Week 4 - Real (?) Games

 I somehow forgot what it was like to play against beginner players. Never make me play bronze room easts again.

This Week

I finished with the WWYD books, for now at least. I also made it into the silver room. Last time I played Mahjong Soul, many years ago, these were my stats upon reaching silver:

I played Souths back then, but nobody was queuing for Souths this time around. So, this time, playing Easts, my stats were like this:

Much more sane. They added more data to this screen so the placement graph and stats don't fit in the same image, but if you want to see that for some reason, here it is:

I ran every game through Maka. Some of the players I went up against scored lower than the easy AIs, somehow. It felt like every round had one or two people forcing flush hands. Often, one of them would get there, and then someone else would deal into them. A very unstable environment. Of course, plenty of cases of people calling with no yaku, too. I basically treated calling players as not tenpai unless they showed something truly scary or my hand was quite bad, something Maka did not approve of.

Anyway, through the Maka reviews, I remembered some old stuff and brought it back. For example, cutting guest winds in counter clockwise order, or cutting dragons based on ura dora chances. Minor things, but easy enough to think about, and they were relevant a few times.

Another gap revealed was tile counting, something I neglected to make an exercise for. For example, look at this hand, where I decided it would be better to shift over to pinfu and/or tanyao:

Yeah, I'm playing Li Yang. Yeah, I'm a bit embarrassed about it.

Just looking at the Maka scores, with that intention in mind, the conclusion could be "going for pinfu wasn't worth it." But, if you look around the table, there's 3 eights and 2 fives visible, so the 67m shape is quite bad now. Would going for pinfu have been good if there were less visible? Is Maka concerned about every player showing the possibility of a characters flush? It's still 44 to 36, so I suppose it's somewhat close even with so many gone.

There have been a few times where I chose the wrong shape because of visible tiles, so it's something I'm being more conscious of now.

Let's look at a few amusing moments from this week.

Hey it's a flush!

During the game, I remember thinking, "That must be scary for the other players."

This time, I am the one with the flush.

I have no idea why Maka doesn't want the kan here. The rinshan tile was the 1s, so, rewarded.

A flush! How rare.

I am glad Maka also plays with hope in its heart.

Next Week

I have another week of vacation. So, I'll aim to read through all of Kawamura's book on calling (麻雀勝ち組の鳴きテクニック), and then use that to refine my calling criteria. Before reading it, it's hard to know what I should work on, so this week is also preparation, figuring out what to aim for in the next three. I have a handful of generalist books I can poke through to look for more stuff on calling too.

At a minimum, I'll look at each call opportunity I had in the replay reviews, and with infinite time, decide if it was good or not based on my current criteria. I got this weekly planner thing with eight slots which I can use to take notes easily for each round. I considered a whiteboard too, but keeping the notes around has a good feeling to it.

This month will likely be largely silver and gold room games, which works out, as good push/pull isn't really necessary until jade room. My plan right now is vaguely Master -> Tokujou -> Saint. Might as well get all the low level stuff out of the way early.