From 2011 to 2019, the Japanese Masters Cup veteran Sai, who held nine consecutive sessions, was suspended due to the inappropriate remarks of Noriki Ida, and at first the Master Cup could be founded because the sponsors worshiped the second elder of the bamboo forest, but the hero of the big bamboo was also retired at the end of 2021, and there was no aesthetics in the chess world. But go is still burning, and in 2021, TEIKEI, a Japanese security company, launched three major competitions in a row, one of which was to restore the veterans tournament for the former super-first-class chess players, this time with the name of the game "Legendary Battle".
In addition to the Elder Legend Battle, TEIKEI also sponsors the Junying Battle participated by chess players under the age of 25 and the Female Elder Legend Battle participated by female chess players over the age of 45. The combined prize money for the three tournaments is 17 million yen (about 940,000 yuan), which is a big deal in today's Japanese chess world.
On August 10, 2021, the Japan Chess Academy held a press conference for the three major competitions of the TEIKEI Cup, and the chairman of the board of directors, Kyaw Kobayashi, and the executive director, Kikuyo Aoki, attended the briefing. Half a year later, the two chess player leaders reached the legendary final four together.
Compared with the previous Masters Cup, the LegendAry Battle has three major changes. First, the age of participation has been increased, the Master Cup is limited to more than 50 years old, and the legendary battle has been raised to more than 60 years old, such as Yi tian Jiji, Wang Minghuan, Zhao Shanjin and other chess players born in the 1960s and 1970s. In addition, in order to protect the interests of elderly chess players, it is also specially required that chess players in the 60-year-old age group temporarily disqualify themselves if they win the championship twice, and wait until they are 70 years old to return. If the 66-year-old Zhao Zhixun wants to win the cup three times in the legendary battle, it will not be as fast as 2027.
Second, the number of qualifiers has been expanded, and the Masters Cup only allows well-known chess players and a very small number of high-ranking players who have won the title battle in the Japanese chess academy to participate, and the number of participants in each session does not exceed 20. The LegendAry Battle is open to age-appropriate players from the Japanese Chess Academy and the Kansai Chess Academy, and the first batch of up to 56 players is divided into five groups from 60 to 70 years old and four groups over 70 years old to carry out pre-selection.
Yuichi Yuantian (right), who has previously missed the Masters Cup, reached the final four with a five-game winning streak in the first legendary battle, pictured here is the elimination of Nao Hasegawa in the final round of the qualifier on December 1, 2021. The best-known match of Hasegawa's career was two decades ago, when he lost to Argentine amateur Achirul in the inaugural Toyota Cup World Throne Battle.
The third is to provide space for men and women to fight, and the top four of the women's legendary battle directly enter the legendary battle competition. The first women's legendary tournament ended from September to December 2021, and in the senior chess players who had won the women's championship, Aoki Kikuyo won consecutive victories over Saiko Nakasawa, Yukari Umezawa, Cocoon Hotaka and Tomoko Kato. The eldest chess player, Sugito Sugiuchi, was eligible, but did not sign up to play.
On December 11, 2021, Kikuyo Aoki defeated Tomoko Kato in the final of the 1st Women's LegendAry Battle. At that time, the two could not have imagined that they would meet again in the semi-finals of the legendary battle.
Three major changes have brought wonderful results to the 1st Elder Legend Battle, the former chess saint Wang Licheng, the former Tenten Kataoka Satoshi, and the former throne Hane Taisho, the qualifiers were defeated by Terutaka Enada, Chen Jiarui, and Ishii Kuni, and they were out early, of which Wang Licheng's defeat was the most unpopular. Female chess players are particularly scrappy due to their general youth, and 53-year-old Tomoko Kato has won consecutively over two octogenarian veterans, Kuni Ishii and Lin Haifeng, to reach the semifinals.
On january 31 Chinese New Year's Eve day, the eighty-year-old Lin Haifeng faced Tomoko Kato in the quarterfinals, and lost the game quickly in only 71 hands, leaving a staggering departure in the live camera of another game in the same chess room at the Japan Chess Academy.
In this competition, Zhao Zhixun, who has been "persuading the king to take the land" all his life, has successively faced the "cosmic stream" Masaki Takemiya and the "Kansai cosmic stream" Yuan Tian Yuichi. At their peak, countless classic duels of "heaven and earth, clouds and mud" were staged at the apex of chess battles. However, the two famous players of high-altitude combat are over seventy years old, and they are influenced by AI to keep pace with the times and fall in love with the field, in the two games of chess, Takemiya Masaki 31st hand, Yuan Tian Isaichi earlier to the 9th hand directly on the three three.
On January 20, Cho Ji-hoon and Masaki Takemiya reunited in the 1st Legendary Battle, but the exciting "Heaven and Earth Showdown" of that year was no longer seen due to the advent of the AI era.
There is a joke in the Japanese chess circles that "Mr. Takemiya realized the importance of the field after he was sixty years old", and after the age of seventy, Takemiya even realized the importance of point three three. However, in the face of Zhao Zhixun, a career sufferer, even if he learned to point three and three, he still lost with 13 and a half eyes.
However, the same point three three, the result is very different. After Masaki Takemiya was once again defeated by his disciple Zhao Zhixun's sword, Yuichi Yuan Tian performed a wonderful performance of "returning the other body with the other way", first forcing Zhao Zhixun to surround the middle abdomen, and then using beautiful means to cure loneliness not only broke the opponent's big air, but even killed ling fiercely and won the mid-game.
Zhao Zhixun, who has been a "lone wolf" for half a century, has watched others turn the river and the sea in his own universe.
Aoki Kikuyo, who tasted the taste of a long-lost champion in the women's legendary battle, became more and more courageous in the Vietnam war, and after eliminating Norio Kudo in the first round of the legendary battle, he defeated the former king Koichi Kobayashi in the quarterfinals. Kobayashi Koichi and Cho Ji-hoon were out on the same day on February 3, and the Elders Tournament was no longer their cross-country arena, and the times had really changed.
Kobayashi's loss to Aoki this game of chess is almost a complete defeat from the win rate curve, and Kobayashi, who is not willing to lose, has lost as many as 9 and a half eyes.
In the semifinals, Kikuyo Aoki played Tomoko Kato again, yuichi Yuanda was against Streak Makoto Doi and Yoshio Ishida, and the final of the first legendary battle was destined to become a gender war.