MAHJONG SESSION 13-10-2007

This Saturday’s mahjong session happened to be WJ’s last session with us for the next two months, as she has lessons scheduled for the coming Saturdays and would not be able to play. Too bad we could not arrange for a “dramatic” session as a send-off for her, since nothing major happened during this week’s session.

We had a close game this week, and throughout the entire game no one really had a lead on the others. We were leapfrogging over each other in table positions. I finally ended in second place, having given EP the winning tile for the crucial last game. SJ played pretty well though she ended up with zero table points – but since it was only her second session with us, we were all very impressed. She made quite a number of wins, some of them pretty big too.

WJ almost won with a self drawn “composite” hand, but she was so confused about the exact number of points she had that she decided not to chance a false declaration. So she gave it up and tried to convert the hand to a “normal” mixed shifted hand, and someone else got to go out instead. We managed to take a picture of her hand, and in the after game analysis confirmed that she DID have just enough points to go out on, and she was quite regretful. However, this just further confirms my point in an earlier posting that such hands take too much time to compute if one is not too mathematically strong. EP also tried to make one, but didn’t succeed. He teased me a little about making my own composite hand since I was so fascinated by them, but I have decided to stay away from them for the time being until my mental agility has reached certain levels.

Despite the “peaceful” play this week, there were still some interesting decisions I had to make:

Hand #1

I managed to get the following hand after some rounds of drawing and discarding:



I thought that I could go a few ways about this – all pungs, seven pairs or full flush. I discarded the all pungs idea as I thought the hand was good enough for a bigger win. I made a decision on the full flush but someone else won before I could make ready. EP thought that seven pairs would have been a better idea, since

1) There was no point difference between seven pairs and full flush. Considering my hand, there was little chance I could get additional points from pure straight or pure shifted chows, which would have made full flush a more worthwhile endeavour.

2) I only needed to draw one more tile, and I would be ready to go out on Seven Pairs. For full flush, I would need to discard four tiles, and even then I might not be anywhere near ready if the bamboo tiles I drew did not fit into the overall scheme.

3) My hand would be concealed, thus no one would be privy to what I was doing. Even my discards would probably be rather misleading. I could even have additional points for fully concealed hand if I was lucky enough.

I have to agree with EP in this case. That was a poor decision made on my part and I guess I deserved not to win this one.

Hand #2

I had to make a crucial decision on a discard for this hand after chowing the 3B from SJ:



1) Discarding the 5B would make me ready to go out on pure straight with 8B.
2) Discarding the 9B would make me ready to go out on pure shifted chow with 3B.

Note that this was very early in the game. At this juncture, no 8Bs were out and no other 3Bs were out except the one I chowed. SJ to my left, had made pungs of 7B and 7D. Other players were not showing anything.

I chose to discard 5B and wait for 8B. The win never materialised.

The caprices of fate can be pretty frustrating. I actually had to make the above decision two more times after the first. After I discarded the first 5B, I drew 5B again in the next few go-arounds. I thought that it was time to exercise some patience and exhibit the stick-to-itiveness that I was harping on in my previous posting, so I discarded the 5B. After another two go-arounds, I drew 3B! If I had kept the 5B, then it would have been a self draw! Anyway, there was only a single 5B left and I thought I should just stick to 8B and discarded the 3B. Sure enough, EP discarded the last 5B almost immediately after that. There goes another chance at winning. After the game, I discovered that SJ and WJ were each holding a pair of 8Bs and I never had a chance from the beginning!

Discussing with EP after the hand, we concluded that 3B would have been a better wait than 8B. Despite the relative earliness of the game, waiting for a tile that had been discarded before would be better than waiting for a fresh tile.

And I had another little piece of experience gained for future use.