It was an “Old Foreigners” game last Friday. Two of them, David and Jaime, had bought cuban cigars at Kemby’s, or rather at the bar on the second floor of Kemby’s.
We were rather hoping to smoke out the Japanese players on the other tables, but when we got to Kodama jansou we found that we were the only party. Another group turned up a while later, but did not stay for long, perhaps due to the volume of smoke that we puffed out.
Wasn’t it Kipling who said something about mahjong being just a game, but a good cigar is a smoke? This would not be the moment to contract him. I seem to remember as I blazed away that Jaime did rather well out of his cigar, although the non-smoking Ray won the first game, probably before the smoke got in his eyes.
I seem to recall that things did not go so well with The Poor Little Cypriot. The worse piece of luck for him during the evening was when he dropped his cigar into the water that sits at the bottom of a Japanese ashtray. The Poor Little Cypriot had to chop his end off and blaze away all over again.
It was all very distressing. He was vaguely aware that Jaime, as Oya, had gone Pon on the Haku and Hatsu dragons and that Ray had thrown out a Chun earlier on, but when he sought to preserve his Tempai hand by tossing out another Chun he was caught out by Jaime’s (in retrospect) rather obvious Chun-tanki Shosangen wait. What with lighting the cigar and running out of beer all the time, The Poor Little Cypriot really had his hands full.
There was a brief window of lucidity amidst the fug of war when the PLC managed to win the third game, but Ray, the quiet non-smoker, promptly replied with his second win of the evening. It would have been prudent to have called it a night at that point, but we played through four more games, all of which Jaime won, three of them outright.
The result saw Jaime move up into the coveted “Top Gaijin” spot. Ray would have made a new bottom record had not The PLC overtaken him on the way down to finish at the bottom of the table perilously close to breaking into the minus five-hundreds…
Somehow or other, The PLC avoided the ignimony of joining his pals in commiting a Chombo.
And so, at around 3:30am, another blazing good session drew to a close.
Jaime -7, +73, -10, -13, +72,* +39, +21 = +175
===
Ray +19, -8, -22, +21, -50, +5,* -16 = -51
David -12, -65, +32, -8, -22, -44, -5 = -124
* Chombo
David Hurley
http://japanese-mahjong.com
Yes it was not a particularly coherent night, which perhaps allowed some to be more fortunate than others. For the record, Jaime’s chombo was the traditional…waiting for ages to complete a nice little hand, before changing to a more plentiful payout and finally going tsumo on a tile already previously discarded. Ray’s was far simpler and perhaps that makes it more beautiful; he went riichi on an already opened hand.
I am enjoying the spread of (reduced) fortunes of those of us currently swimming against the tide in a Hades tinged inferno…although the gap is now under 200 points between the + and the -. Mind you, I would rather be a red than a black!