I knew nothing about Bobby Fischer back then. I only heard of a game prodigy had made headlines in the papers. It was in 1956 or thereabouts barely a month since my arrival in Boise, Idaho, busy catching up with college bookwork.

As I was earning nickles, quarters and halves to ready myself for the fall semester, a chum told me about a young boy Bobby Fischer who had made a monkey out of some grown-up champion in a table game called chess. I dug into the news and found all about the game and the boy.

Bobby’s phenomenal feat impressed me, enough to spare  precious extra time for learning how to play chess for the first time, the western counterpart of my favorite game, Shogi.

Shogi is theoretically more complex and thus harder to play than chess. For one thing, the pieces are not visibly apart in white and black and, secondly, all captured pieces, save King, come alive changing sides. The game calls for strenuous effort to master and to a large degree some gift you are born with.

When I speak of Sota Fujii, I instinctively compare him with Bobby Fischer in the manner both rose in fame. Fujii was younger, age 5, when he first startled the world of Shogi but took a while longer to rise to higher ranks than Bobby Fischer, who at age 15, became both the youngest grandmaster (GM) up to that time and the youngest candidate for the World Championship. Fujii, at age 17, is yet to win 6 more of the 8 grand-championship titles in Shogi – a feat Sota is predicted to achieve in not so distant a future.

Sota Fujii is a prodigy in the true sense of the word as he cleared all the barriers in his professional career with distictive merits. At age 14 and 2 months, he outclassed his rivals to qualify to be a 4-dan professional; he then proceeded to win record-breaking 29 straight wins to step up to 6-dan in 2018.

In 2018-2019, Sota Fujii won Ryuo ranking tournaments in a row to promote himself to 7-dan at age 17 and challenged the ruling dual-championship master Akira Watanabe in the 5-game title match of the “Kisei” Championship. Fujii won two in a row in style and Watanabe admitted after the game that he had failed to read Fujii’s moves in the end games.

Watanabe managed to grab the third game but bowed to Fujii in the fourth game which Watanabe later described a total losing game. Fujii thus grabbed the first big-time title at the youngest age in history.

In a matter of months, he swept a rigorous tournament to challenge another big-time title “Oui” against Kimura 9-dan, a notorious “master of defense”. Fujii was to be promoted to 8-dan on condition that he pulls out winner in the 7-game title match against Kimura – which he eventually did. It was his first 7-game title game ever played and Fujii was predicted to have harder time beating the defensive champion.

But then, Fujii made history by beating his opponent twice his age by 4-0 to win the Oui Title and got himself promoted to 8-dan, again at the youngest age in history, age 18 and 1 month.

At age 18+, Sota Fujii 8-dan holds 2 of the 8 grand titles, eyeing for the remaining 6 most likely within a year or two.

Sota Fujii is a gem just as Bobby Fischer was in his days. While Bobby unfortunately failed to live up to his fame, Sota Fujii has a broad King’s road well ahead to pave along. Walk on he should to reach a height no Shogi masters have ever reached, Sota Fujii would have cleared all the records in Shogi history and mark a pyramid at the peak of a land of his own.

Incidentally, Sota Fujii is an intimate chum of AI. He often outsmarts the artificial intelligence and knows how to appply tricks he thus learns from this inorganic non-human on his organic human rivals. The process is currently ongoing and allows no prediction as to its future outcome.

More power to Sota Fujii.

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