Week 8 - New Year, New Goals

With the calling month coming to an end, it's time to move on to the next topic.

This Week

I reached Gold pretty much immediately after the last post. Here were my stats at the moment of reaching it:

I'm kind of disappointed in the Gold Room. I really thought people would fold here. So far, it feels the same as Silver Room, except people do bad damas and disconnect more often. The same randomness in the opponents. Sometimes they fold, more often they push everything.

Honestly, not sure if it's worse when you can see you played best in every game or not.

My main goal for this week was to increase my honitsu rate, with a side quest to think about calls while people are in riichi. Let's look at some attempts and how Maka thought of them.

My final game before promoting. Here, I was behind from dealing into a dealer haneman in East 1, so I opted to look towards a flush. Maka doesn't hate it. 4p is a better floating tile than 7p so Maka wants 7p cut first, fair enough. Maka also wanted the pon, the A rating is mainly from folding disagreements.

Open list of tenhoui, copy, paste... （≧▽≦）expressed on stream that he thinks Maka doesn't do enough when far behind, and that in his opinion, pushing more for value is good. East 1-1 is perhaps early to be resorting that though.

At this point, I couldn't actually remember for sure whether a tie would result in me being third or fourth, so I wanted to aim for 2+ han. A hard hand to get value out of. I probably should have just gone for riichi tsumo. Even at this point, Maka just wants to aim for the direct hit on shimocha, who is disconnected. But I didn't know if a 1000 point direct hit would raise me to third.

This is more of a defensive flush. I want to progress the game towards the end safely, and quick wins as dealer don't really do that. Honitsu lets me hoard some safe tiles and if I get there the value is nice. Though, you probably go for it with this hand regardless. I cut 8m over hatsu to keep the door open, which Maka agreed with. The A rating came from floating tile decisions where I kept the 9s around longer than Maka wanted so I got marked down every turn. Also kamicha was disconnected at this point. They do that a lot in Gold.

And for a bit of variety, here's a flush I didn't go for. I cut the manzu tiles early to keep the door open, but at this point, a ryanmen to move the round forward seems more valuable than the extra points, despite a flush being close and a dora tanki wait being possible.

Here, I called so the riichi player wouldn't get the final tile. Maka doesn't like it, but I have no idea why. After the call, I cut 7s, which is a 100% safe tile, and there weren't any draws that would have gotten me to tenpai. What, I skip here, draw 6p, cut 2p, kamicha pons, I draw 2s and cut 3s? Seems much less practical than safely stripping a potential han from the opponent. Maybe this sort of thing just isn't in Maka.

Next Week

So, today was scheduled as the push/pull month, but after some initial research, I think there's a much bigger thing to address first. My push/pull is, overall, fine. Improving it beyond where it is would largely involve improving infrequent situations. Instead, I'll first improve something that comes up very frequently:

Mentality.

There are lots of different manifestations of mental game issues.

There's confidence issues, where you question your play after bad variance. This doesn't happen to me. I remain confident in my play, and Maka also backs me up.

There's fear issues, where you fold hands you should be pushing with, expecting to deal in. This also doesn't happen to me. I love calling riichi and I love pushing.

There's tilt issues, which is sort of the opposite, where you push hands you should be folding. I think this happens to me, but when I look at the replay like, "That was a good deal-in right?!" Maka generally agrees. Still, wouldn't hurt to improve.

Here's a situation I thought was probably a tilt push, but Maka agreed with.

There's motivation issues, where you want to play more on a good streak, or want to play less on a bad streak. Both are symptoms of bad mental. The reverse also happens, where you want to quit on a high note, or play more on a bad streak. I definitely fall into this.

Within each, there are other sub-categories depending on what causes it and what happens because of it. For example, there's "bad streak tilt," "injustice tilt," "mistake tilt," and so on and so on. The one that affects me the most heavily is "injustice tilt." This is the kind of tilt that comes up when you see people getting lucky, or rewarded for bad plays, and think stuff like, "Man, when's it gonna be my turn?" or "You should be punished for that." "Entitlement tilt" seems similar, in terms of what people suffering from them say, but I'm pretty sure I'm solidly on the side of injustice.

The gold standard for improving your mental game (outside of hiring a coach or therapist) seems to be the book "The Mental Game of Poker" by Jared Tendler. The first book seems aimed at removing the bad, and the second book seems aimed at improving the good. Poker and Mahjong are thematically quite similar, so let's start there.

Speaking of books, the Tenhoui yoteru released a push/pull book just a couple weeks ago. The shipping from Japan is quite expensive, so I asked him if he had any book recommendations for advanced players I could order at the same time. He recommended one of the Tenhoui お知らせ's books, and I ordered both of those (plus some sanma books for later). Should be fun.

The Tendler book wants you to fill out a questionnaire, then create a mental profile for yourself. The result: I'm someone who settles into habits, and struggles to move forward. When I tilt, it's directed outwards, at my opponents, at luck, etc, and not towards myself (I do not lose confidence, beat myself up, grow timid, etc). Laziness, motivation, and autopilot are big issues. I get triggered by injustice: my opponents being rewarded for bad play, or imbalanced luck.

Signs that issues are arising include my initial discard order being wrong, which is often something I notice immediately. With a hand containing a red and a white dragon, discarding the white first doesn't truly matter, but if the little things are off, it's a canary for larger things also being off. Thinking, "Oh, that should have been red first," is a sign to focus up. Autopilot might be creeping in.

Step one is creating reset points for these things. When I notice autopilot, I will take a deep breath and say, "This is just habit. Think before you click." When I see injustice, I will take a deep breath and say, "Bad players have to win sometimes. Mahjong is that kind of game." I wrote those on a sticky note and put it on my monitor.

I've made it my New Year's resolution to play 1000 games of Mahjong. Roughly three games per day. Let's take this opportunity to also resolve these mentality issues.