Osamuko's Mahjong Blog

League is cancelled indefinitely. Thank you for participating.

UPDATE:

Due to being busylazy, we haven't published the answers to the quiz until now. We apologize for the inconvenience to our dear readers. orz
You can find the answers to the quiz now at the end of this article.
Thanks to Ben for providing us with the answers!

As some of you probably know, the ECR (European Riichi Championship) Tournament, which my humble self attended to, was held for the second time after 2 years during the last weekend in Hannover, Germany.
Expect a more detailed write-up of my experiences and antics during those 3 days once I un-lazy a bit more.

On Friday evening, prior to the actual games on Saturday and Sunday, a 3 hour strategy workshop was being held, which is the actual focus of this post.

(more...)

Yes, I know it's been some time since I wrote something. Yes, I do have a decent excuse. Yes, I do know that no excuses will be accepted. We all have things we'd rather be doing than banging out a couple hundred words for the leisurely perusal of our readers, including a steadily-increasing contingent of Slovakians and Mexicans. Shoutout to them, as well as the dude on old-style Arpanet. Still, come the day when I can't summon up some walls of text for your reading pleasure, you can drag me off to the glue factory.

For some time I had been preparing a cute article entitled 'How to win an EMA tournament'. While not exactly critical in its opinions towards the current tournament formats, it does paint a rather bizarre picture of the things you'll need to do, to maximize your chances of accomplish aforesaid goal. Of course, the only way to alter the allure of this ideal but not-quite-conventional strategy is to move the goalposts, by overhauling some elements of the current tournament format.

(more...)

It is as follows:

Rules: East-only, Ari-Ari, Red, Fast (喰東アリ赤速)
Time: Saturday, 11 September 2010, 18:00:00 UTC - check your time here: http://timeanddate.com/worldclock/fixedtime.html?day=11&month=9&year=2010&hour=18&min=0&sec=0
Tournament type: Knockout, 3-4 rounds (depending on participants)
Location: #mahjong@irc.rizon.net and Tenhou (random lobbies per game)

I would like as many people to play, provided they actually turn up. The registration is here: http://arcturus.su/ch/mj/kareha.pl/1281471095/

Further details to be announced soon, after we make a final decision on the format.

TACOS derail after the cut.

(more...)

Now, I've seen many people write small articles here and there about where the best place to get a mahjong tile set is.

I originally planned to write this a long time ago but now is as good a time as ever. For one, if you do not have people to play with regularly, do not buy anything over 50$. It's wasted money, you won't derive any pleasure at all from the tiles. The first set you should buy is a "China Green" set. You can find these in any city with a Chinatown.

(more...)

THIS SESSION : JULY 16 - DON'T FORGET.

The new seed has been established. Group C has one pair of players seeing each other again. Lists were generated pseudo-randomly as before. I also took into account the preferred session, the only people who have crossed over are people who said they were really OK with switching to either (me, eirei, and xKime... osamu and XshinjiX are at the same as last time). I also have to talk to Trantez if he wants in on a more regular basis or if I have to hire a stunt double from the crowd. (more...)

This is a looooooooong overdue update. We decided to get an interview with Mr Jonas Alm, the CEO of MahjongLogic a several months back when it was the Next Big Thing and no one knew what exactly they would unleash upon us. To enjoy this article in its entirety please dial your mental time machine back to February. Everyone who ever built a palace of pons online was excited about a new player in the online mahjong industry. They actually had software that didn't look or feel terrible, had signed up various skins, and various pundits had weighed in on the subject. Of course we couldn't be left behind, and promptly secured this interview with the big man himself. But why publish it now, and not back then?

To be honest, the team was rather hesitant to go on and publish the thing back then, because of... well, you can read it and form your own opinions. The whole reason we did this was to provide sorely-lacking info about this new arrival on the online mahjong scene that everyone had been talking about. But after the deed was done, I read and reread the whole thing, and no matter in which light I read it, I felt royally owned. And this is after a revision email begging for more answers. The first draft was even better/worse. It was like meeting the CEO of a certain clothing retailer, known for his personal guarantees, in person.

(more...)

This is pretty cool so I'm breaking radio silence to post it. Anonymous delivers again with a userscript to display a mahjong tile font using UTF-8 on /jp/ (or your site of choice, should you choose to enable it elsewhere). This should herald a golden age of in-depth mahjong discussion where one guy posts a hand and nothing else, and no one else cares. Or maybe not.

(more...)

This will be a short rant because I am drunk and incoherent. Osamu edit this in the morning.

It's extremely often I read about discussions of various mahjong clients/software, and someone will come out of nowhere and say "but it doesn't have ________!"

As a normal player who has never even considered programming a mahjong client or software in my life, I am as harsh a critic as any, perhaps even more so than the various people still playing single hand rounds for money on mahjongtime. But people whining because the client of your choice does not allow you to open riichi/ron on concealed kan for kokushi/insert annoying variant here never fails to annoy me.

(more...)