Ron

How I feel after winning a single Mahjong game against easy mode AI

How I feel after dealing in dama mangan turn 7

pon into dealing in

I get pressured into calling easily when everyone is calling left and right.

Don't hope for Ron, aim for Tsumo
There are some heights you can never reach unless you set your targets for them.

Riichi Shitty

Depending on who you're playing with take other people's calls seriously, they often have a very good reason to call. After that you can act depending on their pond

Do I study mahjong theory or just keep playing to finally git gud?

you'll never git gud without learning basic tile efficiency and defence

Riichi book 1 isn't bad and will help you get the basics down but it wont help past some point

You can get most of the theory by thinking about your games indepth: what went wrong? What went right? What were the odds? Did you throw good tiles in the pond and missed sequences? Did you have a winning plan but didn't see it? Did you keep discarding dangerous tiles late in the game and got punished for it? And so on

The tricky part is that mahjong doesn't always reward the "textbook good plays". So you should know what you did only applies to one game and hone your instincts for the next ones.

Generally speaking it's all about being about to smell the bullshit.

If you want to improve at mahjong, you should read at least the last two sections of Flow Book 1, play lots of games, be prepared to win a lot, be prepared to lose a lot, and under no circumstances get upset when you do lose. The mental game in mahjong is very brutal. Keeping yourself in a correct frame of mind, and playing correctly, even if it means dealing in and even if you know you will be dealing in, is beyond any doubt the most essential thing for your mahjong play.

I never learned how to read the pile and my opponent's pieces well by just playing... At some point I guess you have to pick up a book and read to git gud

Akagi... Hokuto mahjongken wa muteki da. You have already lost.

Reading the pond is very hard and it's more about reading what's safe than what's bad. Bad is reason+gut feeling, but you can find safe tiles with reason alone most of the time

It seems the real mahjong challenge is to know whether or not calling a tile will give my opponents an early riichi into 12000+ point hand.
Seriously, it happens so often, this has become the main bottleneck for me.

Everyone at /mjg/ plays Mahjong Soul though.

I wish I had people to play mahjong with IRL. Everyone just plays cards

easy
just read the flow

join a club and play tournaments

It's unironically this. There's no other option, it's a 50/50 between "this will fuck you in the ass" or "this will put you on the right track" and the only reasoning you can get to make that choice is gut feeling

I live in America, there are no mahjong clubs where I live

Akagi.

Gonna ata my hane if you know what I mean

Tell me one good reason this shouldn't work.
go read The Tiles I Cannot Cut Are Next To None if you haven't

Kaiji is better.

There are clubs all over America

Furiten.

try to learn mahjong

manage to learn what the symbols mean and the basic rule

get filtered by actually learning the riichi combinations

I'm too much of a baka gaijin for this.

Most combinations aren't used often, it's really an issue in Chinese mahjong but riichi is easy

Nigga, I can't remember all that. When I'm looking at an incomplete hand, I can't remember even all the "basic" ones. I genuinely end up in No-Ten while playing against easy-mode bots who pretty much never even Ron.

You don't really have to, just remember pinfu, tanyao, toitoi, honitsu, chitoitsu.

Just don't call unless you know what yaku you can go for
If you stay closed you can always riichi

doko

yeah and sometimes "there's a mahjong club in my state" means a 3 hour drive one direction

so? just drive six hours its ez

some people have to work

Play tournaments then

what tournaments?

lmao

League 6

Start your own club then

Akagi, you cant just declare Ron whenever you like, we just distributed the tiles

Middle management Tonegawa*

I think yakuman SUCKS
I made my melds, let me ron

I thank Judgement for making me learn mahjong to complete all the side cases because mahjong is amazing. It's also fucking infuriating. I love it.

do people playing mahjong irl yell out and act all dramatic while they play? also mahjong is completely alien to me and it makes no sense whenever I see it in anime

I think it's faster to point out that he's calling Ron while obviously discarding/drawing a tile

this is what i always do. in doubt you gotta ron.

no, in my experience it's pretty quiet, and my table had a tradition of not talking about the hand until it's concluded

They only act dramatic if they got something insane. I do sometimes. Usually it's more relaxed and etiquette matters quite a bit.

It looks confusing but it's kinda simple once you play a while. Always gotta have a pair plus 4 sets of three (straights or trips) and you're golden. There's some other types of hands too but this is the most basic setup.

Also I'd totally shout it.

this is why you always call first

space mahjong is, for some reason, not a standard tournament ruleset

here take this you stupid monkey, all the easiest and most common yaku. Learn these and you will be unstoppable

I have read like every FKMT, Koizumi, Saki, and probably half a dozen others, but I really still have no idea how mahjong actually works.

I get theatric sometimes, like yelling KOKUSHI MUSOOOOOOOUUUUUU after attempting kokushi 5 times in a row. Most of the time it's quiet, but every once in a while I'll put on Akagi or Koizumi and we'll all copy whatever the characters are doing. PATRIOT TSUMO and all that

If you know poker, the key difference is every combination of cards is a hand in poker and you're wagering your hand value against others, but in mahjong you have to actually form a real hand going 1 tile at a time and the first one to do so wins the hand and collects points based on the hand worth.
As a tile gets discarded though, a player can steal it to complete a portion of their hand, and if they steal it to finish their hand, you have to pay out all of the points. It makes it turn into a minefield game halfway through where you're trying to still complete your hand while avoiding dealing in to the others.
Since you need some type of structure to your hand and people can see your discards and the sets you stole tiles to complete, there's a good deal of predicting what type of hands your opponents are making to keep yourself safe. Adding on to that, since good players can suss out what you're making easily if you're too obvious, there's a good amount of mindgames with disguising what you're doing in order to trick people into dealing in.

As for scoring, you can fit multiple patterns in a hand, get dora tiles (literally just tiles that each one increases your score), or make some specific patterns that are worth a lot (like a full flush) to make good hands. The scoring system is exponential, so shit hands are basically worth no points compared to even a decent hand, and shit like a yakuman (basically a royal flush) can end the game in a single hand it's worth so much. The drama and theatrics comes from getting those mindgames to pull through to win a hand or making those huge scoring hands like yakuman

You dont play mahjongg to Ron, you play mahjongg to make your opponent discard a tile he really needs when hes in tsuomo

Ron becomes a lot more important at high levels when you want to make sure you don't lose these juicy 1sts

This little 2han 2900 ron suddenly matters a lot more when it's on your rival, 5800 difference.