Playing shogi online against human opponents

For real time play against human opponents, the best sites are Shogi Club 24, where the standard of play is high, and Play OK. A recent newcomer is 81-dojo,and shogi is also playable on the main yahoo.com site. Another good site is iggamecentre.

For turn based shogi the best is Brainking, and another site that recently has added shogi too is Gold Token( I recently entered a shogi tournament at Gold Token and you can follow it here: http://goldtoken.com/games/tournaments?st=21343
Little Golem also offers turn based shogi, as well as an interesting shogi variant called tori shogi.
Also there is a site called ThaiBG, and if you're comfortable with basic japanese you can play on Yahoo!Japan.

Play against the CSA World Computer Shogi Champion for free

To play against the current computer shogi champion for free, you will first need to download and install the free program called shogidokoro,(right click the shogidokoro link, then click 'save target as' or 'save link as' depending on your browser to download the shogidokoro software, the downloaded zipped file should be 1.41mb, if not, use internet explorer which is more reliable)(see my previous blog entry),then also download GPSshogi (the current 2009 champion).

Double click the' setup_gpsshogi_20090526' file to run, then on shogidokoro click game, then Engine manager, then add, then my computer, then double click the main drive you have which should normally be' C:', then double click ' program files', and there find the folder called' gpsshogi'.If your computer's RAM is under 4GB, then double click single,(otherwise smp) then double click gpsusi.This should add the engine to your list for you to play against, or get it to play against other engines.