After more than a week of looking through more than a thousand Hoensha games in the newspaper/magazine collections, I’ve found this player 木原亀太郎 Kihara (or Kiwara) Kametaro who was a Shodan on the 1880 Honinbo House registry and 8k (2d) on the 1891 Hoensha member list, that I think is a good representative of a Shodan player around the 1880s.
There are a total of 17 games where he only won 5 of them, although the last 5 games from 1889 and 1893 (where he lost them all) came from the collections of Honinbo Shusai (when he was still a shodan) and Honinbo Shuei, so they are probably bias. Just consider the first 12 games from 1884 to 1886, 木原亀太郎 had a winrate about 40% which suggested these games are pretty even and reflect his strength well, where most of them were against Hoensha 7k(3d) to 9k(1d) players.
I compiled a library for these 17 games played by Kihara (or Kiwara) Kametaro (木原亀太郎) between 1884 and 1893.
And my personal opinion about his games is that he was a pretty solid and mostly use fuseki popular around the 1880s in Hoensha games, and favor territory and thick connected groups. Not particularly good at ko fights, but relatively decent at local fights and semeai. Hard to say about his end-game, since most records don’t include end-game sequences.
One interesting thing I notice for transcribing these old records is that since the move number is marked by Chinese numeral vertically, they would use a square to represent 100 (一百) and a triangle for 200 (二百). And I’ve never seen games with move more than 300 (where most of them just omitted end-game sequences). Also, there are surprising few errors and would include error corrections in the next volume if there were any. Surprisingly good quality and paying attention to details.
And finally here are all the raw records for the first 12 games between 1884 and 1886
