Hello hello. Long time no see.
In the time I've been gone, I've done a few things. I've learned Japanese, to a comfortable level at least. I've published a bunch of yuri stories on Wattpad. I've made an extensive guide for Uma Musume, which had a resurgence recently thanks to the global release. I got a pet snake, and geckos. I played a whole lot of Raid: Shadow Legends, unironically. The recent guaranteed summon event gave me the last unit I needed for Mikage, pretty stoked about that.
Anyway, I've been getting back into Mahjong recently. Why, you might ask? Because I saw Northernlion play it, and he was so bad at it that it made me want to get good again out of spite. This happens a lot, where I see him play a game and then have to buy it to play it properly.
I've made a simple resolution for myself. In 2026, I will reach Saint in Mahjong Soul, and Tokujou in Tenhou. As for Celestial and Houou, we'll see.
During my team learning Japanese, I also learned a lot about learning, productivity, scheduling, and so on. Mainly from people on YouTube like Justin Sung, Dr. K, and SpoonFedStudy. I'll apply that here. It's gonna be mostly self-directed study this time.
Reverse Goal Setting
The primary method I'm going to be using I first heard called "Reverse Goal Setting." There are various other names, like "Identity-Based Goal Setting" or "Backward Chaining" that seem to refer to roughly the same thing.
Basically, instead of setting a goal like "I wanna reach Houou," I'll think instead of "Who would have an easy time achieving that goal?" then work backwards from there, considering what I need to do to become more like that person.
The goal is not to reach Houou. The goal is to become someone who can reach Houou. It might sound like the same thing, but the steps towards that goal are different, and hopefully more clear. You're not focusing on where you want to be, you're focusing on the person you will be when you get there.
Now, let's answer the first question: Who would have an easy time reaching Houou? A Houou player would probably have a pretty easy time, though new 7-dans do bob in and out of it. Let's set our sights specifically on Tenhoui.
A Tenhoui would very easily be able to reach Houou. Thus, the goal will be to become more like a Tenhoui.
What makes a Tenhoui a Tenhoui?
Now that we have a target, we need to define that target. I wrote down everything I could think of, watched the Tenhoui 太くないお play to discern what he did during games, then marked everything with how important I think it is in regards to achieving my goal along with how I would rate myself in that skill. Here's that list:
This makes the improvement path clearer. I can easily see what the important skills are, as well as the gaps between myself and them. Probably, other people asked to make the same list would come up with different things, and assign different importances. And of course, they would have different self-assessments, and thus, different things to work on.
The next step is figuring out how to close those gaps. Sometimes it's obvious, sometimes less so. When you don't know, you have to find out. For me, that will be by reading books on the topic, watching Tenhoui streams, or maybe bothering high level players.
The Plan
I'm going to roughly follow a schedule I saw from SpoonFedStudy that goes over a 90 day plan for achieving your goals. He suggests breaking your goal down into three main arcs, and then each arc into four milestones, one week per milestone.
The three arcs, the three most important themes in my opinion, will be Fundamentals, Calling, and Push/Pull. Arc one, month one, will be Fundamentals, of course.
In the above skill list, I marked in green the things I am considering as falling into "Fundamentals." "Basic Defense" probably counts too, but honestly, I think I'm good enough at that. Kabe and one-chance are my main gaps there, and those will be filled in by the tile counting.
If you're following this, you might have different needs. Maybe Defense is your second arc instead of Calling. Maybe your first arc is for learning about productivity and motivation so you can actually stick to the plan in the first place. You really gotta align your plan with yourself.
Now, I won't work on them all at the same time. The arc lasts a month, so they'll be divided into four weeks. This gives plenty of time to balance intake with practice, which is essential for forming habits. If you read all of Riichi Book 1 in one sitting and then went to apply it, that would be much less useful than reading the efficiency section, drilling that in for a few days, then reading the defense section, drilling that in, and so on.
I opted to follow the schedule theory presented by SpoonFedStudy. The hardest stuff, which is often reading books, goes at the start of the day, scheduled from 8AM to 9AM, between exercise and work. That will give my brain some things to chew on throughout the day. The easiest stuff comes after work. The middling stuff comes before bed, where I can seed my mind with it to think about throughout the night.
Fridays, all the Mahjong study is removed, changed out for reflection. Reassessing myself, changing my priorities, and forming the plan for the next week.
This Week's Training
This week was for the most basic of fundamentals and shaking off the rust. Here are the things I wanted to work on, and how.
Awareness
- What's the dora? At the start of each round, before discarding the first tile, acknowledge the dora. Simple enough, but surprisingly hard for me to do consistently every single time.
- Watch the discards. Acknowledge every discard. I don't have to glean any information from them, I just have to be consciously aware of the tile that was discarded. I did this within Tenhou's test play section against tsumogiri bots, keeping the pace fast.
- What is my wait? I wrote down the complex shapes from 80 Shapes and put them on the wall in my bathroom to think about and remind my brain about Mahjong. Some people may have noticed that I updated the Efficiency Trainer recently. I added the option to start with fewer tiles in hand. I used this for flush practice, doing 11 tile hands instead of 14.
Efficiency
- I read through Fukuchi's 80 Basic Shapes. I also read the first section of zeRo's and ゆうせー's books, which are focused on efficiency and hand building. These helped reveal to me the areas in which I was lacking and gave me more things to focus on.
- The biggest area to work on that came from those was my ability to see hand transformations towards value. Particularly, sanshoku. I made a note to, before discarding an isolated tile, check if it was near dora, sanshoku, ittsuu, or tanyao. Another thing from zeRo's book was, "With a yakuhai pair in hand, consider if you can go for honitsu."
- While doing the Awareness training, I build my hand while trying to be conscious of those things, but the Awareness stuff still takes priority. I started by just turning auto-discard on, then when seeing the tiles became easier, started discarding properly to increase the difficulty.
Mindset
- Focus. I installed the StayFocusd extension to remove my biggest distractors, YouTube and Discord servers, during the hours when I'm supposed to be being productive. I have enough self-control that that's sufficient. I added in meditation, and use Brain.fm for focus-enhancing music. I'm sure any type of meditation will work fine. If you tried meditation in the past and didn't like it, try a different one. Hindu trataka meditation, Buddhist anāpānasati, Daoist visualizations, simple breath focus, walking meditation, whatever vibes with you.
As a side note, if you block Discord on StayFocusd, then whitelist discord.com/channels/@me, you can still see your DMs while having servers blocked. This works well for me, who only talks to two or three people in private, but for people who like group chats you'll probably be better off blocking it all.
This Week's Results
Awareness
- At first, watching the discards was very taxing, but by the end of the week, it had become boring. Which is good. Boring means my cognitive load is low, which means I'm ready to take on more. When I'm watching people play Mahjong, my eyes are automatically going to the discarded tile even if I'm reading chat or something. Sometimes I do get invested in my hand development and miss a round or three of discards, so let's say I've gone from 4/10 to 8/10.
- I did 50 reps in the efficiency trainer in each suit for 11 tile honitsu hands. 50 pinzu, then 50 souzu, then 50 manzu. I still struggle a bit when it's iishanten, but when it's tenpai, I can see the correct tile immediately in most cases now. I also often make the choice that results in a ryanmen final wait at the cost of some immediate ukeire, which I'll personally count as correct, but my overall efficiency stat was still around 95%. Let's up that score from 7/10 to 8/10. One thing I've noticed is that, if a hand starts with 123, I often don't consider cutting the 1, which led to me getting the wrong answer at least a few times.
Efficiency
- This wasn't the main focus for the week, but I did improve in my value awareness. Particularly when it comes to seeing honitsu. With my focus on the tiles being discarded, I spent less time looking at my hand, so when I did draw a useful tile I had to quickly get my bearings which led to some mistakes that I realized immediately. Let's upgrade hand transformations to 6/10 for now.
Mindset
- This is hard to judge accurately. However, blocking YouTube and Discord servers did help, and I was able to do my trainings in each block each day.
This week also involved all the scheduling and such needed for the future weeks.
Next Week
Awareness
- Upgrade awareness to include tedashi. I'll have to switch over to the Mahjong Soul bots for this one. They actually build hands and will keep the pace high.
- Upgrade wait training to 14 tiles. Weirder shapes, more to unpack. Chinitsu doesn't come up often in games at all, but being able to do this will make the lesser honitsus easier.
- Hand visualization training. As mentioned before, watching the discards means I'm not looking at my hand. So, this training will be to let me keep my hand in my head. I'll look at a hand for some amount of time, then hide it and write down how I remember it. When I was watching 太くないお, someone in chat asked him about a discard choice. He streams with a 5 minute delay, but still remembered the hand being asked about. I couldn't do that at all. If this becomes easy, I'll make it harder by having the hand unsorted. Hopefully this makes it easier to watch the discards (because I won't have to look at my hand) and smooths out my efficiency (because I can think about it while watching the discards).
Efficiency
- Read WWYD301 during the morning block and see if it reveals any more weaknesses
- I think playing sanma against the bots might also help. The waits tend to be more complex with one suit removed.
Let's see how far I make it this time.
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