What each piece is worth.

Piece	On the board	In hand	Hand premium	Promoted
Pawn歩兵	100	115	+15%	600
Lance香車	350	400	+14%	600
Knight桂馬	450	520	+16%	600
Silver銀将	550	630	+15%	600
Gold金将	600	690	+15%	—
Bishop角行	950	1090	+15%	1150
Rook飛車	1100	1270	+15%	1300

Centipawns, the unit engines count in: a pawn on the board is 100. These are the app's own numbers, read from its evaluation at build time, so this page cannot drift from the bot you play against.

A piece in hand beats a piece on the board

Every row above is worth more in hand than in play, and that is not a rounding artefact. A rook on the board can only act from where it stands and has to travel to matter; a rook in hand can appear on any of the empty squares, this move, wherever it hurts most. Our evaluation prices that at 15% more for a rook and 15% more for a pawn.

The practical consequence runs through the whole game. An even trade is never quite even, because the side who captures last holds the piece. And a player with three pieces in hand and a worse position is often the one to be afraid of, because their attack arrives all at once and yours has to walk.

Everything becomes a gold

A pawn, a lance, a knight and a silver all promote into a piece that moves exactly like a gold, and our table prices all four of them at 600 — the same as a gold itself. That single rule does most of the work in shogi's endgame:

• The pawn is the great climber. 100 on the board, 600 promoted: a 6-fold rise, the largest in the game. A tokin (と金) is a gold that cost you a pawn, and if it is captured your opponent only gets a pawn back. That asymmetry is why 「と金の遅早」 — the tokin is slow but fast — is a proverb.
• The knight and lance gain most in absolute terms after the pawn, and they gain manoeuvrability they badly lacked: a lance that could only go forward becomes a piece that can retreat.
• The silver often should NOT promote. It is the one minor piece that loses something: a silver can move diagonally backwards and a gold cannot. Promoting a silver that is doing defensive work makes it worse at the job.
• The gold cannot promote at all, which is part of why it is the most reliable defender: what you see is what it always is.

The two big pieces

The rook and bishop are the only pieces that keep their own identity when they promote, adding a king's step to the range they already had. A dragon (龍) is worth 1300 and a horse (馬) 1150 in our table, and both are worth roughly two golds. This is why a bishop exchange in the opening is a real decision rather than a formality, and why so many openings are named after where the rook went.

Note the gap between a rook (1100) and a gold (600): a rook is worth a little under two golds. In chess a rook is worth about two minor pieces; in shogi the ratio is similar, but the minor pieces get their value back by promoting, which the rook cannot do as dramatically.

How to use the numbers

Not by counting them. Engines add them up every move; people use them to answer one question at a time:

• Is this trade good? Compare the HAND values, not the board ones, because after the trade both pieces are in somebody's hand.
• Should I promote? Compare the promoted value to what you give up in mobility. For everything but the silver the answer is almost always yes.
• Can I ignore this threat? If what you gain is worth more than the piece you lose, and the king is safe, yes. Shogi rewards this far more than chess does, because material returns to the board.

And one thing the table cannot price: the king has no value because losing it ends the game. Every number above is worth nothing in a position where you are mated first, which is why our engine's weakest levels are tuned to never give away material for free rather than to count it well.

Where these numbers come from

They are hand-tuned starting values, refined by playing the engine against itself. They are close to, but not identical with, the amateur tables you will see in Japanese books, which usually run pawn 1, lance 4, knight 4, silver 6, gold 7, bishop 9, rook 11 or similar. Any table is a summary of a real position, and a lance in front of a rook is worth more than a lance on the far side of the board no matter what the table says.