My First Mahjong Tournament in 7 Years!

As this is the Chinese New Year it seems an opportune moment to post some mahjong photos!

Mahjong began in China and spread to Japan, which is where I learnt to play. There are some differences between the Japanese game and the original Chinese game.

Like a lot of things, the Japanese imported the game and proceded to "improve" it by adding some rules that made the discarding of tiles a more orderly affair in line with the Japanese preference for everything to have a precise procedure. Whereas the Chinese chuck their discard tiles randomly into the centre of the table, the orderly Japanese insist that you line up your discard tiles in a row in the order in which you discard them. When I played three-player mahjong, the line of discarded tiles could extend to over a dozen tiles in a row before the player decided to start a second row below the first. However, in the standard four-player tournament game, the rule is that you have to make a new row after every sixth discard.

About ten years ago, I was invited to join a "kenko mahjong" circle that plays the standard Japanese four-player "riichi" mahjong. "Kenko Mahjong" means "healthy mahjong" which is played without smoking, drinking or gambling, which came as a bit of a shock, I must admit, but I wanted to play the standard four player game and also to play in tournaments.

Then in 2020, everything shut down when The Virus spread, and I didn't take up mahjong again until the New Year, when I played mahjong with the wife and daughter, as I reported here: https://peakd.com/hive-155221/@hirohurl/jlvbvqpv

That gave me an appetite to play the game again and later in January I took part in a local kenko mahjong tournament.

The Tournament

Mindful that it had been a while since I last played, I played defensively to avoid taking big hits, and while that strategy was largely successful, it also lowered my win-rate.

The tournament was played in three 60 minute rounds, and after the first two games I was in the red, but since I had not taken any big hits I didn't think I was right at the bottom of the pack.

In the third round, as we went into the last game, I racked up several "dora" bonus tiles in an open hand that attracted a lot of interest from players from the other tables who had finished their games. It was an exciting way to finish, because if I had been able to complete my hand it would have been a big score, but the other players were canny enough to avoid giving away the winning tile and closed out the game.

So I finished every round in the red and in fact picked up the wooden spoon consolation prize, which is the first time that has ever happened to me, but perhaps not so surprising since I am so out of practice. As you can see in the photo, my prize was actually a very welcome one - a box of buckwheat "soba" noodles!

After the tournament was over a bunch of us celebrated in a nearby izakaya where the rules on no smoking or drinking were happily relaxed!

Cheers!

My next tournament is on Sunday 22nd February. Wish me luck.

In the meantime,

Happy Chinese New Year!

DH
#InspiredFocus

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