Sota Fujii, the current Osho title holder, won the 3rd round of the Osho battle. The score became 2-1 for Fujii. As described in the previous article, Yoshiharu Habu, the most frequent champion of title battles ever, postponed his opening strategy at the very beginning of the game to perplex Fujii, and his choice was the Gangi (Snowroof) opening.
Gangi is a name of castling used in double static rook games, which has the feature of leaving 77 square (Black side) open for the bishop to attack the 4th file together with the rook and right knight, as opposed to normal Yagura castle. The strategy has been known since Edo era, but it was not popular in 20 century. However, with the rise of Artificial Intelligence, the opening strategy became popular again in the professional games. Before the AI, professional players preferred stiffer castles like Anaguma, meaning Bear-in-the-hole, because it is less likely to lose. On the other hand, AI tend to chose the shortest way to win and doesn’t care the stiffness, and it also prefers well balanced positioning. So, the Gangi castling and associated strategy was often chosen by many AI programs, and young professional players adopted it.
Under the such situation, it was natural that Habu selected the opening for this important game. Habu said after the game that “I don’t know at which moves that I made mistake”. Actually, he did not make remarkable mistakes, based on the many amateur players investigation result using their own AI (some of them have really good AI and expensive PC, and their evaluation is so accurate). However, as the result, Fujii gradually extended his advantage and won the game. A famous amateur player who has the good AI and PC concluded that there was no critical mistake, but maybe the Gangi strategy itself contains some inherent problems. It means that perhaps Fujii put an end to the Ganig Opening.
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