Week 4 - Sickness

I've had a sinus infection with a dash of migraines all this week, so there won't be a real update this time. Sorry! I know I said I'd play on bad days, but there's a difference between thinking poorly, and not being able to think. On the bright side, I have all next week off work, so I'll be able to play a lot!

I guess I can talk about how to experience Mahjong while not being able to play. I've been spending some time while sick watching streams. There's a list on the right side of Mahjong.Guide. These are nice, since you can ask the streamer about their decisions. When watching replays, you don't know why the player made the choice they did, so when the stream has commentary, it's especially helpful.

There's also a YouTube series with zeRo, titled "zeRoから始める麻雀生活". He plays in Joukyuu and Tokujou. Maybe watching him would be above my level... It's also in Japanese, if the title didn't tip you off on that. There's a lot of content!

A lot of Mahjong tournament VoDs get posted on YouTube, as well. There's MondoTV, which has the Queen Cup. This is interesting, because they use red threes instead of fives! Look for the videos with run times of around an hour or more for the actual matches. The JPML also has a channel. The MAX tournaments have no kan or ura dora! Watching videos with different rule sets probably isn't the best for improving, but it's interesting.

Of course, you should focus as much as you can while watching streams or videos. Try to think of what discard you would make, and if the player makes a different decision, try to figure out why. Or, if it's a stream, you can just ask them.

The Mahjong discord I'm in is also a good source of WWYD puzzles, with several being posted each day to analyze and discuss from people's games. You can find the link on the Mahjong subreddit. Here's a pretty fun one that came up recently. Do you fold with 6s? There are six live suji between the two riichis. Do you push 2m? Or the more dangerous 4m that gives you more value? Do you riichi? Hmmm.

I also took some time to reorganize the sidebar of the blog. There's a couple articles I frequently reference that I added to their own section. If I find any more, I'll keep adding to it!

On an unrelated note, Nodocchi recently added an interesting new feature. If you click on your game count, it'll show you how often you get each placing when your previous game was of a certain placing. That's a bad explanation. For example, you can see how often you get 4th after getting a 4th. If this is high, you might be susceptible to tilt, but I'm not sure how much you can read into it.

An interesting thing, though, is that I've never had two consecutive seconds in hanchans! I've played 155 hanchans, so that's rather statistically unlikely. Then again, I don't get seconds often in the first place (16.7%), but still...

No seconds after seconds!