Friday 20th April: David Back On Top

This was a long sesson at Kodama that can be divided into two distinct though unequal halves.

The early, shorter, half was dominated by Noda and the longer and later half was dominated by David.

David arrived in time for the second game at a point in the evening when Kenyon was making the early running having come top in the first on a modest +18. Noda took over in the second and finished on +32 with Kenyon second and in the black and David taking early hits and finishing bottom.

Noda then took complete control of the third game, to finish the only winner and more than doubling his second game score. However, it turned out that Noda had peaked on +87 as the fourth game saw the beginning of David’s winning run that took him from -54 to +136 before he too, just like Noda, had to give a bit back to the market at the end!

Noda gave back just 13 points to finish on +74 and halve his deficit on the Grand Accumulated Results Table before cashing in for the evening.

This was David’s first week of teaching both morning and evenings at Jogakuin and he was expecting the shock of evening work to tell its own baleful story at the mahjong table. As it was, the first TOEFL lesson of term saw him teaching away with a shocking degree of start-of-term enthusiasm right through to the end of the class, which is why he arrived late at the mj table.

Jaime took the brunt of the punishment but staged a last game mini-recovery to whittle back the negative score and keep himself in the black.

The details are a bit foggy now, so I’ll leave it to the score sheet to do the talking:

David –, -35, -19, +53, +34, +5, +98, -29 = +107
Noda -13, +32, +68, -13, –, –, –, — = +74
===
Kenyon +18, +8, -24, -34, -42, +63, -38, -5 = -54
Jaime -5, -5, -25, -6, +8, -68, -60, +34 = -127

David Hurley
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