Green Green Grass and the Return of Dora Galora

This post should have been published sooner but I haven't really had time to write it until now. This was mainly due to the amount of lectures, Mahjong and Street Fighter IV these last few days. There have been some amazing games of Mahjong though, and the two games that I'm going to be writing about in this post are no exception.

The first game was played on Wednesday evening. It started it off quite normally with KC winning a couple of rounds with some small Reach hands. Although KC had won the first two rounds, they were only for a few thousand points so everything was still fairly even. However, things went a bit crazy after the East Third round. I got quite lucky and won a round with a Baiman Tsumo consisting of: All Sets, Three Closed Sets and Four Dora. After this I thought that perhaps the momentum of the game was now with me. But, although I managed to keep my dealership going for three rounds, I didn't really make much of a gain in points. And then suddenly, from nowhere, Scud started making a massive comeback in South First round. He managed to get a couple of Mangans and clawed his way into the lead by over 5,000 points. By this point he had also managed to get three dealer repeat chips. That's when everything got a bit mental.

After breaking the wall and drawing our starting tiles, I found myself staring at nine Sou tiles and four honour tiles. My plan was to go for the Half-Flush and maybe attempt a Full-Flush if the opportunity arose. I had some good fortune and kept drawing tiles that I needed, but it looked like that my good starting hand might not amount to anything due to the constant Pons from everyone else. However, it got towards the end of the round and no one had managed to win yet. By that point I realised that there was a possibility of an All Green limit hand. I already had two 8-Sou at the start, and managed to amass two 2-Sou, three 3-Sou, three 6-Sou and two 4-Sou. KC played a 4-Sou and I decided to Pon it. I was now one tile away and waiting for a 2-Sou or an 8-Sou to win. I was having an nervous breakdown inside, hoping to hell that the last tile would come out. And it did! It was KC who played the 8-Sou, allowing me to Ron him for an All Green limit hand. Not only that, it was All Sets and a Full-Flush with Three Dora; bringing the total to twenty-three Han! Needless to say, I bankrupted Kevin and won the game.

The next day we had another game of Mahjong. Everyone thought that perhaps my luck had been totally spent after getting that All Green limit hand but how wrong they were. I started winning a few of the first rounds but had my lead wiped out by a few drawn games and a Tsumo. Then lionintown pulled off a Mangan Tsumo and went into the lead. I was in second place, Scud in third, and Taurinensis in last, and this was how it remained until South Fourth round. I was over 6,000 points behind lionintown so I knew that I'd have to go for a pretty big hand in order to win.

My hand consisted of quite a few Manzi tiles plus a couple of South Wind tiles. I also had three 7-Manzi tiles that I later turned into a Kan. Taurinensis later made a Kan of White Dragon tiles, bringing the Dora total to three. Luck was still on my side and I kept drawing Doras. I managed to manoeuvre myself into Tenpai near the end of the round and was waiting on a 5-Sou (one of the Doras) to complete the hand. It got down to the last four tiles and I really didn't think I would get that last 5-Sou. But when I took my last draw, there it was in my hand! I'd won the game on the last round with a Sanbaiman Tsumo consisting of: All Sets, Seat Wind and Table Wind plus five Dora. Now that was a good day!

Mahjong Veterans vs. The Terrifying (and inexperienced) Tag Team Trio

First of all, forgive the silly title. Although to be fair Tau's titles are far sillier.

Tonight we had yet another thrilling game of M-M-M-Mahjong! And yet again Hocchan came out the undisputed victor, whereas Scud, the undisputed ass-licker. We began the night by explaining the rules of Mahjong and training one of our dear friends, whom I shall call Mr. X for the time being. Mr. X had for quite a while wanted to learn how to play this incredible game of skill and endurance and tonight he finally got the opportunity to learn. After a short training session we began the game. At first it was myself against Tau, Hocchan and Scud but after a while, realising that both Gibdo and Mr. X wanted to play too, we decided to tag team. That is, switch out every couple of rounds or so.

As always, luck, or possibly skill, was on that Hocchan no yarou's side. If I am not mistaken he began with a cheap win but started to rack up the points soon thereafter. As for myself, I didn't get any big hands. I only went after the cheap, BARELY LEGAL hands. To be completely honest I stopped playing after a few rounds and left it all up to Gibdo and Mr. X. I was busy playing Street Fighter 4 in the room next door. From what I heard Mr. X managed to get a pretty decent Tsumo, which of course is FANTASTIC. I don't think Scud even won a round. In the end it was Hocchan at the top, Tau second, tag-team trio third, and unsurprisingly Scud yet again placed a pathetic, morale crushing, depression provoking, pitiful, dismal, deplorable, beggarly, worthless and miserable FUCKING last. For a Mahjong veteran he's pretty fucking shit.

Now we only need one more player to get 2 games of Mahjong going at the same time. We've already probably got one too so its all good. After Mahjong we had much fun playing street fighter next door. For a gaming god Tau sure does suck at Street Fighter.

P.S. - Scud.... I'm sorry. Please don't beat me.

A challenger approaches! Missing Tile Madness and Last Place Blues

So I've finally been dragged kicking and screaming from my vidya game to come and update, so here we go!

You may notice we have a new author on the list, lionintown, well he's the new guy and despite being new to Mahjong has already managed to wipe the floor with us on one occasion already. The first hand he ever played he managed to rack up a Haneman and from there went on to win the match.
However, despite the ability to play quite well from the word go, there seems to be issues with numbers of tiles. We've noticed on about 3 or 4 occasions now that his hand is down a tile, and this mistake even cost us a hefty amount of points as we decided to let him draw and continue, but he ended up drawing his winning tile. It's a problem that will probably rectify itself pretty quickly at least.

On the flip side, myself and Scudd have been having some winning issues as of late. In the 2 games we had on friday I ended up coming last both times and Scudd seems to have issues with completing a hand at all, going almost entire matches without finishing a single round.

I'd post the running scores we have but I can't remember them entirely off the top of my head so I'll leave that for the next person, the only really important thing to mention is that Hocchan has been cleaning house of late. Hopefully one of us will put and end to that soon

Mwahuhuhuhuh! Watashi no Chikara Misete Yarou!

Stop playing Street Fighter IV and update the damn blog!

I love the smell of rage in the morning

The title of this post is a bit misleading, as I fucking hate it. Our recent game of mahjong caused me to develop a passionate hate for the game and anyone associated with it. For the majority of the game I was cursed with hilariously bad luck, scoring one mangan (lost soon after) and maybe one tanyao, I don't remember because it was so shitty. Despite having decent hands, the tiles I needed to complete the hand would never come out. After Hocchan taking the lead by ronning me with a dealer haneman, Tau proceeded to be a faggot and make shitty hands to secure a second-place "victory" while me and KC slowly leaked points and burst a few blood vessels. The first game finished around South 2nd, with me going bankrupt.

At this point, it's about 2am and I foolishly demanded a second game to try and redeem myself, which (unsurprisingly) failed. From what I recall, the 2nd game was largely uneventful, with Hocchan coming in last place this time and amazingly, KC picking up his second win. Once again, Tau comes second.

tl;dr Shit sucks.

Current scores

Tau: 6
Scud: 5
Hocchan: 7
Gibdo: 1
KC: 2

KC's Got All Crabs!

Since that lazy fool, Scud, hasn't managed to write an update yet (even though he said he would) it looks like I'll have to do it. And here was me thinking that I could take a back seat for this blog. Oh well...

We had another late-night Mahjong game at the library again last night. But, due to a combination of reasons, it turned out to be one of the most 'ghetto' games of Mahjong we've ever had. First of all, KC turned up an hour late for the game. Then we found out that Scud had forgotten to bring his points chips, and that I'd not remembered to pack mine. In the end we had to use a pen and paper to do the scoring, and one of the spare dice to keep track of dealer repeat rounds. This was on top of all the added stress I had about finances, Taurinensis's concerns about the Hanover trip, Scud's mislaid sauce packet for his Pot-Super-Noodle-in-a-Pot thing, and KC's obsession with his beloved Facebook.

Despite all the set-backs, we managed to get a half-decent game going eventually. I clawed my way up into first place with a reach, half-flush, two-Dora hand around the end of the East round. However, a short while later I managed to totally screw myself over. Big time! It was getting to the end of South third (I think), and no one had managed to make a winning hand. It got to the last tile and KC revealed his hand to show us an almost completed Kokushi Musou. All he needed was a Green Dragon tile to complete it. He drew the last tile from the wall which turned out to be a North Wind. Overjoyed, I immediately called Pon on the North Wind to put myself into Tenpai on the last draw of the game. Then I had a moment of pure insanity and decided to discard the Green Dragon tile that was in my hand, instead of the perfectly safe East Wind tile.

As a result, not only did I lose 16,000 for KC's Yakuman, I also lost another 4,000 for Taurinensis's Mangan. Had we been playing by the Japanese scoring system instead of the stupid German tournament system, I'd have been bankrupted by that stupid mistake. It didn't matter that much in the end since I ended up in last place. I don't think I'll ever live it down though. What kind of moron plays into an OPEN Kokushi Musou that's in Tenpai?!

Friday Mahjong Madness! Dora Galora and The Curse of the Dealer Repeat

Every friday all the Mahjong guys get together for.....a game of Mahjong (obviously). Anyway, we're keeping a track of our total wins for the year and so far they look like this

Tau: 5
Scud: 5
Hocchan 5
Gibdo: 1
Kc: 1

Firstly it was this Friday that saw the very first win for Kc, so congratulations to him for that. Noone was playing particularly badly that game, but the luck for him was absolutely immense. In the final round, through a number of Kan's he managed to amass something along the lines of 7 Dora or so, it could have been more, I think I passed out from shock.

The second game played that nothing of real significance happened. I managed to get myself up to enough dealer repeats for a 2 Han minium, but got a bit giddy and ended up fouling like a moron. Still despite the foul I managed to win although it was kinda close right up until the end between me and Hocchan

Hopefully a game will take place on Sunday, we need as much practice as we can get for Hanover

Pon! Chi! It's All in the Mind

It's probably not a good idea for me to start writing for another blog (especially since I've been neglecting my own) but at least on here I won't be under pressure to do 100% of the updating. I can write a few post every now and again and leave the rest up to my fellow authors. I don't mind taking care of the layout design since it doesn't take much time and it's something I enjoy. The current design didn't take me too long to complete. All I had to do was tweak the settings a bit and crop the header image to fit the space. I'm pretty pleased with the end result.

Regarding the trip to Hanover in May, I'm really looking forward to it. I'm not entirely confident that we'll be able to compete effectively in the tournament but it'll be a nice trip abroad in any case. I haven't really been to Europe before so it'll be a nice opportunity to do a little bit of sight-seeing. There are still a few months until the tournament so, who knows, we may improve enough by then to win the thing. Better get practising!

It begins!

A nice short, sharp first post is in order to get this ball rolling!

We're basically 5 dudes who all enjoy playing a good game of Mahjong and this blog acts as a space for Mahjong and the discussion thereof.

3 of us should be attending the German Riichi Open in Hannover but more on that later as we've yet to pay the 15 euro entry fee

Anyways I've already run dry on stuff to write in this post so I'll call it there.