I popped into Bizenya for a bowl of “yasai ramen” and then headed across Peace Park on my way to play mahjong with Mr and Mrs Nakano. They had heard about me from a former student of mine and Mrs N had contacted me by e-mail to arrange a game of mahjong which we played last autumn. A whole year passed before I had opportunity to take up her invitation to go and play a second game.
Unfortunately the fourth player pulled out so we had to play 3-player mahjong. Mrs N had never played the 3-player game before and Mr N was not so keen on it as on the standard 4-player game. Their old and well used mahjong set also does not have enough score tallies for the three player game. (In the three-player each player starts with 45,000 points, whereas in the standard four-player game each player starts with 25,000 points.) We agreed to begin with 35,000 points with a break-even level of 40,000 points and make the best of the scoring as we went, with Mr N working out the scores from the standard four-player game. The result was that some hands were scored too highly but still the game worked out well enough.
Mr N won the first game, Mrs N won the second and I won the third. Mrs N stole the second really (!) by going out on Suuanko Tanki which sent me into the red. However, in the third I ended up with most of the score tallies in my tray and the final score was:
Mr N +36
David +36
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Mrs N -72
I don’t quite know how I managed it because Mrs N and I spent most of the last game gossiping about a mutual acquaintance of ours who goes by the name of Mr Crowfield and who was a member of my Thursday morning class at Ajina Dai until he took it upon himself to undergo a training course for some form of gainful employment… His manifold exploits in the field of chivalry were celebrated.
Good luck Kurasuda-san and if you have chance sometime in the future, please come back to our class on Thursday mornings!
David Hurley
japanese-mahjong.com
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