Does Tsume Shogi Make You Stronger? Why It Works and How to Keep It Up

A little while after you start playing shogi, someone will almost certainly tell you to solve tsume shogi, the mating puzzles of shogi. But tsume shogi has slightly different rules from a real game. The attacker must give check on every move, and the defender holds every piece that is not on the board or in the attacker’s hand. Positions like that almost never appear in real games. It is natural to wonder whether the puzzles really help.

My view, up front: tsume shogi is a very efficient way to improve your endgame. It does not, on its own, make you stronger at the whole game. This post covers where tsume shogi helps in real games, what it does not teach, and how to keep it up. The rules and the basics of solving are in Tsume Shogi for Beginners, so here I focus on the effects and on the routine.

An old way to practise

Tsume shogi is not a recent training idea. In the Edo period, the leading shogi houses presented collections of tsume shogi to the shogunate, and Ito Sokan’s Shogi Muso (1734) and Ito Kanju’s Shogi Zuko (1755) are still solved today (Wikipedia: Tsume shogi).

Many of those classics, though, are works of art to enjoy for their length and brilliant sequences. If the goal is strength in real games, the usual advice is to start with shorter problems whose shapes could appear in a game. Below, I mostly have short problems such as mate in 3 and mate in 5 in mind.

Reason 1: you start to see mating patterns

In the endgame of a real game, you miss that the opponent’s king is mated and play something else. That is common for beginners. Most of the time the cause is not weak reading but not knowing the mating shapes.

If you solve many tsume shogi, you see the final shapes again and again: gold on the head, gold on the side, gold from behind, a dragon one square away from its supporting piece, and so on. When those shapes are in your head, looking at the king in a real game gives you a starting point: can I reach that shape? Knowing where to start reading makes it easier to spot a mate even when time is short.

Reason 2: it trains endgame reading

Tsume shogi is close to ideal reading practice. The attacker’s moves are limited to checks, and the defender usually has only a few replies. Mate in 3 trains you to line up three moves exactly in your head: your check, the reply, and your mating move.

Try the same in the middlegame and there are so many candidate moves that you lose track of how far you have really read. Because tsume shogi narrows the candidates, you can get a clear sense of having read it to the end, and you can check the answer clearly. I believe repeating that experience of reading accurately to the finish is what makes the endgame faster and more precise.

Reason 3: you get a feel for sacrifices

Tsume shogi solutions often start with a sacrifice that seems to give a piece away for nothing. There are set patterns: a sacrifice that pulls the king down to the back rank, one that moves a defender, one played on a focal point (more in Basic Tsume Shogi Tesuji).

In real games, moves that lose material are hard to play. But if the opponent’s king is mated, material no longer matters. A shogi proverb says that in the endgame speed matters more than material, and there are moments when giving a piece to mate quickly is the way to win. Having solved many sacrifices helps such moves come to mind naturally.

Reason 4: you can judge your own king’s safety

Tsume shogi does not only train you to mate the opponent. The same skill tells you whether your own king can be mated.

When both sides are racing to attack, if you know your king has no mate, you can skip defence and attack with everything. If you see that your king can be mated, you can act before it happens. Deciding whether to attack or defend rests on reading which king can be mated, and I think that is exactly the tsume shogi skill.

What tsume shogi alone will not teach

I want to be honest that there is a lot tsume shogi does not teach.

The opening and middlegame. Building a position, choosing a strategy and judging material cannot be practised with tsume shogi. If you are far behind before the endgame, you will not get to use your mating skill.

Attacks without check. In real games you often close in on the king with moves that are not checks, such as a threatmate (tsumero), which threatens mate next move, or a brinkmate (hisshi), where mate cannot be prevented. Tsume shogi mates only with checks, so these need separate practice. Hisshi problems are one way to do that.

Not knowing whether a mate exists. Every tsume shogi problem has an answer. In a real game you do not know whether there is a mate at all. Deciding that there is none, after reading and not finding one, and choosing another move is also an important real game skill.

Defence. You may notice that your king can be mated, but how to defend is a separate skill.

I think of tsume shogi as one pillar of the endgame. The rest comes from playing, replaying professional games, and problems such as hisshi and next-move puzzles.

How to keep it up

Even a good practice is useless if you stop. Here is a routine I would recommend because it is easy to continue.

Many short problems. Mate in 3 is enough at first. Solving many short problems shows you mating shapes more often than struggling for a long time with a hard one. Move on to mate in 5 once mate in 3 becomes something you see quickly.

Read it through before you move a piece. If you think while moving pieces on a board or screen, it does not train reading much. Line up the whole sequence in your head first, and only then move the pieces. Just keeping to that order changes what you get from the same problem.

It is fine to look at the answer. Rather than spending tens of minutes on one problem, I think it is more efficient to think for a few minutes, look at the answer if you are stuck, and understand the sequence. Solve the problems whose answers you looked at again a few days later.

A little every day. I believe a few problems every day fix the shapes better than dozens on one day. Solving at a set time makes it easier to keep going.

Check it in real games. After a game, look back at whether there was a mate in the endgame. That shows you where the shapes from tsume shogi actually turn up.

A daily tsume shogi puzzle

Shogi365 is a tsume shogi app with 1,000 puzzles each of mate in 3, 5, 7 and 9. There is a Daily Challenge every day, and the home screen shows your last seven days and your streak. You can play any check, right or wrong, and the defender replies automatically with the most stubborn defence, so you can confirm on the board whether the sequence you read in your head was correct. If you do not mate within the move count it is a failure, and you can retry up to three times. Moves that are not checks cannot be played, so you solve by the rules of tsume shogi.

Every puzzle is generated by the app’s own solver and checked: the first move is unique, and no attacking or defending piece is superfluous. After solving, Review lets you step through the moves one at a time. If you use it the way described above, reading it through before you move, even a short session becomes reading practice.

How to use the app is in Getting Started with Shogi365, and tips for keeping it up are in Practical Tips for Using Shogi365 Every Day.