Nineteen hours and fifty-seven minutes would be very near the time
allotted both players in an ordinary match, but the Master still had more
than twenty hours left. Otaké with his thirty-four hours and nineteen
minutes still had almost six hours.
The Master’s White 130 was the careless play that proved fatal. If he had
not made the mistake, and if the match had continued with the two sides
generally equal or the advantage for the one or the other very small, it
seems likely that Otaké would have hung on until he had used the whole of
his forty hours. After White 130, he knew that he had won.
Both the Master and Otaké were famous for tenacity, and both were
given to long deliberation. Otaké would wait until most of his time was
gone; and his way of making a hundred and more plays in the last minute
gave his game its own peculiar ferocity. The Master, disciplined in an age
when there were no time restrictions, was not capable of such a tour de
force. Indeed he had probably insisted upon forty hours so that the last
battle of his life might be quite free from the pressures of time.
The time allotment in the Master’s title matches had always been large. It
was sixteen hours when in 1926 he played Karigané of the Seventh Rank.
Karigané lost because he ran out of time, but a victory by five or six points
for the Master’s White seemed unshakable. Indeed there were those who
said that Karigané should have played like a man, and not allowed
insufficient time to be the excuse for his defeat. When the Master played
Wu of the Fifth Rank, twenty-four hours were allotted each player.
For the Master’s retirement match, the time was about double that for
even these unusually long matches, and four times that for an ordinary
match. Time restrictions could as well have been dispensed with.
