If you follow me on twitter, you probably don't notice that you follow me on twitter most of the time, as just like with the blog, I tend to go through small spurts of tweet activity -generally centred around cricket games- followed by long periods of lying fallow. But if you have noticed me on twitter lately, it's probably because I kept popping up on your timeline as I tweeted my journey through the UK Riichi Mahjong Championship throughout last weekend. There were 52 players in the open tournament, and I ended up coming 47th overall with a distinctly negative score, so it was a bit of a come-down from my fourth place at a tournament earlier in the year, but I didn't go in expecting to win or anything.
Unfortunately, the photos that I took over the weekend were mostly pretty lousy, as I limited myself to the occasional shot between games as taking in-progress shots feels intrusive at the best of times and taking the time to compose a photo when you're on a short time limit is just plain rude to the other players on your table. I probably would have made more of an effort to take some better photos and make a more complete record if I'd remembered that Blaugust was just around the corner, but to be honest I was just focused on trying to play some good mahjong.
Sometimes it's hard to know how well you're playing mahjong. It's a game of chance and chance manipulation, so sometimes you just have off days because you're unfortunate or just because you're in the way when someone else is having an absolutely barn-burner. It's also hard to know how you're doing relative to everyone else. Are you just having a good or a bad day? Are you getting better than you were last tournament? I haven't really worked out how to measure most of these things, so instead I set myself a couple of goals for the tournament and thought that it would be nice to revisit them as a sort of retrospective and review of my tournament as a whole.
Psyching myself up for #UKRC tomorrow. My aims:1) Only risk if the reward is worth it (I'm looking at you, riichi tanyao)2) Play at my own pace, not the table's3) Play for position, not for hands4) Have a good time out there5) Be the friendliest person at the tournament pic.twitter.com/OI6B92UXwx— Thom 'Ted' Diment (@NombreHombre) July 26, 2019
1) Only risk if the reward is worth it
Very pleased with how well I managed to do this. I was forced to play a careful, defensive game a lot of the time as I was just drawing pretty poor tiles quite a lot, but that's when it's easy to play defence. The trickier thing is knowing when and how to fold on a half-decent hand to avoid giving away all your points, and there was a number of times over the course of the tournament when people won with tiles that I had been deliberately holding, which is always a vindicating feeling.
2) Play at my own pace, not the table's
I manage to do this most of the time. I was conscious that I was playing a little slow on the first couple of tables, mostly due to not playing with physical tiles much lately and just being a bit clumsy mechanically, but I definitely warmed up, and once I did I mostly didn't let myself get pressured into any silly play by intimidating players or by tricky situations on the table. One notable exception was giving myself a dead hand by forgetting to draw my last tile during my final table, so I'm still not immune to the pressure entirely!
3) Play for position, not for hands
In tournament mahjong, you carry over the points that you earn -or lose- in each game, but you also get a bonus -or penalty- based on your position on the table. Coming first is worth a bonus 15,000 points, and in a game where the difference between positions is regularly a couple of thousand, that it no small amount of points. I was very aware of how many points everyone had this tournament, and played carefully to do my best to hedge my bets and hold onto my positions where I could, but unfortunately I was mostly trying to defend third place from turning into fourth rather that pushing for one of the top spots on my tables. I also failed more than I succeeded, but it's hard to know if that was due to my poor play or not. There were certainly moments where I could have changed outcomes if I'd played differently, but not that many where I actually made mis-steps.
4) Have a good time out there
Yep! I'm not convinced that other people that were there would be convinced, as I can be a bit glassy-eyed in the mornings at the best of times and I slept incredibly poorly in the warm weather in the unfamiliar surroundings of my airbnb, but I love playing the game and being around people that love the game. Enthusiastic and sightly awkward nerds have always been my people and the UK riichi scene has them in spades plus a smattering of more elderly affable gentlemen and less of a gender bias than most other games, so it's always a good atmosphere. Being behind the eight-ball on score from the beginning probably helped too, as I knew that I didn't have a realistic chance to do well so I could relax and enjoy the moment.
5) Be the friendliest person at the tournament
Oh hell no. I don't know why I even made this a goal. I'm friendly enough in small doses, I suppose, but I'm not remotely outgoing enough even at the best of times to qualify for this one! Throw in a few early mornings and some pretty poor results and this definitely wasn't a label that I could aspire to give myself. That said, I don't think anyone went away wishing that they didn't have to play with me, or that I gave anyone any course to complain -apart from one pretty egregious ettiquette breach!-, so I think the spirit of this one has been complied with, even if the letter doesn't leave a lot of wriggle room.
6) Avoid drinking too much tea!
I still drank too much tea, but at least this time I didn't have to leave a table part-way through to relieve my bladder. I'm going to try to remember to take a thermos cup next time so that I can keep my drink warm for longer, and hopefully that'll stop me from gulping it all down too quickly and then wriggling constantly towards the second half of each match.
Though I didn't meet my unspoken but very real expectations for the tournament in terms of score, and came out the other side with a feeling of shellshock more than anything else, I still had a blast playing a game that I love with a whole heap of other people. Many of them continue to astonish me with their skills and who make just sit back slack-jawed, completely gobsmacked at the depth of play. I still have an awful lot to learn and I'm keen to keep going to tournaments just as long as I can. Maybe this coming year I'll even have a chance to travel around Europe playing a little.
If you want to find out a little more about mahjong or find out what's going on with the game, our friends over at Riichi Mahjong Central in the US are running a 24-hour streaming event today celebrating National Majong Day. I have my own opinions about the legitimacy and usefulness of National Days for anything, but that's a post for another day, for now, just enjoy the stream.
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