#27: Why isn't chess popular in Japan?

@jeffgogo said in #19:
> Seems to have dropped to 91 now:
>
> ratings.fide.com/topfed.phtml

Thank you, fixed! I'm not sure what page I was looking at now, maybe they updated it after I first saw the September lists.

@datajunkie said in #20:
> Things will inevitably change
I don't know. Small things for sure but big shifts is much harder to tell.

I do notice that older people not willing to adapt are getting frustrated and often quit chess. I see around me several old clubs disappearing despite sometimes existing for almost 100 years. On the other hand new clubs (often in schools) are created, having a completely different dna.

My own club with half of the management team 70+ age is getting into heavy weather. We need new people otherwise we will be next in line.

It would be interesting to see a comparative analysis of Chess in Korea and China where GO is very popular and their own versions of Shogi are also popular.

@MrLizardWizard said in #4:
> Anybody who is interested in giving shogi a try should go to our sister site, lishogi.org! The playerbase is still small at this time, so there aren't many live games, but it's been slowly picking up steam the last year or two. Just like here, there are tutorials and puzzles, as well as a few variants.
There is also lidraughts.org

I know Hikaru is registered as an American player, but he might have something to say about this, since he is Japanese.

@a14747at said in #24:
> There is also lidraughts.org

is that not checkers. Is there a board logic there that would allow people to do mini-go on it, ignoring the diagonals.. and not moving the draughts but placing it. What is the minimal go board size for the interesting emerging rules to be possible even.

Is there not some criticality on the ruleset about that? there are games like othello reversi, or others that i think are also about territorial boundary local transition converting the "inside" of the boundary. if i guessed anything right.. There are paper and pencil games with growing territory on a grid, where it is the links that are owned by tracing them and forming cells (if i remember from my childhood correctly).

there is a theme there, but chess and draught are about pieces already there in full, and getting lost in the smoke of game depth, until, ... surprise, the holy grail territory confine, one is the opponent palace plundering the coffers and finding a queen, or buying its equipement.

@KDMFan said in #25:
> I know Hikaru is registered as an American player, but he might have something to say about this, since he is Japanese.

I remember in one of his streams, somebody was asking him if he'd ever played shogi; he said that he tried it before but "didn't really get it", unfortunately. It would be an incredible boon to shogi if any of the big chess streamers would try it out on stream, even if just for a few hours. Pair them up with Karolina Styczyńska (a famous Polish shogi player and international shogi advocate) and have her explain the rules and basic principles. It would be great.

I know the thread is about chess in Japan, but I'm almost more surprised how NOT popular (or known at all) shogi is here in the west. It's an absurdly sharp and deep game.
For those chess players who haven't tried it before, imagine chess, but every opening is a SHARP gambit, where initiative is several times more important than material. Then imagine that unlike in chess, there's no way to simply "trade off and equalize", instead you have to accelerate your own attack. There is no concept of an "endgame" like in chess. Rather, it's raw calculation and finding a forced mate. Shogi professionals train their endgames by grinding hundreds of mate-in 5, 7, 9, and so on, puzzles, so they end up with absurdly good calculation and board vision.
It's honestly sensible that chess wouldn't appeal to them much, it's a much more positional game, where material is basically the only important thing. There was a blog post here on lichess recently that was something like "Chess is just about material" and... well it's kinda true. The bot simpleeval @simpleEval plays at a 2300+ level by ONLY counting material

@dboing said in #26:
> is that not checkers....

Ok, I was in a GO curiosity mindset. Yes that is another lichess sister, about checkers: lidraughts.org/. Considering the same looking things on board of 2 colors, is probably how I drifted as I did into GO and similar placement territorial games (turn, the move would be in the air of the thing that is placed on board, unless using strict definition of move as being the transition from a position to the next, one could say the position has moved from one configuration to another in all the board games, when actually obtained from sliding a piece on board, or placing a piece on a point).

Also, the thread might be about chess in japan, but the attempts at comparison, and game culture differences can go both ways. Here being a forum, it would not be such a slide off-topic. And I bet the author, is ok with that. The blog kind of set the table, in my humble relaxed opinion.

@MrLizardWizard. What do you mean by deep and sharp? Is that in comparison to standard chess? My guess was that 9x9 combined with many species of mobilities and promotions, all with few long range pieces, made for more bandwidth requirement, if wanting to approach such game as standard chess, has been mostly mapped, turn by turn, and while some developped theory for longer term, the calculation aspect of turn by turn, is still taking a lot of place in chess playing or its upbringing, with decent initial performance I gather. My superficial visit about the rules, made me realize that it was likely a slower game, where a lot of thinking would be made on multiturn levels. A bit like the pawns in chess, are the slow game of the whole game. The increased territorial, still slow outflanking that just an extra band of squares might provide.. I have no clue if that even make sense.. But I still wonder what you meant. Because in standard chess, well deep might mean many things, and sharp I thought was about criticality of finding the one move that would perserve current odds, all others would make the position worse (a lot).

sharp turn required. Although, there can be differnt kinds of sharpness, does not have to be about turn by turn calculation...

@dboing said in #29:
> it was likely a slower game, where a lot of thinking would be made on multiturn levels.
You are partially correct. The pieces are almost entirely step movers, and don't necessarily have the ability to step directly back from where they came, so multiturn planning does play a large factor in the opening and midgame.
Where it greatly differs from chess, is that the pace of a chess game can suddenly shift from tactical to positional and back, while shogi starts of VERY slow, but almost exclusively accelerates and gets more tactical as the reusable captured pieces have essentially "infinite" mobility.
> sharp I thought was about criticality of finding the one move that would perserve current odds, all others would make the position worse
Yes, this is what I meant as well. Shogi endgames are often brutally sharp, where a single misstep in a checkmate sequence could give your opponent enough pieces in hand to achieve a forced checkmate of their own.
And as for "deep" I really just meant the sheer number of possibilities one has to look through to find a good move... in chess, there are seldom more than 40 legal moves, out of which are maybe only 3 "good" moves . Whereas in shogi, there are regularly 100+ legal moves, and it becomes much harder to find those very few good moves.