Osamuko's Japanese Mahjong Blog

MahjongNews has just released an unofficial list of the best European riichi tournament players of 2009. For some reason, drob is in there. In spot #37. As the only Swede. If I'm not mistaken, this makes him the best Swedish player in Europe.

"... since formal EMA riichi tournaments were not held until 2008, when the first European Riichi Mahjong Championship took place, in Hanover. So, unlike the MCR list, comparisons with earlier rankings are not possible."

...best ever Swedish player in Europe?

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After I started playing mahjong, I learned one thing very fast. It is great to be in the lead. It's not just great. It is amazingly awesome. You are like a champion looking down on the rabble, watching them scrabble around for crumbs from your table, more often than not having to cannibalize each other to stay ahead. When a minor threat emerges, you can just put on your defensive armor and snicker at the pathetic attempts at toppling you. Should you choose to take the offensive, you can strike from anywhere, at anyone, with anything. Or if you are rich and bored you can just take a luxurious stroll around menzen mansion and not do much of anything, while everyone else is hanging on your every discard, safe in the knowledge that even doing absolutely nothing can benefit you. Being in the lead is great. But how great is it?

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Since upload.youtube.com is failing to load for me, I'll post this here.

This video is from a DVD that came with Kindai Mahjong Gold, it's a series of documentaries on Sakurai Shouichi or something, it's four people (not Shouichi) playing Jankiryu. I've only uploaded the first round, but if theres interest I might upload some more.

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Crossposted to 0x23mahjong, because I'm awesome that way.

A simple yaku overview sheet (2 pages), based on tenhou's yaku table. No scoring tables, no rules. Image quality sucks, because I'm too lazy to do better (sue me). Spot any mistakes just tell me and I'll fix it for the next version. Here it is.

After a certain tournament in Europe, I stayed behind and played a few games with some other people who also stayed behind. I asked them if they wanted to play with open tanyao, since I hadn't had a chance to do so for the entire day (given that the tournament was an EMA one), and I would like to play something I'm more familiar with. Two of them said okay, but when the third player joined she exclaimed, "Oh no, not open tanyao!" Or something to that effect. This made me curious and prompted me to ask why so many disliked open tanyao. I got a lot of answers, but most said the same thing: "It's too fast" or "it's too cheap" or "it's too easy!"

Given that we have an amazing tool for data mining available, I figured I might as well use it. So, with the help of Umai I got my hands on some data, sadly not presented in graphs (because graphs are awesome that way). The rest of this post will detail the specific numbers regarding Open Tanyao (and open hands in general).
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Famitsu have posted several images from upcoming Saki PSP game here and it's now listed on Amazon.

I really want those figures. No release date yet though.

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I'll come out and be a little honest here. When I started writing for Osamu's blag I wanted to do something special, to make a difference. There is virtually zero English material on the internet, which is surprising in itself, especially as people are extolling their helpful communities and grouphugs and guilds and twitters and endless ranking lists. I didn't want my community to be doomed to torpor, rising occasionally to answer random newbie questions. Especially when the fucking answer is always furiten. I wanted to write strategy. And theory. Oodles of it.

Of course, as you can see, we don't really have much of that around here. If you came in expecting cunning stratagems and hot tips, I'm sure you'll have been disappointed.

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Well, nobody has written any articles on here for a long time, so MOUIKKAI asked me to whip something up for this blog. However, since I was wasting time with Jun Watarase and Torchlight, an article was posted yesterday, so I can’t be the first article in whatever. Oops, but oh well. Since the gods have struck me with a severe case of imagination block, here is an article on Touhou Unreal Mahjong because I haven’t touched it for months. Hopefully, this might be useful for something, although I don't know what.

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European mahjong associations cancel cooperation with MahjongTime

From MahjongNews, the world's #1 source of any news whatsoever that turns up when you google 'mahjong'. Seriously guys, there's not much to be said about mahjong itself, right? It's just a game of matching tiles, after all. That's why you have writers. That are supposed to write stuff. Or at least make some kind of sad effort.

So to recap the events of this week, according to MahjongNews:

(Some days ago...)

MahjongTime cancels 2009 German Open Online Championship two days before the event, citing technical difficulties. Read the rest of this entry »