MAHJONG SESSION 06-10-2007 (A LESSON IN STICK-TO-ITIVENESS)

You know one of those people who order something in restaurants and then always end up regretting it when the order arrives, because everyone else’s orders look better after all? I regret to say that I seem to have the equivalent mentality in MCR. I make up my mind, and discard the deciding tile and immediately the option that I had just abandoned would look better. I would start whining immediately that I made the wrong decision, and be frustrated and upset to the end of that round. Sometimes I get so affected that I lose heart in the hand, and play in a haphazard manner and just makes things worse for myself – a vicious cycle, a self fulfilling prophecy. EP admonishes me, and I do agree it gets irritating. I tell myself to stop, but in the heat of the moment, I do it again before I know it.

The beauty of chow based hands is the flexibility that can be employed. As a player who deals mainly in chow based strategy (though it may not seem like it lately), I like to keep my options open as long as possible. After yesterday’s experience, I think the crucial part is not when/what decision to make, but to exhibit some stick-to-itiveness after the decision has been made. Changing strategy when circumstances demand (such as when crucial tiles are dead) is acceptable, but a player who dithers back and forth ultimately gets nowhere, as I have experienced in one of the hands yesterday.

This was the hand after about almost near the start:



I had two choices here:

Option 1
Three pure shifted chows in Characters – a potential sixteen point minimum hand. I would need to either draw or chow two 7Cs to make 567C and 789C respectively and discard either the 8D or the 4B pair.

Discarding the 4B pair would garner me one extra point in the “One Voided Suit” faan. However, discarding the 8D pair would mean that I still have a potential mixed shifted pungs (4B,5C, 6D) hand to fall back on if for some reason the shifted chows did not come through.

Option 2
All Pungs + Mixed Shifted Pungs – a potential fourteen point minimum hand. I would have to discards most of the Character tiles.

I decided to go for option 1 and discarded 4B, because I failed to notice that I actually had a back up in mixed shifted pungs if I discarded 8D instead of 4B. I regretted this immediately and was quite upset about it. It felt like sealing an emergency escape door knowing a fire is going to happen in the next ten minutes.

I got more upset as the game progressed, as I didn’t draw a single character tile, only dots and bams. Meanwhile, everyone else except for WJ were throwing nothing but Dots and Bams. WJ herself had only a few character tile discards, mainly terminals. I interpreted that to mean that everyone was doing something related to character tiles and getting convinced that someone was sitting on a pair of 7C somewhere.

By this time, I had destroyed my 6D concealed pung to make a 456D so that I would have two extra points from the “All Chows” faan. So trying to go back to All Pungs as a back up was out. My discard piles were littered with Dots and Bams and I was really regretting that I had not changed my strategy to Dots when I first realised that no one was discarding character tiles.

Up to this point in time, I probably hadn’t done anything really wrong which couldn't be salvaged, except for the continuous whining about “if onlys” and irritating the hell out of SJ and EP. But I think my next actions should get me the stupidity award.

By this time, I had this following hand (We were already into the third row of discards):



I let my emotions get the better of me. I decided I had enough of waiting for the 7Cs which I was convinced were never going to turn up. Disregarding the fact that all the 7Ds were already discarded and I myself had already thrown away many linking Dot tiles, I decided to make a hand in dots and started discarding character tiles. I was down to this hand when I made the last unforgivable mistake.



The game was drawing to a close with perhaps fifteen tiles left in the wall. By this time, it finally dawned on me that I was not going to be able to make any kind of worthwhile hand out of Dots. My remaining thought was to at least make ready, with any kind of hand, in case I could capitalise on either last tile draw, or last tile claim. The intelligent thing to do would probably be to complete either the 56C or 24D sets and discard the 9D. Did I do the intelligent thing?

EP, sitting to my left, discarded a 2C at this point. I made the 234C chow and stupidly discarded 6C, instead of the 5C. This left me with a 24D set, an 889D and a 55C set, the latter two which had no chance of being completed since 7D, 8D and 5C were all dead by then. What a genius I was.

To add insult to injury, I actually drew a 7C after that.

The hand ended in a draw, but I felt like I lost two hundred points for all that. This was one of the most badly played hands I had ever attempted.

In previous games, WJ had often given up hope on the possibility of getting crucial connecting tiles rather early in the game because she either suspected them being stuck in someone’s hands or she felt she was not having any luck drawing them. She felt that she did not have good enough luck for them to come her way. Many times, she changed her strategy to something which she felt was more viable due to her “suspicions” but which were actually less flexible and had less chances of winning, and which were definitely much cheaper in points. Sometimes her “suspicions” proved true, but many times she missed wins because she gave up too early. EP often advised her to keep her cool and to be more patient. Just because she suspected something didn’t mean it was necessary true.

I felt this advice applied to me as well yesterday. I gave up on the pure shifted chows because I suspected the 7Cs would not be coming my way and this paved the way for a downward spiral into chaos. I should stuck to my original decision. Maybe I would not have won, but it would have been a good try. And most importantly, maybe I WOULD have won and what then?