Welcome to (June) 2022! The lunchan thing has pretty much stopped due to a bunch of life changes but I hope to revive the blog for events at a minimum. I moved for work back in late 2020 and it's been a long time since I last posted.
In mahjong news, drumroll please...
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Made it to houou back in June 2021! I haven't played many matches yet however I bought premium so I could play. The level of play is something else... I'm pretty good so far at avoiding last but the opponents don't make it easy at all. Push/Fold has to be perfect.
How to cover all the things that happened in 2021...? at the tail end of 2020 I moved to Boston to be a consultant. I'm lucky that I've gotten a consistent contract that allows me to be in the same place for a while, but Boston doesn't have the most robust of mahjong scenes. There is of course the MIT mahjong club which I have attended a couple times along with some home games. Most of my mahjong in 2021-2022 was repeated trips to NYC to play with Riichi Nomi. A big thank you to Claire for making NYC my mahjong home away from home!
In terms of in-person events, the oldest one since my last blog post was the PML open in late 2021. This was during a gap between my two Boston assignments so I was home in Michigan and flew out to San Francisco. Aaron also joined me in the Michigan representation.
To say that the first live tournament (with all autotables, a major PML draw) since all the pandemic stuff started felt good would be an understatement. I had some of the worst luck imaginable in the first 4 hanchan and found myself in dead last in the standings. No tilt, no salt, a little disappointment but honestly just glad to be there anyway.
I had a crazy turnaround of luck after that and managed to drag myself from last of 40 all the way up to 12th in the cumulative standings. This was enough to get me one of the random prizes they had after the trophy and top 4 were given out so I added a PML t-shirt to my wardrobe. Day 2 was just interesting. I think I won every hanchan, which even that might not have been enough but I was helped along the way by an oya kokushi:
As Claire recounted (she was my shimocha in this game), she was glad to see the kokushi fold to the riichi. I had some extra pairs which I threw away, the north and 9p in the pond here for safety. Then followed by the most dangerous looking tiles imaginable. "Red Alert!! Red Alert!!" is what she had to say about it and she was able to maintain safety without throwing edge tiles and my toimen who was in riichi tossed the last 1s for the 48000 point ron. Just being able to say the phrase 'Ron! Forty-eight Thousand!' is a rare treat. This was my first tournament yakuman and it felt good even though I was still very low in the standings when I got it. I rode the momentum from there and got to 12th winning all the other games to the cut.
PML Finals Table:
As for the event results, Tian took home the first place trophy and Aaron represented us in MI very well by making it to the final table. Congrats to both! The event was just a blast all around.
In early 2022 we had a fun time in NYC when many people came from out of town to play mahjong. It was our first opportunity to meet Jay, an Australian houou player vacationing in the US in person and we had so many coming in from out of town that I ended up coordinating an Airbnb instead of doing the usual of sleeping on Claire's couch.
And finally, the most recent event was Anime Boston, held just last weekend right here in my current backyard. Riichi Nomi NYC brought mahjong to the convention and I was an unofficial staff member. They had 6 tables from noon to close running that were almost completely full of people wanting to learn. To say that Erik and Pio had their work cut out for them is an understatement as riichi has a pretty high bar to entry compared to many other forms of mahjong and having 4 randomly sit down to play without needing at the very least score help (since online spoils everyone by doing automatically) is pretty much impossible.
Anime Boston Tables:
It was successful and the staff wants mahjong next year with the promise of square tables along with an ask of double the number of sets and increased staff.
When it was all done, we had some games to unwind in the hotel lobby just to get the pace of play up with better defense and strategy. We used my custom tiles for a couple games below (only the rainbow winds) and invented the house yaku 'double rainbow all the way across the sky' for 2 han. This actually got won. A triple rainbow 3 han and mega rainbow yakuman were not (but keep in mind that mega rainbow doesn't necessarily imply suushihou hands as only 1 of each is rainbow you can win it with chiitoi or kokushi too!) My 'sad to see that one go' hand that I didn't win was tenpai for honitsu, toitoi, ton, nan, double rainbow all the way across the sky, dora - baiman. What does it mean?!?
We still don't have a use for the gold and red nan yet. It's my lucky tile so I think I'd just scare people away with making it too powerful... 😏
Post game selfie with Pio, Erik and Cassie.
PML Open and Anime Boston pictures shared compliments of Claire and Riichi Nomi NYC: www.riichi.nyc
Not pictured - me in a cat ear headband. It didn't release my inner poncat however I did win a menpin tsumo aka 2 ura 1 6k all to win a game. Tsumo-nya.
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