Shogi Skill Issue

Where do I go to meet players who are about as bad as me at the game? In chess, I could slowly improve by playing from 800 lichess to where I am now, but there are so few players on this site that I can't really do that here. How am I meant to learn by playing when I can't play? Even the second-level bot is leagues better than me.

41

@COArSe_D1RTxxx
There's a couple options; you could play correspondence, there's a bit more life in the correspondence games here mostly because - like you said - the overall playerbase is somewhat too small to have a lot of live games.
You could also play handicap games:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Handicap_(shogi)
I've said it before on this site, but players coming from chess tend to not play handicap games as it's not a tradition of western chess (anymore), and it might seem "condescending" or "demeaning" to them. This is very unfortunate, as shogi has a pretty long history of handicap games, and there are whole systems of different handicaps that top level players use to train with each other.
So you could play against a stronger computer, but give the computer a handicap; or you could play against the computer you can already beat, while taking the handicap yourself.

21

I personally don't love handicaps, as I don't know how well they help with non-handicapped games for newcomers (other than possibly getting used to the board?)

I recommend playing with the AI on bullet and play over and over again to get used to its moves through trial and error—this was what I did!

Start with correspondence games, and move onto live games when you feel more confident~

Also, Merry Christmas y'all!!! 🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄🎄

Also, Also, tsume puzzles! (they should feel relatively easier than regular ones)

122

I wanna suck Your DikC man cuz u are an al qaeda member and supports osama bin laden. I wanna suck Your DikC man cuz i wanna be a gay nigger. I wanna suck Your DikC man cuz i wanna be a gay nigger. i also suspect that u r @ hāmas member who killed a fucking n*z!. u better shut up or else i will kill YOU kkk idiot.

3

handicap games don't allow for enough experience with dealing with strategies involving the handicapped pieces

a new player might spend a large amount of time playing against opponents with a 2-piece handicap, then when they feel confident enough to move on they get floorwiped with bougin or ureshino because they've never encountered those strategies before

1

I just started shogi, I suck at it aswell. Lets grow together :)

I ran into a similar problem when I started playing. 81squaredojo has more players so it's great for non-correspondence games. Some players on there are willing to help you do a post-game analysis, where they tell you about where they think you went wrong and what you could've done differently. Most of the players are Japanese though, so you will probably have to use Google Translate to communicate with them if you don't know Japanese. You can also take the kifu from the games you play on 81squaredojo and use the Tools -> Import Game feature on Lishogi to get the computer to analyze your game afterwards. That has been very helpful for me to learn how to improve. Lishogi's computer has a "Learn from my mistakes" option where the computer shows you where you made a mistake and asks you to come up with a better move.

In order to learn more about the game, I strongly recommend watching Hidetchi's youtube videos on how to play shogi (they are in English). These videos are a great place to start and teach you the rules of the game along with various strategies you can use.