A player who captures the opponent's king wins the game. In practice this rarely happens, as a player will concede defeat when loss is inevitable.

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When a player makes a move such that the opposing king could be captured on the following turn, the move is said to give check to the king; the king is said to be in check. If a player's king is in check and no legal move by that player will get the king out of check, the checking move is also checkmate (tsumi ??) and effectively wins the game.

To give the warning "check!" in Japanese, one says "?te!" (??). However, this is an influence of international chess and is not required, even as a courtesy.

A player is not allowed to give perpetual check.

In professional and serious amateur games, a player who makes an illegal move loses immediately.

There are two other possible, if uncommon, ways for a game to end: repetition (??? sennichite) and impasse (??? jish?gi).

If the same game position occurs four times with the same player to play, the game is considered a draw. For two positions to be considered the same, the pieces in hand must be the same as well as the positions on the board. However, if this occurs with one player giving perpetual check, then that player loses.

The game reaches an impasse if both kings have advanced into their respective promotion zones and neither player can hope to mate the other or to gain any further material. If this happens, the winner is decided as follows: Each rook or bishop scores 5 points for the owning player, and all other pieces except kings score 1 point each. (Promotions are ignored for the purposes of scoring.) A player scoring fewer than 24 points loses. (If neither player has fewer than 24, the game is no contest?a draw.) Jish?gi is considered an outcome in its own right rather than no contest, but there is no practical difference.

As this impasse generally needs to be agreed on for the rule to be invoked, a player may refuse to do so, on the grounds that he/she could gain further material or position before an outcome has to be decided. If that happens, one player may force jish?gi upon getting his king and all his pieces protected in the promotion zone.

In professional tournaments the rules typically require drawn games to be replayed with colours (sides) reversed, possibly with reduced time limits. This is rare compared to chess and xiangqi, occurring at a rate of 1-2% even in amateur games. The 1982 Meijin title match between Nakahara Makoto and Kato Hifumi was unusual in this regard, with jish?gi in the first game (only the fifth draw in the then 40-year history of the tournament), a game which lasted for an unusual 223 moves (not counting in pairs of moves), with an astounding 114 minutes spent pondering a single move, and sennichite in the sixth and eighth games. Thus this best-of-seven match lasted ten games and took over three months to finish; Black did not lose a single game and the eventual victor was Kat? at 4-3.

[edit] Player ranking and handicaps
Amateur players are ranked from 15 ky? to 1 ky? and then from 1 dan and upwards; this is the same terminology as many other arts in Japan. Professional players operate with their own scale, from professional 4 dan and upwards to 9 dan for elite players. Amateur and professional ranks are offset.[illustration 2]

Games between players of disparate strengths are often played with handicaps. In a handicap game, one or more of White's pieces are removed from the setup, and in exchange White plays first. Note that the missing pieces are not available for drops and play no further part in the game. The imbalance created by this method of handicapping is not as strong as it is in international chess because material advantage is not as powerful in shogi.

Common handicaps, in increasing order of severity, include:

Left lance
Bishop
Rook
Rook and left lance
Two pieces: Rook and bishop
Four pieces: Rook, bishop, and both lances
Six pieces: Rook, bishop, both lances and both knights
Other handicaps are also occasionally used. The relationship between handicaps and differences in rank is not universally agreed upon, with several systems in use.

If a jish?gi occurs in a handicap game, the removed pieces are counted as if White had them in play, or available for drops.

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