Also, the mahjong statistics quoted in this article are misleading. Your hypothetical chances of winning are 25% only if you are playing against opponents who all have a skill level that is identical to yours. In reality you will go into games where your expected winning percentage is considerably higher or lower.

The same term, “winning chances,” was also until very recently used in arbitrating draws. I don’t know if that means luck is a factor in a chess game, but chance certainly is. If your opponent makes a stupid blunder that causes you to win a lost game, what can you call yourself other than lucky? And if you’re playing in a tournament that seeds you advantageously (particularly in quads), did you get 2 byes because of skill? :P

@TheGeek
Chess hasn’t been solved but supercomputers unfortunately have reached the point where they trounce high level humans. Not every game, of course, but I don’t believe a human has won a high profile human vs machine tournament in a few years.
BTW, it’s very possible that perfect play will end in a win for white.

Winning or losing in chess is not simply about making ‘mistakes’. It’s not entirely untrue, but to state it that way is an oversimplification. There are so many moves that you can make and so many permutations of possible games that you cannot easily label what is a ‘mistake’ and what isn’t.

In a game like Mahjong or Poker it’s usually more clear whether a certain call is good or bad. The results are more contained. Moreover, it would be wrong to characterize chess as a game of ‘luck’. Making errors in chess is not about luck. It’s about forcing your opponent to make errors, which has very little to do with luck. Chess is a game of complete information, so there is probably less luck in a game of chess than pretty much anything else in this life!

Chess has not been solved. ie all perfect play ends in draw. But still about half of high level game do end in draws. Even playing against supercomputers high level player can force a draw.

Although…I’m not really sure what you’re arguing here, since your post sort of goes all over the place. It seems that the main thrust of your argument is that small wins aren’t bad. There’s also something about when to try for a small hand and also that sometimes karmic lightning strikes you (and not in a good way) no matter what you do. The post has the feel of responses to real-life mahjong rants by other people that you tried to tie together loosely.

And re:sports, I am not talking about strategy but the design of the game in general, scoring points is always good, and there is no time when scoring goals is a bad thing. However in mahjong it’s the decision to score points that matters, and not the actual execution.

What i mean is that for someone to win, you need skill (not to lose) and luck (for the opponent to make a mistake). Of course it’s a different kind of luck than than the one you find in mahjong, but still…

Taiga: If chess is a game where if two players play perfectly, nobody should win, doesn’t that that mean that it’s in fact not a game of luck? I thought true games of skill meant those games where even if everyone played perfectly, the game should end up in a draw.

I’d also like to address the bigger point. Yes, in most chess games, if someone wins, it’s because of a mistake being made. But I think that in chess, and mahjong as well, there’s no such thing as playing a perfect game.

I remember a chess book I read once which detailed the state of the current game ranked on a scale from 10 (checkmate for White) to 0 (checkmate for Black). The starting state was 5.5 for all games (since white is slightly favored at the start). One of the games basically consisted of black mirroring white’s every move, and the scale stayed completely in the 5 to 5.5 range, ending with the most boring draw possible. I have to think that that would be what a theoretical perfect game for both sides looks like, i.e. playing not to lose. In grandmaster games there are always gambits going on, even if they might be only minor or rote gambits. And it’s even more pronounced in games like Chinese chess, where there are massive gambits and uneven trades, and positioning is far more important than piece counts.

In the case of mahjong, your two “perfect game” criteria, reaching tenpai as fast as possible and not dealing in everyone’s hand are, in the strictest sense, mutually exclusive. Unless you get extremely favorable draws (i.e. going into tenpai, then magically drawing tiles that match the last tile that was thrown), you can’t do both at the same time. And even when you’ve reached tenpai, what then? Declare riichi? Stay silent to trap others? Improve your chances by opening it (assuming you have a hand where this is possible)? Break up the tenpai to play defense?

For instance, I just played a round yesterday where dealer had declared riichi, and had thrown a 8-sou early on. North had an open honiisou tenpai at the time with 2345678-sou in the concealed part of his hand, waiting on 258-sou. He draws a 7-sou right after the riichi, and he has two choices: toss the safe 8-sou and have a more difficult wait (he already had pon’d 1-sou), or toss the dangerous 7-sou and have a much easier wait. As it happened, he tossed the 7-sou and West tossed 8-sou three tiles later, giving North the win and landing him in second.

In a statistical sense, North both increased the opportunity of winning and the risk of losing, which averages out to pretty much the same state that he was in previously. Which was the correct course of action in a perfect game? It’s impossible to say.

I myself just wrote a nine-page strategy guide on Japanese mahjong detailing various strategies that I’ve used or seen on offense and defense. I find, however, that when I actually go play the game, I disregard my strategies half of the time, and I consider myself a very good player. I have to think that there isn’t a strategy guide on how to play the perfect game, because there isn’t one. Even pure statistical reasoning can let you down because opponents will spot that and change their strategy to wait on lower-probability tiles.

Given that, possibly a “perfect strategy,” or whatever the top players of Japanese mahjong in the world use, is to take the best pure strategies and mix them in an unreadably random fashion. depending on the situational, monetary, emotional, and yes, karmic circumstances.