Week 11 - Breathing Room

I still have a lot of room to grow. I can see the path forward, but I've barely begun taking steps towards it. What roadblock will await me next?

First, some other news. If you didn't see it, Riichi Reported posted an article about this blog. You can find it here. If you've been following along, it won't have much new information for you, but at least you can learn what my favourite tile is!

This week I've been doing a lot of solo practice trying to improve my hand building. Hand building, hand building, hand building... I hear about it a lot, but there's never anything concrete. "These players don't know how to build a hand." "So how do you build a hand?" "Uh... Hard to explain."

I complained to Dasuke about it and he said that, in Tenhou games, you want to aim for riichi + 1 han, or an open hand with 3 han. More is good too, of course. And pinfu only counts as half a han. He then suggested doing some almost visualization stuff.

"What is the fastest way to get this hand to tenpai? If I go that way, will this hand have at least one of something, or have the chance of getting one of something in the predicted blocks?"

If yes, then go for it.

If no, "Instead of taking the fastest route, I need to take the fastest route to a yaku. With my current blocks, what gives me the best chance of doing that?"

I asked if you would dama if you had a tenpai hand, but with blocks that could slide to accept dora or red fives (for example, a riichi nomi hand with a 567s shape where 8s is dora). Dasuke said yes, you would wait, but ideally you would get your +1 before tenpai.

I also remember Corak (7d) saying, "One of the first checks I make on a hand is, how do I add sanshoku/iitsuu/iipeikou? Most of the time of course it's... uh, draw a bunch of stuff that won't happen. But, doing it over and over keeps it in your mind for when they do come." In a similar vein to both of these, shinkiii (6d) mentioned thinking about what the maximum his opening hands could be worth.

With all of these in mind, I've been trying it out. Looking at my starting hands, thinking about how to get a +1, or to three han to open, and refusing anything else. My hands do feel like they're getting better, but it could be variance with the small number of actual games I've played with the strategy. Still, it's revealed a lot more that I can work on.

Rather than do a short snippet of a replay review, I'm going to do an in-depth review, where I think about each discard. I posted it in its own separate article, which you can find here.

As a small bonus, I was watching Sajam talking about learning a new game. He's talking about fighting games, but the concept applies to mahjong, too. I found it inspiring. This part, in particular. He even suggests keeping a notebook handy, as Dasuke suggested!

One last thing. I think posting weekly is kind of suffocating me. The pressures of having to prepare a blog post each week are dampening my desire to actually play, and I feel like I don't have time to do fun things with Mahjong. So, I'm going to change my diary entries to be monthly instead. Let's say... The first Thursday of each month. So, September 5th will be the next update.

I received the Houou replays from ApplySci, so I'll also be doing some analysis on those. To fill the gap between blog updates, I'll try to post an analysis each Thursday that I don't post an update. They'll start simple, but get deeper as time goes on and I write more code for analyzing them. Look forward to those!