Week 8 - Deflowered

I'm back to playing on my Erzzy account now. My play on Shinshou showed me that I could reach tokujou with my current skill, so I decided I might as well skip to 3dan, right?

When I first switched over, I had a long stream of thirds. Like, 8 thirds in ten games. I whined a bit in the discord and Rosti (6d) suggested I stop going for value and just play for efficiency. Win before my opponents. So, I've been doing that, and have been having much better luck since. In fact, I haven't even had a fourth this month! And I'm back to 600/1200!

Four games ago, I was at 3 firsts and 4 thirds for the month, so I was going to title this blog post "The Odd Girl" or something. But, I got four seconds in a row. Previously, I've never had two consecutive seconds in Joukyuu on this account, so now I'm really padding that second-after-a-second stat.

Since I've been trying to follow that "efficiency over value" rule, let's look at a few instances where I didn't do that in a recent game. Here's the link: https://tenhou.net/0/?log=2019070505gm-0089-0000-75896eea&tw=0

Here, I cut the 2s. I wanted to keep the possibility for junchan open. But, it's so extremely far away. Instead, I should just cut the 1p or 1s. Of the blocks in the hand, 224s is the weakest, so we should keep the 2s around to reinforce it. Cutting 4s may also be a possibility, but it removes some upgrade potential.

Here, I decided to lock in the 8s as my pair to keep the 0s ryanmen with dora acceptance. This kind of feels like a sakigiri thing, and it's way too early for that. 1p is the clear cut this early in the hand. The souzu is sort of close to iitsu, but it's really hard to get to it sensibly, so I probably shouldn't think about that. If I drew 6m after cutting 1p, I could also consider cutting the two 8s, but riichi is almost certainly better.

I'm... not really sure why I cut this red dragon. Maybe I was scared of the dealer honitsu to my right, or the nondealer chinitsu haneman across. Is that fair? Neither of them have discarded a tile from their suit yet. The efficient play would be to cut 4p or 5p (likely 4p to accept the 0p). Hmm. Perhaps I've been too cowardly recently.

Kind of a short update this week. Next week might also be short. There's a lot of games coming out or that have come out recently that I want to try, so I might cut back a little on mahjong. Know thyself and all that.