PlayOK.com (Fastest & Easiest)

As many of you may already be familiar with this website, whether it was from a video, a friend, a family member, search engine, whatever or whomever, PlayOK.com is by far the most popular English online shogi-playing community.

The applet is run by Java and there is no download needed. To register an account, all you need to enter is a username, password and email, with no registration confirmation required (very easy). Under Shogi, Kyoto room is usually the most popular, with people ranked from as low as 762 to over 2300 playing this great game, shogi. Your default ranking is always 1200 (after the account is created).

On every Wednesday and Saturday, there will always be a mini-tournament on PlayOK.com for you to enter, so if you feel inclined, go ahead and enter one.

PlayOK has both the original Japanese piece-set as well as a PlayOK version of the International piece-set, slightly different from HIDETCHI-san's proposal, but they're quite obvious which piece is to which, since they're all located in the very same position as when the game is played with the Japanese piece-set (quite obviously).

This website also offers numerous other game including Go, Xiangqi, Chess, Draughts, Blogpoly, Reversi, Durak, Hearts, 9-Men-Morris, and more, so definitely register and check it out!

Link: http://www.playok.com

On the website itself, at the top right corner, you can click "Statistic". When you select Shogi, then Games tab, you can see a list of rated matches replayed in the past 6 months. This is very useful for game analyses.

Here are the statistics of the number of the users who enter Shogi in PlayOK.com to be recorded every 2 hours. The data has been recorded since July 11, 2009 thanks to the program developed by Ginsho-san, one of my twitter friends. Each record shows, from the left end, YYYY/MM/DD, H/M/S, and the number of the users who enters Shogi there. The time is based on Japan time. I think this data will be useful to discuss how we will use PlayOK to promote Shogi.

• http://www.air-bldg.com/~synchro/playok.html

What a great resource! Thanks for posting this, Takodori-san, it's very informative.