Week 6 - Despair

I'd planned to play a lot of mahjong, but I ended up not playing too much. I could make some excuses, but the truth is, it just started really getting to me.

I started getting pretty careless. I wasn't playing mahjong because I wanted to over the past week. I was playing mahjong because I felt like I had to, and feelings of "this is getting in the way of time I could spend playing with shory" clouded my decision-making. Then, when I lost, I got pretty sad. I could blame those feelings on a bunch of stuff -- lack of sleep, monthly cycles, expectations, etc -- but whatever the cause, it doesn't change that I felt them.

So, what can I do to get past those feelings? If I'm rendered useless by a 4th, I'll never be a very good mahjong player, right? Well, option one is to just run away. Stop playing mahjong, join shory in his hiatus, live a comfy life free of this adversity.

Option two would be to somehow change my mindset to one that doesn't care if I get fourth. That's pretty idealistic, though. How would I even do that? And if I did it, wouldn't it be hard to want to improve, if fourths didn't feel bad?

Option three is to simply get better. A lot of my bad feelings about my losses come from knowing better. "I shouldn't have done that, I know that," and such. If I could get to a point where I was consistently happy with my decisions, if not the outcome, the fourths wouldn't feel so bad. Dasuke gave me a long motivational speech when I rambled this stuff at him, about finding enjoyment in your improvements rather than the results and that sort of stuff.

But, well, I do feel like I need to make a change. Build a safer place to develop my skills, where I won't care as much about losses. If my rank is causing me distress, I'll just remove my rank. To that end, I made a new Tenhou account, and bought premium so I could play in Joukyuu. I wanted the name 琥珀, which means "amber," but Tenhou wouldn't let me use anything involving those characters, so I went for 神漿, which means "ambrosia," which Amber is short for.

With this new account, fourths no longer affect my rank. That takes away a large part of the negativity associated with them. Of course, they still feel bad, but the bad feelings don't linger as much. The fourths don't have a lasting effect, so I can just move past them and onto the next game much easier. Regardless, here's my stats for now, as if they mean anything with seven games played:

Deal-in rate is high, but it's probably variance.

I'm reviewing each game I play, and looking for mistakes to fix. In the past, I haven't looked at my mistakes closely enough. If you go to a previous blog post, you'll see that I point out my mistakes and say the correct play, but not much more. I need to be thinking about my thought process that lead to that mistake, and then think of ways to not make that mistake the next time.

To that end, lets review my latest game and find some things to examine. Here's the link: https://tenhou.net/0/?log=2019062108gm-0089-0000-e197ec5a&tw=2

Chase?

Kamicha tsumogiri riichi'd, as is his wont, and we got to tenpai. Do we chase? I did it in the game, but was it a good idea? We have Riichi, Aka, Pinfu, as dealer. That's a 5800 ron or a 7800 tsumo. That's enough value to chase against a non-dealer, so the chase was a good decision! Yay.

Something else you can see in that hand is I cut the haku pair from my hand so I could get pinfu. I don't think the past me would have done that. She liked calling too much. I think it was good to do, and will consider it a mark of improvement.

This isn't really a mistake as much as it is an interesting WWYD puzzle. I (9k) cut 6s, as you can see. shory (7d) also answered 6s. Ozball (1k) wanted to cut 45p. TheElkaz (2d) wanted to cut 3s, or 2s to keep calling opportunities. zech (4d) deliberated for a while and decided on 3s. shinkiii (5d) wanted to pon 3m last turn, said that 3s was the best discard, and said they would cut 2s. I wouldn't trust shinkiii. There's lots to consider here. Come to your own conclusion! Maybe we can try a strawpoll?

Here's that dang ol' X X X (X+1) shape that gets me so often. A riichi on the 8s would have given a 23m wait, which is also a suji trap. My reasoning for cutting 2m was that I only saw it as a 3m wait, which is 4 tiles compared to the 6 tiles of the nobetan. I'm not sure how to evaluate the worth of suji traps in situations like these, but regardless, how do I see this shape for what it is? Fukuchi's 80 basic shapes book has a bunch of things like that. Maybe I could make flash cards and just drill them into my head.

This discard put me back in shanten. My thought process was, "I have three pairs. I should cut the weakest pair, which is 88p since all the 8p are out." But, I neglected to count my blocks. That's a tricky one to fix. It's mostly just a paying attention thing, so maybe it will resolve itself? Perhaps playing with unsorted or blind hands would help me keep my blocks in mind.

This is a kind of silly one. I was so far ahead in South 4 that I decided, "Wait, don't I want to just deal into kamicha?" So, I started chucking live tiles in the hopes he would ron one and end the game before shimocha could win more. It didn't work, but I've been told this was fine to do, at least for a few turns.

Well, tomorrow I'll work on putting together that shapes Anki deck to practice on. I'll try to make it nice enough to share out. Maybe you'll see it next week!