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.

Other Useful sites

The one site I wholeheartedly recommend is

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 .

The above reference was made more than 10 years. ago.  There are so many 'modern' reference points you can explore. See here for more reference

Frequency of Updates
Updates to this site may not be as frequently as I would like to have. In the meantime, please refer to the site above. I am certain you will find values.
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 referencematerials that are available online are shown with Classic styles. If you don't get used toit, 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.
By the way, you need to turn on Asian character support for Classic style layout. Otherwise the PlayOK/Kurnik site will not show what pieces you have on hand. Please refer to this for how to turn on Asian character support on your PC.