TravisOC Mahjong is running a series of online qualifers for a tournament being held March 8th in Irvine, CA. Qualifying consists of nine rounds of online matches, of which you must complete six. Points from all qualifying matches are added together, and the top 8 are invited to play the in-person event at UC Irvine. Because the Seattle Riichi Mahjong Club meets on Mondays, I missed the first qualifying match, so even though today was the second qualifying match overall, it was my first one. Going into Monday’s match there were only 13 players who had registered, and after today’s match there are 14, so qualifying shouldn’t be too much of a struggle.
Before today’s match I watched the previous qualifying games of 2 of my opponents (the third hadn’t played yet) to get a better understanding of their play style. I watched 潛水母艦大鯨’s match and was constantly confused about their discard choices and what yaku they were and weren’t choosing to pursue. Aura, on the other hand, seemed to play very similarly to me, and I was able to predict their discards nearly every time, so that was the opponent I was most worried about on top of the fact that they won their previous match.
The match itself was largely uneventful through the first half. I maintained 30,000 points from the beginning of East 1 all the way until I declared riichi in East 4 and won a mangan off the dealer.
Riichi, tanyao, pinfu, houtei, ura dora
South 1 I would lose a handful of points to another player’s tsumo baiman with riichi, ippatsu, tsumo, san ankou, honitsu, yakuhai. Luckily I wasn’t dealer, so I only lost 4,000 points plus my riichi stick.
My hand in South 2 was decided before I drew, it seemed. Haku was dora, and the honitsu was pretty obvious here.
Less than half way through the second row I managed to tsumo a haneman, which brought me back into 1st place with 45,000.
In South 3 I was able to ron a small tanyao iipeiko as dealer after fighting for a ryanpeikou and deciding it wasn’t worth the hastle. South 3 bonus 1 ended after TMKStorm riichi’d into
潛水母艦大鯨 hand, which I had been overly cautious about paying into.
South 4 I was tenpai with yakuhai, dora 2, and chanta if I got the right tile, but TMKStorm opted to tsumo for a 4,000 point hand, which ended the game without changing the rankings even the slightest bit. RIP, cool cat.
These are the current standings. With only 1-2 matches played it’s a little hard to read but the data is all there.
The Mahjong Soul replay can be found here, and a link to my stream with live commentary on the match can be found here.