On last week’s Friday, me and Leon got to attend the 38th Kisei prize-giving ceremony, which was held at the Tokyo Imperial Hotel in Ginza. As seems customary for these events, the organizers weren’t stingy about money when it came to the venue or the catering.

The winner of the 38th Kisei tournament was no other than Iyama Yūta, who successfully defended his title (of which he currently holds six of the seven available). Me and Leon were lucky to have gotten the chance to take a photo with him, as below:

…One might indeed get the idea that the people in the photo were football players getting ready for a free kick by the opposing team, as somebody remarked on Facebook.

I’d prepared for the ceremony by avoiding eating too much earlier in the day, because by my experience I knew that there’d be plenty of good food available. To my dismay, this time, I hardly had any chance to eat at all, as for some reason the ceremony hall was full of old acquaintances with whom to speak, including for example Takemiya-sensei, two insei girls who used to go to Mimura Tomoyasu 9-dan’s dojo at the same time as I did, and Igo-shougi channel’s reporter, who of course had to ask me for a quick interview on what I think of Iyama.

…Like so.

Saturday’s insei games continued in usual fashion with a 2-1 result, but on Sunday I suddenly got sick of what seems to be a common cold. I considered not going to the training because I was sure I wouldn’t be able to play normally, but decided to go anyway knowing that scoring even one win might be big, and that I might as well rest on the following week. As such, I did score one win on Sunday, and have now gotten rest for four straight days. Because the quality of my games from last weekend wasn’t very commendable, and because I passed up on getting the English class pros’ comments on them, I don’t have any games to post today.

In exchange, to make it easier for the blog readers to speculate about April’s results, here is the results sheet after last Saturday’s games: