Osamuko's Japanese Mahjong Blog

Well hello there. It seems that some strategy for defending against specific yaku is in order here! Today, I shall discuss some ways to fight back against THEM TOITOIS, as well as those "yakuhai + rage" hands people complain about.

If you've been playing Mahjong for a while then you probably know of some environments where these yaku feature very prominently in the play style. Are you frustrated? This post will be intended to help people, not to criticise them, so we won't be complaining about this or that ruleset, environment, or whatever. Rather, we'll come up with ways to counterattack the people who take advantage of the opportunity afforded by the rules to cheapen the game.

Also, you might have heard some yaku counterattack strategy already, but only in cases where it is treated very briefly. Thanks to our extensive statistical research tools, I hope we will be able to go a bit more in-depth when looking at what our opponents are doing, and see how this compares with theories we have heard.

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This is a public service post to increase awareness of one of the most exciting things you can add to your Mahjong game: Open Riichi. Open Riichi is a nonstandard or "local" yaku which means you won't find too many places that allow it. There also isn't a lot of software that contains it; we got our hopes up when Toupaiou advertised it and even included graphics for it in the client, but they never implemented it. However, if you are part of a friendly Mahjong group or club, you can probably add this to your house rules.

Since it's not a standard yaku, there are many variations on how Open Riichi works. Here I'll try to explain the variants I know. Feel free to post any others you know about as well as how you've been playing it!

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Hey, this is UmaiKeiki, a very lazy mahjong player -- although I'm often in the company of some real addicts. They've scoured the internet for anything and everything related to Mahjong, and found some really outrageous ideas. Are the tiles given by Tenhou really random? Is a hanchan really the same length as two tonpuusen? Questions like these, while not exactly about "luck" and the "flow of the game", are a bit reminiscent of "occult" Mahjong, which is essentially the belief that random events in Mahjong are not really random.

Now there's nothing terribly wrong with Occult Mahjong in that it can be a convenient way to explain away some minor issues -- such as that awful losing streak you just had, or some secret technique you don't want to share with everyone. However, it sure would be fun to test some of these claims against the mathematics of probability and statistics! Today we shall do exactly this, and see how well they stand up.

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Yo, this is UmaiKeiki once again. This post comes at the request of MOUIKKAI who wanted some kind of glossary of basic game terms so we can translate stuff.

This probably came about because Osamu and Fukuchi-sensei read each other's blogs and discovered how English and Japanese abbreviate three-player mahjong:

三人麻雀 = 三麻 (sanma)
3-player mahjong = 3p

I'll also try to include a list of common English terms that differ from the Japanese. Obviously I can only include the most common words or else this post would never end...

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Hey, this is UmaiKeiki once again. I think it's cool when people who play mostly internet mahjong take time to learn how to score hands, even though the computer does it all automatically. Here are a few things that I learned during my own quest to figure out the scoring system; I hope they'll be useful to you as well.

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Here's another basic Mahjong strategy known as Kabe, plus Dama-ten and Saki-giri which you can use against slightly tougher opponents.

Yo, this is UmaiKeiki again. If you are reading this, it means I actually made more of my defense guide (a surprise, I know). This is a continuation of my previous post which you should probably read first. I apologize if this turns into another novel/tl;dr/wall of text/whatever.

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A guide to useful Riichi Mahjong strategy, such as discard reading and how to avoid dealing into hands.

What's up. This is UmaiKeiki, a Mahjong fan with a shorter attention span than that of a dog with ADD.

Some time ago I set out to write one of my Mahjong-addict buddies a guide to defense strategy. Once it was about half finished, something shiny caught my attention and the guide was long forgotten... One day Osamuko mentioned that she wanted to put something about Suji reading on here; I remembered that old guide and offered to revive it into blog form. This whole fetus is what I recovered off my old computer -- I make no guarantees that it doesn't suck horribly.

Brace for tl;dr!

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