This review is very interesting to read to me.
Shogi for chess players
I love solving chess problems because they show all kinds of brilliant tactics (forks, pins, skewers, discovered check, double check, queen sacrifices, etc. etc.). However, when I actually play chess, somehow these tactics never seem to materialize. Part of this is undoubtedly because I suck at chess, but part of it is due (I think) to the nature of the game. In most chess games, one player makes a mistake and loses a pawn or two, or gets a lousy exchange (e.g. two pawns for a knight). The opponent then proceeds to exchange all the other pieces until he has a winning endgame, and then promotes a pawn and the game is over. If you make a big enough blunder (e.g. losing a minor or major piece) you might as well resign right away. You can play hundreds of games of chess without seeing the kind of brilliant tactics that are there in the problem books. When was the last time you saw a queen sacrifice in a chess game you played? Or a game that ended in a flurry of sacrifices by both players as both players rushed to mate each other before they were mated? But this kind of thing is routine in shogi (with the caveat that there are no queen sacrifices per se because there is no queen; however, major piece sacrifices as part of a mating attack are not at all unusual). When I play shogi, I feel like every game has ten times as many tactics as a typical chess game.
Although I do not have much experience in playing chess and thus I'm not in the position to mention what the writer says about chess in the linked article, I agree that you need to use many tactical moves to play shogi well. Learning Tesuji(tactical) will be never be useless to play shogi better.
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