Week 6 - Slowing Down

You know, maybe deciding to start calming down wasn't the best idea when I'm playing in the Silver Room... Oh well, time to start speeding up.

This Week

It was a personal rewards CvC so I finally fused Mikage, and redeemed Cleopterix which I had lying around. Those are gonna help a lot in Sand Devil and Grim Forest, I just need... Oh, right, Mahjong.

I'm up to Adept 3 now. Here are my stats.

I'm surprised my call rate hasn't gone down. I'm definitely calling differently. I'm skipping yakuhai pons and everything. Maybe I've just been offered more keiten calls or something to make up for it? The sample size is still very small so who knows, could just be variance.

I've also been folding more diligently instead of doing mawashi every hand so that probably contributes to my win rate and deal in rate going down. Bad thing in Silver, good thing for later. Just gotta trust the process and that it'll pay off in the long run.

Have you heard the term "low-validity environment"?

Another thing that's bad for now but good later is that I've been going through some sleep treatment. Because of it, something like 1/3 or 1/2 of my days I end up low on sleep, as you start by shrinking your time in bed before raising it later. But, it's supposed to work out long term. I'll end up sleeping better and need to spend less time in bed, allegedly.

Recently I've been wondering how much I should really care about the Maka grades. I both feel that they have little tangible meaning, and that I don't understand how it's calculated.

I was watching the Tenhoui （≧▽≦） stream, and he got an A grade from Maka.

This seems to happen easily when a player decides to fold a hand early. When Maka doesn't agree with this, every decision ends up being marked wrong, getting a D grade for that round and lowering the overall grade. I imagine the same thing happens when you decide to push instead of fold, with Maka repeatedly wanting to fold. So, Maka punishes these play patterns quite heavily.

On the other hand, if you decide to fold, and Maka wants to push, you'll be marked wrong for the first decision. But, now that your hand is broken, Maka will also decide to fold, so you only get marked down once. Sure, you could say folding excessively is perhaps less dangerous than pushing excessively, but it's still basically one judgement with one side getting punished more in terms of grade... Whenever I get an A grade and look at what Maka was mad at it's Maka wanting to fold against an open hand I'm ignoring, giving me like 8 "incorrect" turns in a row, or me deciding to keep a safe tile and Maka wanting to cut it over and over.

But, I'm also not entirely sure how Maka calculates these grades. A player called an open kan from a closed hand, then won two turns later, so I was wondering what went on there. Here's the decisions from that round:

Aside from perhaps the 4p draw, all these decisions are pretty obvious. Except, the kan call is heavily frowned upon by Maka, for good reason. And yet, they received an S+ for this round. Is 90% agreement good enough for S+? I feel S+ should be "you matched Maka every time." Does Maka's grade not include calling decisions? That's pretty wild if so. Calling is pretty individualistic, but there are definitely calls you must and must not do.

Edit: I had a round where my only disagreement with Maka was a call, and was graded S for that round, so I guess calls are counted... Pons at least. And there was another hand where discarding a live yakuhai late was my only disagreement outside of floating tile order, where I got graded A. Very mysterious.

Long story short, I don't know what to think about the Maka grades. It'd be nice if it was like Stockfish, labelling things as inaccuracies/blunders/etc based on how bad and how important the decision was. Both Tenhoui I've watched stream Mahjong Soul put some weight onto Maka's opinions (though sometimes question them or say things like "Maka will get mad at me for this cut"), but I think I won't care much about the grade.

Amusingly this quirk means big firsts are more likely to be graded lowly due to the early folds. Senba's book mentions getting an S rank while coming in fourth could be a form of mental care ("If even Maka says so, then this fourth was unavoidable."), though based on yu_song's videos, coping about the people in first having low grades may also be important for mental care.

Next Week

I've tidied up, clarified, or rearranged my notes a bit.

Most notably is the criteria change at 3-shanten to help me justify calls I've seen called correct, and expanding the "Pinfu if closed" condition to any yaku.

Also since I took these for myself there's some implied stuff behind the words. For example, "Sanmenchan - +2" doesn't mean call two turns later if you have a sanmenchan in your hand, just if you're calling the sanmenchan itself. You can still call other ryanmen or whatever at the usual times. "Changes to bad wait" is not "Leaves a bad wait," you can call a ryanmen and leave a kanchan.

Anyway, next week it's time to start integrating these red and green things. Let's think about how things add up. I'm writing this a bit early because Mahjong Soul is down for maintenance, so I'll take some hands from streams.

• Ryanmen-ryanmen iishanten, turn 6
• Calling 6p confirms tanyao, -2
• Calling 58p is tanyao atozuke, +4
• Calling 7p8s confirms tanyao (-2) but changes to a bad wait (+4)
• This hand is pinfu if it gets there closed, +2
• But the pinfu might not have tanyao? Do we count this?
• Iipeikou is only 1/4 of the time, we don't count that

So, we can call 6p from turn 6 (4 if we don't count +2 from pinfu), 58p from turn 12, and 7p8s from turn 10. My instinct is that ponning 7p is insane. I can tolerate chii on 7p. Ponning 7p leaves us with a 1 tile wait, while chii is at least 3 tiles. That should probably also come with a penalty.

Does 6p at turn 4 sound early? Take it up with the book, I'm actually being moderate here.

Okay, let's look at a scattered hand next.

• Three shanten
• Dealer: No. Han: 1. Good shapes: 45m only.

We can call the bad shapes, but not the souths yet (unless it's double south), and we wait to call 36m until the second row. At this position,（≧▽≦）called chii on the 8m, on turn 6. Now what position are we in?

• Imperfect, turn 6 base
• 2-shanten, -2
• 6 blocks, +2
• I think we can say any call other than souths is atozuke, +4
• Then again we have the souths as safe tiles... I haven't quantified that yet

So, perhaps we wait until turn 10 to call the ryanmen. We can call any other tile, except 3p which will make us headless when we pon the souths.

Though, I also have the feeling that your hand already being open should reduce the threshold. There's no strong reason to pass a call to tenpai when your hand is already open, right? Calling from 2 to 1 shanten while your hand is already open is perhaps more complicated since you're removing defense ability.

That's a lot to work through right now, but hopefully it becomes second nature eventually.

There's also two specific kinds of calls I want to dig deeper into, but that'll be for next week.