Week 2 - Reservation... Four!

Another week has come and gone. Perhaps too quickly. But, we have a new exercise to show for it!

First, if this is the first post you're seeing here, you should go back to the previous week. Once you feel comfortable with those exercises, come back and read on!

Before we get to the new warm-up, a slight alteration to an old one. For the Efficiency Trainer, there's now an option to set the minimum starting shanten of the hand. You should set this to three, to ensure the training is of adequate length. For added difficulty, you can turn on "simulate opponent's discards". By the way, if you don't know how to calculate shanten and ukeire, I wrote a post about that. The scoring training should also be growing in difficulty -- are you at 15 in a row required yet?

The new warm-up is Mangan Shibari. If you've heard of the ryanhan shibari rule, you probably know where this is going. In Tenhou, open up a fast tonpuusen game with the tsumogiri bots. Every time they discard, do your discard readouts. They discard extremely fast, so this is difficult on its own, but on top of that, you need to score, in order:

1. A 33% chance mangan or better. This would be a hand that requires ippatsu or ura dora (with at least nine unique tiles) in order to hit mangan. It could also be a hand where the takame is mangan and there's an appropriate number of tiles remaining to be at least 33%.
2. A guaranteed mangan or better. All outs give you mangan, with or without ippatsu/ura dora.
3. A guaranteed mangan or better, but without counting aka dora. So if you have an aka dora in your hand, you need an additional han.

You can call, and you can treat it as if kiriage mangan is in effect (so a 7700 non-dealer ron counts as mangan). However, you can't kan. Also note that those need to be cleared in order. If you get a guaranteed mangan for your first hand, that only counts for the 33% chance step.

This exercise is to help you be able to build and see potential value in your hands, as well as get practice building them for those times you absolutely need a mangan. It is quite cruel, though. On bad days this exercise might take quite a while! But, your discard readings should start getting faster.

Speaking of discard readings, I mentioned in the previous post that you should be reading out the name of each tile that's discarded. I also mentioned if that got too easy, to start counting the number of discarded tiles. By now, you should be moving up to counting the number of discarded tiles. This gets very difficult during the mangan shibari practice, so, good luck! I still can't keep up, aha. Once you get it down, you'll easily be able to realize how your hand's efficiency is being affected by the discards, as well as any kabe that are forming.

If you can, you should do the warm-ups every day, even if you can't play that day.

That's it for new exercises. So, let's go onto how I've been doing. This week has actually been exceptionally busy for me, mainly because of my birthday. On Sunday, I did birthday stuff with my family, and then on Monday, I did birthday stuff with my friends (which included real tile mahjong, at least). Then I got a call on Tuesday saying the apartment would be inspected on Wednesday, so I had to clean all night Tuesday. Sheesh. When I had free time, I focused on training my efficiency.

I only managed to find time for eight games this week, and four of them were fourths. Ouch! Well, that'll happen. Let's check out the most recent game to see if we can see what's going wrong: https://tenhou.net/0/?log=2019052306gm-0089-0000-90bcbc90&tw=3

Efficiency error! The 3p is probably the worst thing I could choose to discard here that doesn't reduce my shanten. I should have just cut 8m. That would have given me a 14p wait when I riichi'd, and I would have won immediately or tsumo'd. Gotta drill that efficiency more and more!

Furiten! In this case, I was writing in my notes, "If I draw a red five, do I keep it?" When I looked up and saw the red five, I made the decision without looking at my discards. Oops! I was actually furiten on both red fives if drawn. But, pretending I wasn't furiten, I wonder if keeping it is the best decision?

Here, I discard 4p. It would probably be better to discard 7p, though. Then, the 6p out gets toitoi, and the 5p out is still there to accept the red dora. I'm the last dealer, so I likely want to maximize the value in this way. But, to be honest, I forgot 4446p wasn't a tanki wait! More efficiency drills, more!

Well, hopefully I get to play more Mahjong over the next week. See you then!