"An attack with four pieces won't fail" - What can we learn from Japanese Chess Proverbs? Part 2
Make sure you read Part 1 first where I do a brief introduction to Japanese Chess and discuss one of the most important proverbs in their game
I wanted to continue our series on what we can learn from Japanese chess (Shogi). In part 1, in a similar vein to chess, king safety is still of utmost importance - arguably more so in shogi, that whole 24-move opening systems are simply one player getting their king safe.
One special rule that I wish to explore a little in this part is the fact that in shogi, a player can elect to drop captured pieces on their side of the board becoming part of their army. This makes shogi a very fluid, free-flowing game where both sides can trade blows.
Hidetchi explaining how drops and captures work
Sadly in chess this is simply not the case. Instead in chess we mercilessly slay our opposition pieces sending them to the void away from the board (Brutal!) - Although, we do also call it capturing (less fun than the former). With that said, in the emerging variant of "Crazy-house" chess, piece drops are legal and highly encouraged! So today we will focus on a Japanese chess proverb that can apply to this very interesting variant of our royal game - crazy house.
A brief detour
Yoshiharu Habu, one of the all-time great shogi players (equivalent to Garry Kasparov) in his dominance of the game, successfully reaching 9-dan (the highest title a shogi player can possibly hold) at the age of just 24 is also a very strong FIDE master with an elo rating of over 2400 (surprisingly one of the highest in Japan).
In a 2002 interview he talked about one of the key challanges with adjusting to chess [link]:
Habu: I find that the most difficult is to adapt oneself all the time to the changing rhythm of a chess game. A position may demand either fast and energetic action, or much quieter positional play, or something else still. Having to switch from fast play to a slower one and vice versa is the most unsettling for me. In Shogi, the rhythm of a game is much more stable. The opening is usually rather slow, whereas endgames are always a speed race [what Shogi players call "endgames" are in fact mating attacks! There is no such thing as endings in Shogi, since taken pieces can come back into the game at any moment, thus the game does not tend towards simplification - JL]. The rhythm of Shogi never slows down, it only accelerates.
I neglected to mention in my first blog post about some of the key difference between the game. One of them being the ability to drop pieces. By dropping pieces, in essence, the game of shogi can be never-ending. Although draws can happen, they are extremely rare:
The rules of Impasse
Proverb 2# - An attack with four pieces won't fail/ 4mai no seme wa kirenai
When delivering a mating combination in shogi, due to the drop rule, if you start an attack with four pieces, it will be infinite. It makes combinations in shogi, ever more satisfying:
