MAHJONG ONCE MORE!

This post should probably have been posted last weekend, but what with “jet lag” setting in from the mahjong weekend followed by a rather busy week, it is only tonight that I have a bit more energy to write out this post.

It has been almost half a year since I last posted. It started with some procrastination, followed by sheer laziness and before I knew it, half a year was gone. Well, one hopes that I have spent the last few months at least trying to fulfil the resolutions listed in the post below. Alas, other than the weight loss (I have lost about 6 kg since then! Kudos!), I’m afraid I have not spent much time (actually NONE) on the other two.

At least I can report now that the situation seems to be changing with respect to mahjong. With AW having more free time on her hands in the next two months, and a new player KT introduced to MCR, we may have enough players to start regular sessions again, at least until end of July. Happiness abounds…..

Back to the mahjong weekend. AW organised a gathering last week at a rented chalet, and with KT newly back from down under, we naturally took the opportunity to have a game and introduce KT to MCR into the bargain. We played MCR from Friday midnight to Saturday dawn, then from Saturday night to Sunday dawn, with a few hours of sleep and sundry other activities during the day, hence accounting for the “jet lag”. Age does tell…..we are all apparently past the age of whole night partying…..

There was nothing really fantastic to report about the MCR games. KT picked up reasonably well and could more or less hold his own with some guidance. AW and I were pretty rusty, so we mostly stuck to the basics. I did a lot of mixed shifted and triple chows, with the occasional attempt at pure straights or pure shifted chows. AW had attempted quite a number of all pung hands, and KT, being a reasonably seasoned player of the Singapore variant, also tried quite a number of all pung hands (which is a rather common hand in Singapore mahjong), and EP naturally felt that he had to join them. So I was left frustrated and aggravated with incomplete chow hands and dead tiles for a number of hands, which always make EP happy. All in a day’s work. I guess I should have been used to it by now.

I did break some personal records though. I completed my first ever three suited terminal chow hand (first time it has been done in our group as well). At 16 points, it probably wasn’t really worth the effort, but it was cool to try. I actually came close to completing a second one during the Friday night game, but was a tad too slow to go out. My biggest hand of the night was Four Concealed Pungs, my first ever. I have to attribute it to pure luck in this case. I was only trying for a modest all pung hand, but before I knew it I had 4 concealed pungs in my hand.

Anyway, I did well enough to secure 7 (or was it 8?) table points, and put me 0.5 points over EP in the ranking. My unofficial New Year resolution achieved….

We did manage to squeeze in a game of Singapore mahjong before the barbeque (despite my intentions to circulate among the eligible bachelors – mahjong lures appear stronger though), so that KN could play for a bit. KN actually played a little MCR but claimed that it was too complicated for his “elderly” brain. A bit ironical, considering he had been working on his thesis on Gaussian mathematics before that…..

It took a bit of a switch for me to adjust to the Singapore mahjong play, especially since the boys were not very friendly and played an extremely fast game (in my opinion at least). Only during the Singapore mahjong game did I realise how much time we actually spend thinking and building up hands during MCR, and how much I had come to rely on the orderly discards to aid my thinking. During Singapore mahjong, tiles are thrown haphazardly into the centre and some people do it with such force that it knocks other tiles out of the way (like playing marbles). So tiles get shifted around in the blink of an eye and it is easy to miss pung and chow opportunities if one is not paying attention. Plus the play goes quite fast and the window of opportunity to claim a tile is actually quite small. Since I was the slowest player in the group (I am slow even for MCR), I was under considerable stress.

KN led the beginning of the game with many small “chicken hand” wins, mainly with the help of flower or animal tiles to meet minimum fan requirements. KT however took the game as he followed up with a series of relatively large wins of three and four fans, winning him the price of a good lunch. I was rather too used to building larger value patterned hands as a result of playing MCR, and missed opportunities to go out with patternless hands even though I had up to 3 fans worth or more in my flower and animal tiles.

However, I managed to scrape by and lost an insignificant amount. EP and KN shared the bulk of the losses. And proved again that “chicken hand” win strategy is usually not that sound. I believe this has been discussed in great detail especially with respect to Zung Jung.

It was an enjoyable weekend of mahjong, except for the sleep debt incurred. Plans have already been made for subsequent mahjong sessions, and perhaps another weekender (with more sleep time planned as well) soon. My resolution looks to be on its way to fulfilment if this trend keeps up.