available on-line .