audacity wrote:Some of the posts in this thread sadden me greatly. It's a tragedy that someone thinks he has progressed so much, only to find he has taken but a single step.
Great. This thread wasn't supposed to enlighten your day anyway. Look at it from a more objective standpoint, rather than "it makes me happy" or "it makes me sad." This thread doesn't do one thing or the other to me, as I always knew people who thought like this, who feel "so yakuza", always existed. They either learn a little bit more about mahjong and become more serious, or they just leave the game as just "one more thing" they have learned the basics of.
xkime, I am disappointed.
I doubt it. You would be required to expect something from me, and I do not remember giving you anything to do so.
What is mahjong to you? A game? A calculation? Possibilities, permutations, probabilities and such have no place here.
You would be surprised the amount of calculation involved in a single hand. Even to recieve points you're expected to calculate. I don't know if you know how to calculate points, it strikes to me as though you probably don't, but that's also one of the things you're expected to study for a very good reason.
Also, yes, probabilities do have a lot of place. Don't try to lecture me as if you knew any better. That's the very basis of why a three sided wait is better than a penchan wait under neutral situations. Mahjong is different from other "digital" games in a way that not all calculations are numeric, but some other are also theoric as well, but there is something you cannot change: The better your stats get, the better player you are becoming. And it's like that in about any game. The better your average income is, the better poker player you are; the better your win percentage is, the better kishi (igo/shogi) you are. If within 1000 games you only won 10, you suck, with no way to deny it. If within 1000 games you won 333, you're pretty decent. Remind me again, how is your winning percentage? Did it improve considerably the last year?
Mahjong is an all-out contest of wills. It is a struggle of superiority.
You need a strong will, and you need superiority to win, but with a "strong will" alone you accomplish nothing. We are all willing to win, no sane human being is willing to lose, but if you do not have the knowledge to back it up, you're just a random entity discarding random tiles. Also, take into account, this guy's post had nothing "superior" in any part of it; if anything, he assumes his opponents are fools. I doubt he would do well in mahjong, or get any far at all in net servers like tenhou. Not the way he began to think. He should start studying the game seriously to do so. Taking it so lightly like that, he's just making a mock of it. By thinking this way, he's just going on a very dangerous downwards slope, where his game is just not going to get "optimal." He would be convinced the reason his stats are bad is because "he has bad luck" or because "his opponents suck and can't be bluffed." The truth is, his game is far from optimal because he still chooses to perform TV stunts.
I would like to share with you one of my life-changing experiences. I used to play mahjong with a regular poster on this forum. He was always full of sage advice, but always kept an air of superiority around him, hinting at heights I could not reach. I was determined to prove him wrong. In the course of many matches with him, I noticed that either he would almost always go for a Hon Itsu hand, unless the tiles for a complete hand fell naturally into his lap. However, when necessary, he would always have the tiles to intervene for a quick ron in a threatening situation. He usually ended up 3rd or 4th in our encounters, but never once changed his style of play.
So, all in short, he was all talk but no show. I hope you didn't listen much to his "expert" advice, unless you too want to end 3rd or 4th usually, never changing your style of play. (Even if mahjong itself is changing)
Sooner or later this got to me. How could someone go straight for a Hon Itsu every hand? To do so is to damage your chances of winning beyond repair. Even the best player in the world could not keep up a winning record with such a handicap. And then it hit me. Even though he was always dead last, he had stamped his authority on the match, and the specter of his will loomed over every hand. Was it a Hon Itsu or not? Would he riichi with a double honor wait? How many tiles away from tenpai was he? The match was always about him, and we were inevitably dancing to his tune.
This is only so because you rarely had other friends to play mahjong with and just played with him over and over. In the mahjong world, you get to play with a lot of completely different people most of the time. Some amaze you with their flawless play, while some others just make you think "What the heck is wrong with this guy?"
The fact that you got overwhelmed by the persistent and hard-headed game of your friend will not affect the way you have to play to either rank up in a league, in a tournament or in an internet client.
I immediately opened up all the replays from our previous games. It was as I feared. He would routinely tear his hands apart, sacrificing value and potential to control the flow of the game. Moreover, it was an obvious challenge to me, and I regret not seeing it every time I recall our games. Why play a game subject to its whims and desires, he seemed to be asking me, when you are the one played by the tiles instead? It was a challenge to get on his level, to beat him at his own game and break his dominance over the match itself. Since then, he has not asked for a game with me, and I fear I have disappointed him far too much to request one myself.
If he sacrifices value and potential, unless he gets really lucky, he is probably not winning a lot more than he is losing, unless you three were -also- below his level; you just happened to assume you were supposed to be better than him, and whenever things would go his way, you just like to think it was his "dominance." When in reality, you were just not playing with a clear mind, and not making winning bets at all.
And for not playing with a clear mind, you only have yourself to blame. I don't think this story led anywhere at all, and it is also just hear-say anyway.
This guide is imperfect, but it carries a strong message. Mahjong is a game where you are buffeted hither and thither by the winds of chance. Instead of striving in vain to navigate a course, a real man plays and wins by his own rules, and nobody else's.
Exactly. The important thing is that you consistently win. And in a game of chance, to do that, you must be a better player than your opponents, and make the correct calls more times than them. To know that, you need strategy, theory and advice from real expert players or at least players with a reputation or decent win record, and hours of practice and study of the game and each of its aspects. When he advised for a noten riichi, that was just the last thing I needed to be convinced he doesn't really know what he is talking about, and that his win rate right now is probably something like 20-20-30-30 at best. And I don't think that's a bad thing, to start off with, but I would highly suggest that he takes the game and his opponents seriously, and study real mahjong theory instead of writing either obvious advice, or outright terrible advice.
In short:
If mahjong is a thing you will only do in counted times, with a limited number of friends, feel free to play tricks, stunts, and just have fun.
If you plan on playing mahjong seriously and improving as a player, take the game and your opponents more seriously, and polish your flaws and holes in your statistics and records with some real hard work.
