Gomoku is actually a finite two-person game of perfect information. Moreover, if we consider draw as victory of White, then by Zermelo's theorem, exactly one of the two has a winning strategy, either Black or White. In other words, either Black is destined to win, if he does not make any error, or White can at least make a draw.
So my question is which one? the Black or the White?
I have asked a similar question for Go, however, the terminal answer for board 19$\times$19 is still unknown despite of Black having more or less some advantages.
However, for Gomoku there is another story. A programmer asserted that Black has a winning strategy in Gomoku(freestyle). Moreover, (s)he announced (s)he had found this winning strategy and written a program named Gomoku Terminator which "completely terminated the gomoku game". Furthermore, (s)he claimed that the one who first beat the program can earn a bonus $¥920000$ (about $€92000$). But no one has taken this bonus since 2006. So there seems to be sufficient reasons to believe (s)he is right. But I still have a doubt: Do PCs nowadays have enough capability to calculate the whole game tree? Note that the game-tree complexity of Gomoku is PSPACE-complete.
So another question arose: Does Gomoku Terminator(v1.22) really have the winning algorithm for Black?