My First "Houou" Game: Review 1

Technically, I was playing in tokujou.  However, why were these three 7dans entering my game at the same time?  Either way, I was glad to get this opportunity to get a sample of an "actual houou" game.  I have faced games with three R2000's before; but usually, they were 6dans.  So, this felt much different.

The game can be viewed here: http://tenhou.net/0/?log=2019060708gm-0029-0000-15d18a22&tw=2

Given this rare opportunity, I made sure to enjoy this game as much as possible.  The primary goal was to survive.  If I was able to win, great, but I did not.  I took my third and lived.

Now, unlike my Twitter post, I am looking to cover this game more indepth to see what I could learn from it.  As a note, comments with each respective image is below the image - not above.

With 1-shanten by turn three, it was a good opportunity to get some kind of jump start on them.

But it took this long to get to tenpai at all, and this was a natural pon.  Otherwise, the hand never gets to tenpai or ends up keishiki tenpai, which would be rather pointless.  Then toimen drops the 9pin in the same rotation.  As it turns out, this was my only hand won in the game.  So against these guys, I spent the rest of the game essentially a sitting duck.

This time, it is 1-shanten from turn six, with effectively two ryanmen shapes and a shapon to work with.  I would look to riichi this hand immediately.

I missed a discard choice here, where dropping a 9pin would be better to set up a favorable ittsu or a pinfu for 1-4-7.  Instead, I ended up dropping 3sou aiming at developing the souzu shapes.  The other option was 4sou in order to commit the ittsu shape.

Tenpai would have been right here; so my backfire on the 3sou comes to haunt me here.  Kamicha drops 5sou later, by which shimocha hit.  Hindsight says, I would have scored here too.

The interesting question: Would I have called riichi here?  With tanyao and dora on a 5-8 sou ryanmen, I probably would have.  Counting off the winning tiles, half of them are gone; but that would still be acceptable.

Looking at kamicha, that is a nasty hand.  The two manzu calls is a good reason not to call riichi.  Yet, a riichi call would expect a souzu or pinzu tile to come out from kamicha's hand anyways as it did here.

With riichi, then tsumo is expected.  Though, someone pushing honitsu / chinitsu hands might continue to do so.

My dealer turn but shimocha riichi.  In an "ordinary" tokujou game, I might still try to fight with this hand.  However, this is not an ordinary game.  This is 2-shanten aiming for pinfu dora.  But, it is a hand that cannot fight.  So, I back off immediately here.

I get my yakuhai pair here.  Then I chose to drop the 6sou, because it was two tiles away from the dora.  However, I should have kept it for that exact same reason.  Now, given three pairs, one of the terminal pairs should go instead.

Within the next turn, yes, I did draw a dora.   After said dora, I dropped the 3sou and 1sou kanchan.  Yet, I opted to keep the isolated 6pin.  I cannot remember, but I was looking to develop it.

Low and behold, I did get to develop it.  But remember the 6sou?  It would have been a nice setup for sanshoku.

So instead, there is the issue of the isolated dora.  Under any circumstances, I do not drop it.  This time for sure, one of the terminal pairs are dropped; and so I did.

As luck may have it, the dora pairs up.  So, from here, I'd be looking to get yakuhai off of the pei, by which it became pei ankou.  However, the hand still remained 1-shanten.  Shimocha's hand was simply faster after three calls.

Hatsu pon here?  I declined; and shimocha immediately followed suit and I declined that too.  So, I committed to chiitoitsu here.  

Was toitoi the better option?  With no ankou, tenpai may require three pons at most.  The 9pin and 1sou may produce a good chance to pon both.  The three minkou of honor/terminal would jump the hand to 3 han 40 fu.

With that said, chiitoi attempts can be hit or miss, even if it was at 1-shanten so early.  Given kamicha riichi with only two draws left (meaning I had the haitei draw), I called pon here to deny kamicha one more draw.  Though, the call gave shimocha a draw to get to tenpai too.  So, I was left alone as noten.  Even a failure at tenpai dash felt bad here.  But that's ok.

Nothing much came out of East 4-2.  Though, this should explain how I survived this game.  One of them became the sacrifice.

Now, when kamicha won that hand, the game effectively went to kamicha and shimocha vying for the win.  As for me, I have to survive against toimen from here on out.

As for South 1-0, it was somewhat the same.  Toimen was pushing his dealership even against shimocha riichi.  He had to anyways.  As for me, well, I kept on defending.  Given the defense reads, I was feeling fairly safe here.  My pair 7man with one out renders the pair 9sou as good 1-chance tiles.  Shimocha's early 8man makes it less likely for a 6-9 man wait.  Toimen called chii on that 4pin and drops chun.

Once again, here is another 1-shanten hand by turn three; and then I was faced with either favoring chiitoitsu or not chiitoitsu.  Given the dora, dama chiitoitsu puts the hand at 3 han 25 fu; naturally, a riichi increases the han by one.  

But here, I opted to decline chiitoitsu.  However, the otakaze shabo should point to chiitoitsu.  I do not have the option to call on either one in case I had to.  To get to tenpai, I'd have to draw any of the three pairs.  A 7pin would not be too favorable; but it would have still be acceptable.  That draw would prompt the discarding of a pair.

As it turns out, chiitoitsu was the better option.  And yes, I'd riichi on the dora.

Here was a semi-decent hand with a range to take second.  However, toimen's riichi takes priority.

But I still tried because of temptation.  I took the nan here to get to tenpai.  However, I gave up two safe tiles in the process.  Given between 2, 4, or 7 pin, I took my guess at 2pin.  That passed; but given the read, I could have easily been punished here.

So, it was a bit of a risk.

Now, this got ugly quickly as the rest of the sharks joined in.  With that said, hopefully, one of their hands kills the other.  Shimocha's tsumo did the trick.

Now going into South 4:

• Shimocha in a big 1st is long gone.
• Kamicha in 2nd has 5400 pts above me.  So, that's a decent range for gyakuten.
• Toimen in 4th needs mangan on me or haneman tsumo to save himself.

Now, did I have a hand capable of gyakuten?  With this, yes, I do.  I kept haku instead of 2man for the sake of a bit of safety.  Oddly enough, it paired up in the next turn.

So darn, I actually had a dama gyakuten here, if it were haku ankou.  However, looking back, that haku discard was justified here - perhaps.

Quite frankly, to fight with this hand, I'd be content with going riichi dora 2.  In the end, game ends with a harmless dama chiitoi from shimocha.

Now, things I did not do in this review:

• Noting their tile calls and immediate discards after calls.
• Focusing on my opponents: What were they doing?
• Taking guesses at their expected hand values.
• Suspecting tenpai hands when my hand is noten in the mid 2nd row and after.

Yes, I'm criticizing my own review at this point.  To get to the next level, I need to be able to do these things.  So, that is next on my mahjong homework.  Before moving on, did I miss anything else important to note here?

In the meantime, I managed to survive this game.  So going forward, I'll take it with a grain of salt as a means of encouragement.

Speaking of survival, I have my work cut out.  Yet, I've been here before multiple times.  However, this time, I do not feel it; and so I may actually demote out of tokujou into 3dan.  That in of itself would not be too bad, as I can treat it like a break or something.

We'll see what happens.  Good luck.