Which I find to be exactly the case. I can’t find a better word to describe losing your semi-concealed dai san gen to a kuitan than just “cruel,” buuut, however, a player going for a kuitan every single hand shouldn’t be an obstacle impossible to overcome.

The problem more often than not, would be assembling your comeback hand in the last few rounds, and have the player in fourth place kill the game with a no-dora nakitan. But it’s just the same as if the guy in first just killed it with a yakuhai.

So I don’t really think open tan yao cheapens the game either; only cheap players cheapen it.

In truth, I don’t think you even need data to argue against the “too fast”, “too cheap” and “too easy” arguments, myself. If you’re an experienced person playing against someone who plays tanyao every time, for a thousand or two every time they win, you still shouldn’t lose in a full hanchan most of the time. And if you are, you’re doing something horribly wrong.

Total number of hands are winning hands only, I doubt you could write a program that searched through logs and could tell what a user was aiming for on its own.

Krill, what you’re saying is absolutely true. I basically wanted to point out the bullshit argument I kept hearing that open tanyao was somehow cheaper or easier or more often played than yakuhai. It could, obviously, be that open tanyao fails more often than yakuhai (and I wouldn’t be entirely surprised if that is actually true, since it’s a lot easier to defend against). Anyway, I’m bored of banging my head against the wall and wanted to get the data we had out there.

And now I’m late.

You haven’t indicated in any way that the game won’t improve by closing Tanyao (assuming one’s standard for “improvement” is the reduction of quick, cheap hands), even if protesters of Open Tanyao are hypocrites for not also changing Yakuhai.

Where did these games come from? Are the total numbers of hands winning hands or all hands? What happened to the hands that didn’t win? Are there any games played by Europeans in the data? Etc.

“Well, suffice to say, people *go for* an open yakuhai hand a lot more often [than open tanyao].” (my emphasis)

Where is the proof of this? It seems that it would be difficult to quantitatively prove how often people *go for* a certain yaku. Moreover, this just doesn’t make sense. In order to aim for a yakuhai hand, you actually have to have a pair of them in your hand. Most starting hands will have a good amount of simples in them, which will beginners might think makes them good candidates for open tanyao.

Incidentally, I’m not arguing against EMA’s adoption of the rule. I just wish your arguments were a little more clear.