If you are part of a mahjong-playing community, as opposed to grinding on 0000 in a vacuum all day, only pausing between matches to take a swig of your bottled green tea, I’m sure by now you’ll have played in several tournaments. Well, I’m fairly certain of it. There’s a pretty reasonable chance. At the very least, you may or may not have heard of someone talking about organizing one but never getting round to it.
Riichi mahjong tournaments outside Japan are still rather uncommon, so when we decided to hold online tournaments for fun, we had no idea where to begin – tournament formats, timing, etc, as well as taking into account having an event of reasonable length without needing multiple sessions, how players qualify and are eliminated, time zones, and other considerations. Of course we could have just taken a page from the Japanese and- well, actually we had no idea how they did it, and still don’t to this day. All we had was a bunch of players, an IRC channel and most importantly, absolutely no clue what a regular tournament format looked like. This is known in business management as “blue sky thinking”, or “making shit up”. However we had no lack of ideas on how things could be done, and so we embarked on a highly experimental journey of dreaming up and implementing different tournament formats.
