Basic Tsume Shogi Tesuji: From Gold on the Head to the Focal-Point Sacrifice

A mate in 3 in tsume shogi has three moves: a check, the defender’s reply, and mate. The line is short, but the correct first move is often one that seems to give a piece away for nothing. Seeing this sacrifice (捨て駒, sutegoma) or missing it makes a big difference to how easily you solve mate in 3.

Sacrifices come in a handful of fixed patterns, and shogi players call patterns like these tesuji (手筋). If you find yourself trying checks at random every time, knowing the patterns by name gives you a clear order for narrowing down the candidates. In this post I explain the basic tesuji worth learning first, using small positions I made with very few pieces. The rules and the basic way of reading are in Tsume Shogi for Beginners, so here I stay with the tesuji themselves.

I describe positions in words. Squares are written the Japanese way: 5一 means file 5, rank 1, and rank 1 is the defender’s back rank. Pieces without a label belong to the attacker, the side solving the puzzle; the defender’s pieces are marked “defender’s”. By tsume convention, every piece that is neither on the board nor in the attacker’s hand belongs to the defender. Each position was checked with the same mate-search program used in Shogi365: it mates in exactly 3, and the first move is the only one that works.

Gold on the head: where every tesuji leads

The easiest way into tesuji is to start from the mating shape. The most basic one is 頭金 (atama-kin), “gold on the head”. You drop a gold directly in front of the king, on its “head”, with another of your pieces protecting the gold.

A gold moves forward, sideways and diagonally forward, so a gold on the king’s head covers the two squares beside the king and the two squares diagonally in front of it. If the king is on the back rank, it has no squares behind it. If the gold is protected, the king cannot take it. That is mate.

Once you know this shape, many mates in 3 start to look like the question “how do I set up gold on the head?” It helps to think of the tesuji below as different ways of bringing the king into that final shape.

The sacrifice that pulls the king down

Position: defender’s king on 1二. Your silver on 3三. In hand: a bishop and a gold.

The first idea is to drop a gold on 2二 straight away. Your silver covers 2二, so the king cannot take the gold. But the king can run to 1三 and get away upward.

The answer is bishop to 2一. You drop the bishop on the back-rank square diagonally above the king, giving check. If the king takes, it lands on 2一, on the back rank. Now a gold drop on 2二 is gold on the head, protected by the silver, and it is mate. If the king does not take and goes to 1一, 2三 or 1三 instead, a gold drop still mates.

Your first move gives away a bishop, a strong piece, for nothing. What matters is not the bishop but the purpose of the sacrifice: by making the king capture, you drag it down to the back rank where it has few escape squares. It is the proverb “drop the king to the bottom rank” carried out in a single move. If you build the habit of looking for a sacrifice on a back-rank square whenever the king has a way out upward, problems of this type become much quicker.

The sacrifice that moves a defender

Position: defender’s king on 9一, defender’s silver on 8一. Your dragon (promoted rook) on 7二. In hand: a bishop and a pawn.

With the dragon on 7二 and a bishop in hand, a bishop drop on 8二, protected by the dragon, looks like mate. But the silver on 8一 covers 8二 and simply takes it. Even without taking, the king can escape to 9二, because the bishop on 8二 now blocks the dragon’s sideways line.

The answer is a pawn drop on 9二. You drop a pawn on the king’s head and give check. The dragon’s sideways line reaches 9二, so the king cannot take the pawn. Only the silver on 8一 can, and it does.

Two things happen with this one move. The silver has moved from 8一 to 9二, so nothing guards 8二 any more. And 9二 is now filled by the silver, so the king is boxed in by its own piece. A bishop drop on 8二 is now mate. The empty 8一 is covered by the dragon’s diagonal step, and the king has nowhere to go.

Making an inconvenient defender capture so that it changes squares, and having that defender land on the king’s escape square and hem in its own king: both are very common purposes of a sacrifice in tsume shogi. The pawn is the first move partly because it is the cheapest piece that does the job. Note that giving check with a pawn drop is not a foul in itself. The foul is uchifuzume, where the pawn drop itself is mate. Here the silver can take, so there is no problem.

The focal-point sacrifice

In shogi, a “focal point” (焦点, shōten) is a square covered by two or more pieces. The Seisen-ban Nihon Kokugo Daijiten (in Japanese) gives this meaning, calls a pawn dropped there a “focal-point pawn”, and says it is often a good move.

When two pieces guard the same square and you sacrifice there, one of them has to capture. The piece that captures leaves the post it was guarding. The two guards usually have other jobs as well, so whichever one takes, a hole opens somewhere.

Position: defender’s king on 5一, defender’s silvers on 4一 and 6一. Your gold on 5三. In hand: a gold and a pawn.

The square on the king’s head, 5二, is covered by both silvers. If you drop the gold there for gold on the head, a silver just takes it.

The answer is a pawn drop on 5二. That square is the focal point of the two silvers. Your gold on 5三 protects the pawn, so the king cannot take it. One of the silvers must.

If the silver on 6一 takes, 6一 is left empty. A gold drop on 6二 gives check and covers the empty 6一. The gold on 6二 is protected by your gold on 5三, and 5三 also covers 4二, so it is mate. If the silver on 4一 takes, the mirror image works: a gold drop on 4二 is mate. Whichever silver takes, you drop the gold on the side it left.

Keep the gold for the finish

What happens in the focal-point position if you drop the gold on 5二 first instead of the pawn? A silver takes it, and you are left with only a pawn in hand. A pawn cannot finish the mate, so it fails.

This hides one more tesuji. There is a shogi proverb, “keep the gold for the finishing blow”. A gold that can deliver gold on the head or a side gold should stay in your hand until the end if possible. If you sacrifice, sacrifice the pieces less suited to the final shape, like a pawn or a silver, first. Giving up the bishop and keeping the gold in the first position follows the same thinking.

When you have several pieces in hand, decide first which piece will deliver mate, then think about which piece to sacrifice. The order of your candidate moves follows naturally.

Learn the names, or solve many problems?

I believe you need both. Knowing the names lets you ask questions in order when you are stuck: can I pull the king down, can I move a defender, is there a focal point? But knowing a name does not make the pattern visible on the board. To recognise a pattern the moment you see it, you need to see it many times, and I think solving lots of problems is the shortest way there.

The order I would suggest is to read through patterns like the ones in this post once, and then solve a lot of mates in 3. When you look up the answer to one you could not solve, try to put into words which tesuji it was. That alone changes how you see the same pattern the next time.

Building patterns with a daily mate in 3

Shogi365 is a tsume shogi app with 1,000 puzzles each of mate in 3, 5, 7 and 9. You can play any check, right or wrong, and the defender replies automatically, so you can test on the board whether your reading of a sacrifice was correct. If you do not mate within the move count it is a failure, and you can retry up to three times. 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, which is also a good way to confirm which tesuji it was.

Tips for using the app are in Shogi365 tips.