Week 12 - Improving Mental (With a Guest!)

Going to ippan for mental training ended up working unexpectedly well, in the sense that I had to bear an extremely high amount of it. Let's briefly talk about that, then bring in a guest to talk about an entirely different flavour of tilt.

Ippan has stronger players than I expected. For the most part, it feels very similar to Gold on Mahjong Soul. People do bad damas and disconnect a lot, but I think people fold more in Ippan than in Gold. But also, most of the players I ran into were like 1~3dan players. Perhaps due to the hours I play at.

I ended up hitting a patch of prolonged bad variance, going 13 games in a row without a first place. When you're running bad, certain kinds of tilt really stack up, including my injustice tilt. Feelings of unfairness rise up even more intensely, even from minor things. Someone hits ura 2 and gets a haneman/baiman on your dealer turn. You're in riichi, someone chases, and you deal into a kanchan on the ippatsu turn. You're tenpai with a comeback hand in South 4, and fourth wins 1000 points to stay in fourth.

On their own, each of these things is bearable and I can just shrug them off. But in a streak of games, where each one of those has happened several times, I'm not just upset at the unfairness in that one moment, I'm upset at the unfairness in the past ten games. Bad streaks like this will happen again and again, so I need to develop a resistance to it. Top players often have 20~30 games as their longest streaks without a first.

It probably feels worse hitting this variance early into an account, as it makes the stat screen look really bad, and I am overly concerned with my stat screen. 13 games in a row without a first with only 43 total games means my first rate looks atrocious:

Please... Let me win one...

At least NAGA is saying I played well! My score is high! The deal-ins were justified! ... is another dangerous thing. AI reviews end up being a double-edged sword for people with injustice tilt. It confirms you're playing well, that the variance is just variancing, but it also gives you "evidence" to fuel the injustice tilt. You don't just feel you're playing well without being rewarded, you now know it. It's a tricky thing. I can go back through all my games with NAGA, look at every deal in, and be like, "See? I was supposed to cut that tile!" and then that makes me feel even more annoyed at the variance putting me in those situations repeatedly.

With more weaknesses revealed, I need to come up with some new statements to inject logic into my brain. When I go to the NAGA review and check my score, if it's good, I need to say, "Good, I'm still playing well. Let's not fall into tilt and keep it up." If it's bad, I need to say, "I'm not a perfect player. I'll make mistakes sometimes. Let's note these down and work on fixing them." If I start with a yakuhai pair, I need to say, "They might be deep in the wall. I shouldn't expect to call these every time." When I start getting upset by perceived injustice, I need to say, "I can't control variance, but I can control my decisions. Focus on playing well."

But, injustice tilt is just my thing. It's not everyone's. At the same time, mistake tilt and fear rarely creeps into my game. So, let's look at someone who's entirely different from me, their tilt focused inward instead of towards the game itself. They've written their own guest blog post for this week:

________________________________________________________

I’m shory, and I’m a pretty good mahjong player. Before I stopped playing around two years ago, I topped out at 8-dan in Tenhou, which - at least at the time - was among the highest ranks for non-Japanese people (and, I guess, Japanese people) online. I stopped playing at the time because I felt like the game was not very fun anymore, and because I had played a ton of mahjong both in real life and online over a relatively short timespan, and was feeling burnt out. A few months ago, I decided to set up a new account and play some more, having regained a lot of the joy I initially felt from mahjong on my slow climb back to the Houou table.

I’m also what poker players would call a fish when it comes to the mental aspect of the game. In real life, when things were not going well, I would often feel my face getting hot, my mind going blank, all the way up to my vision getting blurry to the point where I couldn’t even see the tiles very well. Online, after a few bad games in a row, I would find myself visibly flinching at opponents’ calls, thinking I was always on the verge of getting destroyed. When it gets to that point, a win makes you feel nothing; winning does not actually help you at all, other than that it staves off losing, which feels devastating, for a little longer. And since it’s mahjong, you can’t just not lose until the end of time.

Needless to say, feeling like this is not very conducive to good play. That being said, I truly felt like this was, to some extent, normal while playing mahjong. Actually, it’s more like it is normal to some extent, or at least normalised. Take a look at what people are saying about the game as they grind out eight to ten hours of mahjong:

In truth, there’s thousands of examples. Some people probably see this as harmless venting  - they get it out of their system, and then they can play normally the next time. For most people, that’s probably a myth - not to mention, if you’ve already been on monkey tilt for the past hours, it’s obviously too late. I would imagine that for the majority, these thought patterns reveal crucial flaws that are actively holding them back - because that’s definitely the case for me. 

A few days after Amber discovered “The Mental Game of Poker”, I went through it myself to see what parts of it apply to me. Since the results were kind of interesting, and because my mental issues with mahjong show themselves a lot differently compared to her, I thought it would be interesting to share.

I think my own mental problems can be narrowed down to three large areas: mistake tilt, entitlement tilt, and fear.

The first two seem relatively straightforward to me, while the last is a lot more insidious. Entitlement tilt boils down to the feeling like you are the best player, so that means that you deserve to win. For me, even if it’s been a while, I’ve made it to Houou not once, but multiple times - why should those 4-dan be able to beat me, regardless of how I currently play? 

It goes without saying that this is stupid. It’s already stupid in games that are (more or less) pure skill, where underdogs still win all the time; it’s particularly stupid in mahjong, where variance is a large aspect of the game, and you can’t win every time. Feeling like you should win every time is setting yourself up for the inevitable crash.

It annoys me how obviously irrational this is while still managing to bother me. It’s not about whether I’m actually the best player on the table - it’s possible, even plausible that this is actually true. It just doesn’t matter in any particular game. Mahjong doesn’t owe you anything. 

There are several ways to inject logic into this, and I’m not quite sure what exactly works for me yet, but they all boil down to the reality that expecting to just show up and win is stupid arrogance, and you’re only as good as your decisions. Thinking otherwise is the same as thinking you’re somehow above the rules of mahjong; a kind of overconfidence that also happens to lend itself nicely to the next form of tilt I experience: mistake tilt.

Comparatively speaking, I don’t really feel all that bad about fourth places where the game just railroads you into a loss, or hitting the equivalent of a bad beat. I mean, I do feel bad about them when they happen repeatedly, so that’s something to sort out eventually, but I feel like I can deal with it pretty easily. 

What I cannot stand is making a mistake, or even what I only perceive to be a mistake, even if it turns out to actually have been a sensible decision afterwards. If the mistake is bad, it’s enough to keep me distracted for at least the next few hands. Then, because I'm preoccupied not thinking about the game right in front of me, this inevitably leads to more mistakes. (It’s never the first mistake that kills you, it’s the second one.)

The answer to this is pretty obvious, too. You cannot play a perfect game of mahjong. Thinking that you can is a misunderstanding of how mahjong (and probably any skill) works. 

I spent some time thinking about why this one bothers me so much in particular. There’s a few possible candidates. Possibly, I feel like making a mistake in mahjong says something negative about me as a person. If I made “good at mahjong” some aspect of my personality, then making an obvious mistake doesn’t just say something about the game, but something negative about me. Another thought is that making a mistake proves in some way that I’m not as good at the game as I thought I was. Both of those seem plausible. I’m not sure whether I exactly need to figure out which one it is (or if they’re, in truth, the same) to think about fixing it, though. It all boils down to a feeling of “i must never be wrong”, as well as unrealistic expectations. Expecting perfection at every point is like you’re permanently putting yourself on trial. 

Mistake tilt also has a connection to the third aspect that probably underpins all of this: fear. 

I think I’ve more or less always been a player who thinks of losing first and foremost. This has led me to develop a defensive playstyle with a lower call rate (having fewer tiles to defend with is scary!), a low percentage of bad wait riichis (what if I get chased?), and so on. In that sense, I’m not sure fear is completely a bad thing - it can lead to cautious, stalwart play. You can make it very far in mahjong with that.

It is, however, a bad thing when it starts holding you back from making the best decision. Because I think that this is the fundamental problem in my game, let’s look at a couple examples.

After getting to tenpai for a 3900 point hand in relative safety in this South 3 round that would put you in first place for South 4 if you win it, you get a choice to switch up your wait in the final stages of the game. What would you discard? Don’t worry, this isn’t a trick question.

The answer is, of course, 3s. The tile is plenty safe against everyone, so there’s no particular reason to not go straight for the better wait here.

I did not cut 3s, I cut the 4s that had just passed a turn prior, because it is - Naga agrees on the deal-in rate - very moderately safer. 

I can tell you for a fact that I was not even thinking about actually winning this hand. Didn’t even consider it for a second. It was South 3 and three more discards until the end of the round, and I wanted it to be over peacefully, without being placed in a potentially compromising position later. This is fear at its finest, because it’s not only leading to you making the wrong decision, it’s also delusional to believe that this decision even decreases your risk to begin with. Not pushing (in as far as this can be described as pushing) when you’re supposed to carries a real, much greater risk of long-term loss. This isn’t choosing safety over risk, this is choosing a delayed, invisible risk in the future. It feels good, but it is wrong.

I spent some time mulling over this mistake in the following bonus round and South 4, which also led to making another pretty funny mistake. 

I cut 6m here, which is, for the record, a really bad cut, since you can see two of the 3m in shimocha’s pool. It’s different from a mistake because I did not see the 3m - I was very aware that I was cutting my efficiency here. So, what is it? For one, 2m is safer than 6m - it’s safe against toimen, and it should pass easily enough against shimocha assuming a standard hand.

Furthermore, I was afraid of having to make a tough decision in calling riichi here, so I did not actually want a sequence in manzu - I wanted a hand that can win without riichi, so either chiitoitsu or toitoi (in which case 6m is, I guess, a slightly worse tile), or sanankou (in which case it doesn’t really matter that much because you want the 4m to become a triplet).

As you can see, it’s not just the fear of dealing in, per se, but also the fear of having to make a difficult decision later down the road, or - in case I would call a bad wait riichi and lose - also a fear of looking like an idiot (funnily enough, I had this a few times in real life and online, being glad I didn’t win a hand because I made a blatant mistake in it earlier and being like, “man opening this hand up for a win would be really embarrassing”). There’s a few different fears that all overlap, and they are all holding me back. Some amount of fear is healthy - but if you never try to never take risks and are always afraid of looking dumb, you’re not improving in mahjong.

That about covers it for me. I think my analysis is sound - next up is actually trying to fix all these problems, one at a time. I’ve started writing tilt and fear profiles and coming up with mantras to keep my mind focused on the game - we’ll see how it works out. Particularly fear is an almost integral part of my play that shaped my defensive playstyle, so I imagine that will be the largest aspect - trying to keep the fear productive rather than destructive.

________________________________________________________

Extremely different from me. If I make a mistake, I think something like, "Oh, that tile was probably better. Was it...? Yeah, it was," and move on. Figuring out what issues you have is the first step, then the second step is learning to recognise when they're happening during the game. Once you can do that, you can start resolving them over time through the logic injections.

Also, we're not just different in terms of mental. Our playstyles are also opposites. I like using Kagashi and Omega for my NAGA reviews, while shory likes using Gamma and Nishiki.

Kagashi has some very funny thoughts sometimes. Turn two, dora 8s:

Modern Mahjong Strategy says you can cut a 1 from a 13 while at a tenpai that's otherwise tanpin upon drawing a floating 3~7, so I guess doing it earlier also makes some sense. I'd probably never have thought of doing it here though, despite loving tanyao.

Next week, I'll bring this slightly extended section to a close, and it'll be time to start improving push/pull. I'll continue to work on mentality all the while, it's a slow process.

New Year's Resolution Progress: 82/1000. 8 games behind, but not bad considering the week or two that went into the ref doc.

Tsk...