Wanted to start a thread to track the Japanese Womens Li League tournament 2026.
It started up today with the favoured (and last years winners) team Igo&Shogi Channel beating Fukuoka 2-1.
Xie Yimin won her revenge match against the, much younger, player who replaced her as Team Captain and there was an unexpected upset when the Japanese #2 woman lost out to someone 200 ranks or so down (but still a rising Professional)
I am adding links to the various things on my blog will be updating as I glean more info from other source.
Match 1 Games 1-3
The league follows the usual Japanese team format of 3 boards with each team deciding which player goes on which board. It is running a quick time structure so the games are coming in at around an hour each (so no 10 hour multiple day games with you waiting half an hour for a move).
There are 5 teams of 4 players and in the pool stages each team will play all the other teams twice with 3 games in each of the two matches. The second time they play I think (my Japanese isn’t great) is going to be an unusual random setup but I may have misunderstood.
After the pool stages the finals will occur with the top two teams (various tie breakers exist) facing off where all 4 players on both teams will be playing. Since that allows a draw there is an interesting tie break here with the team with the best pool record needing either its Captain or Co-Captain to win and if this occurs with a draw (2-2) then the best pool team wins.
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I watched a bit of the stream on YouTube. I’m not sure why they are all dressed up like they are playing a soccer match. 
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It’s part of the sponsorship I think. They have spent months crowd funding to pay for the league so using team kits and getting a team identity going was a priority. I think some of the crowd funding rewards went from replica kits for your favourite teams right up to individual lessons from the players (rates according to fame and some of these players are very well known).
I prefer it when they wear their own stuff and play in more, erm, tranquil surroundings but they are trying to get interest in a younger Japanese audience potentially and maybe they think this is a good way to make it fresher?
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I think they improved from the first time but it still feels like an “amateur” broadcast. KB League does it well because they have a proper studio and commentary and nice soundtrack and camera work, though even the viewership for the KB league seems to be dropping too.
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This is the league format, and how they pick colors (手番：ホームゲームの主将、三将を白番、副将を黒番とする。) For the home team, the captain(主将), and the 3rd player(三将) will play as white, and the vice-captain(副将) will play as black. And the home team can decide the sequence of which of the 3 matches to play first. (the “roles” of each match within a setting are decided by their team, and the naming of the match/round just signifies the importance for tally the results, not the players’ roles within their own teams, they are all just team members)
And it is just round robin playing twice, and accounts for players’ schedule, there are other normal pro matches consistently played throughout the year, so the league schedule has to fit the schedule of their team members (especially those with strong players who would participate in the women’s title match).
And the final deciding team match of 4 players all participated between the 1st place team and 2nd place team in the league phase are bias torward the 1st place team in the league when the result is tied (2 wins 2 losses for each team). The 1st-place team from the league only needs one of their winning games by either their captain or vice-captain. The only way for the 2nd-place team from the league to win in a tie result is for the 2 winning games come from both the captain’s and vice-captain’s matches.
BTW, Hoshiai Shiho (born 1997) is actually one and a half years older than Fujisawa Rina (born 1998), but she became pro later in her life (in 2012 at age 15), while Rina got to pro much younger and earlier (in 2010 at age just 11 years and 6 months old), so Rina has a longer professional career than Shiho (and Shiho played very well recently against Rina, just lost 2-3 to her in Woman’s Honinbo title match, and they are close games)
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Ooh, great information, thank you. I will update the relevant pages.
Of the three games I thought Rina vs Shiho was the most interesting. Shiho’s rating is also consistently climbing at this point and is hitting those finals more frequently so is an interesting player to watch.
I did think the fact that Senko does not play for a while could be down to the schedule of current Japanese #1 lady, Ueno Asami, though there might also be a level of building expectation especially as Senko won the pools last year but were pipped by Igo in the finals.
In their schedule page, they did mention this is just the current arrangement, and they could change them in the future, even the order.
※ 日程は変更になる場合があります。
※ 日程の都合により一部ラウンドの順序が前後する場合があります。
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Next match has just finished with Nagoya beating Wakagoi 2-1
Some nice matches, the closest was the first which could have gone either way, the second has a fun multiple 33 invasion opening that led to a gradually increasing defeat for Black and the third was a powerhouse game from Ueno Risa - who showed her fighting preferences in exactly the way she had said she liked to play prior to the match.
Anyone else enjoy? Bit of a gap now before the next match on the 13th February when the two teams that just lost - Fukuoka and Wakagoi will go head to head.
Blog link to report with the AI reviews
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The first team match of the second round just finished
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