I'm up early this morning, nursing a cup of tea in the lounge of an airbnb while the house wakes up around me. We're here in Surrey braving unfamiliar beds and hot weather to play in the UK Open Riichi Mahjong Championship.This is a pretty big deal for me, not because I expect that any of us have any chance in the tournament (we really don't!), but because it represents two major milestones.
The first is that this is the first time that I've ever travelled to play a game. It's not like the trip from Oxford to Godalming is all that far, but it's a step. I can now join my friends that go away to the riverland every year to play board games or to Melbourne to play anime fighting games. It feels like a level of commitment to a game, to be willing to spend money to travel and to stay just to lock myself in a silent room with a bunch of serious people to play a game of chance. Am I...becoming a mahjong player, not just a person that plays mahjong?
(I'd hoped to have a post up explaining riichi, for those of you that aren't familiar with it, but that hasn't happened yet, so please be patient with me. Hopefully that will happen later this week.)
The second (and more important) milestone, is that I've managed to convince four of my friends to travel with me and three of them to compete in a big scary tournament for a game that I love. In many ways it's the culmination of a long ambition to teach riichi here, a game that I was unable to play for years due to not knowing anyone else that plays. Over the last year it has become a staple of our college games night, greatly to the detriment of the diversity of games played, but excellent in establishing a dedicated group of reasonable players. These days when I sit down to play, I'm no longer teaching the game, I get to sit back and analyse my own play and actually get better, and losing is made that much more bearable by the sense of pride that I get by being outsmarted by people that I taught to play the game.
It doesn't really matter how we do in the tournament this weekend, as we're all still relatively amateur players none of us have high expectations and there's no real stakes for us when compared to the people trying to earn national ranking points to qualify for international tournaments, but I have a couple of goals.
1) To get a net positive score for the tournament.
2) Get one of the top ten match scores of the tournament.
3) Not to end up on the chombo list.
4) For everyone to be willing to play mahjong again afterwards!
I was thinking that the goals would be a little more group-focused than that, but I suppose that mahjong is an individuals game after all, so I guess I'll just leave the others to do their own thing rather than setting goals for them. We'll have plenty of time to theorycraft and discuss our tournament highs and lows throughout the day after all. You can follow along on our progress on the website here today and tomorrow if you'd like to. The Brasenose Union of Riichi Mahjong Addicts (BURMA) are: Thomas Diment, Angus Fisk, Thomas Yems, and Eric Haney (clockwise from me). Up the college!
2 comments:
You need to get your EMA account set up as an Australian. Good luck :)
Unfortunately, Australia is not a member of the European Mahjong Association, so there's not much point. At least this way the UK can use any ranking points that I happen to earn for their own nefarious purposes.
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