The American Chu Shogi Association
The American Chu Shogi Association is an association devoted to all things related to Chu Shogi. Specifically: raising awareness of the games existence, providing a body to make decisions and recommendations for tournaments, to provide a body for establishing rankings.
The ACSA will not deny membership to any person for reason of age, race, gender, nationality, religion, etc. etc.
Go to acsa.shogivariants.com for more information if you are interested.
Why does it exist?
In 1998 I read about Shogi and then played my first game of Shogi. I loved it, but could not find an opponent to play against. No much later, I read about Chu Shogi in R. Wayne Schmittberger's book New Rules for Classic Games. I found it interesting, so I made a set of pieces out of some trim and marked the pieces with pen. I made a board out of a piece of canvas and voila, I had a board. Unfortunately, I still had no opponent. I played against Steve Evan's Shogi Variants program a few times, but quickly found that it didn't pose a real challenge to me (especially after I found a bug that caused it to throw away it's lion-- I reported that to Steve Evan's, but do not know if it's been fixed.) My homemade board sat in a drawer for quite some time. Until the Chu Shogi e-mail ladder sprang into existence (currently hosted at http://www.shogi.net/chu-ladder)... I joined the ladder almost immediately. I still wanted to play the game over-the-board. I mentioned my desire to one of my opponents (Victor Contoski) and talked about setting up a tournament myself. He mentioned that maybe an Internet tournament could be good... Before I knew it, I found myself getting excited about it and since Vic mentioned that he thinks we have four people already interested, I thought why not?
But still something was missing. I wanted it to be an 'Official' tournament, so we needed a sanctioning body. I asked a couple people and they mentioned that there is no such body, so I created it. I thought about starting the World Chu Shogi Association, but felt that would be WAY too arrogant. I won't move there unless I get some other people to sanction it. My hope is that someday, Chu Shogi will be popular enough that there will be a World Chu Association and the ACSA will be a member in it along with others. Maybe some day we could have a Chu Shogi equivalent of the Ryder Cup. That would be great! I hope we generate enough interest in Chu Shogi to have such a thing.