Lance handicap (kyo-ochi)

What changes

Every rule of the even game applies without exception: the same board, the same moves, hand and drops, nifu, the dead-drop bar, uchifuzume, the three-rank promotion zone, sennichite and the twenty-four point impasse count. Only two things are different, and both are on the set-up.

First, one man is removed before play. Gote begins without the lance on 1a. That is his left-hand lance as he sits at the board, and on this site’s drawing of the board it is the corner square at the top right.

Second, gote moves first. On this site the stronger player — uwate, the one giving the odds — is seated as gote, and the weaker player — shitate — is seated as sente with a full army. So in every handicap game here, gote opens; in the even game, sente opens. Handing over the first move is part of the odds, not a quirk of the seating.

Playing shitate, with the full army

The missing lance is at the top of the first file, so the obvious target is the edge. An edge attack that would normally cost several moves to prepare gets there a move sooner and meets one defender fewer. A common plan is to push the first-file pawn, trade it, and follow with the rook or a lance of your own down the open file, aiming at the corner where nothing is standing.

The mistake is to treat one missing lance as a licence to attack immediately. It is not enough material to justify a bad attack. Castle, get your rook’s file working, and then use the soft corner as the place where an already sound attack breaks through.

Playing uwate, a lance short

You have the first move, so use it. The lance is a defensive man in the opening and it costs you very little to be without one, provided you do not castle into the corner it used to guard. Castling towards the ninth file rather than the first is the natural answer, and it turns the handicap into almost nothing.

There is even a small compensation. With no lance on 1a, your own first file is unblocked from the back, so a rook swung to that file has a clear run, and the empty corner is a flight square for a king that gets chased. Play the position as an even game with a slightly wrong-footed right-hand side, not as a game you are losing.

Sources

Everything on this page is written from scratch. These are the works it leans on, and what each one settles.

• Nihon Shogi Renmei (Japan Shogi Association) handicap ladder

  The source for which man comes off at each rung and for the convention that uwate moves first. The lance handicap removes uwate’s left lance, which is the 1a lance in the seating this site uses.