Noda Marches On As Foreigners Sink In The Mire

This was not a good night for foreign players! It was probably all the fault of the Poor Little Cypriot. When Noda was on his first hand as Oya the PLC moved off Tempai to try and build a pure bamboo hand, a tactic that backfired and that went against every principle of play when Noda is Oya!

While the PLC did indeed end up with 13 Bamboo tiles in his hand, he was still one off Tempai when Noda went out. Worse still, Noda went on to rack up about eight or so hyaku tembou, and by the time he relinquished the Oya the PLC was in hock to the tune of about 30,000 points. It was thoroughly deserved, and the score for the first game tells the story: Noda +116, David -116, Ray 0!

The second game saw one of the recoveries of the year, however, as the PLC found himself with a Suuanko-Tanki wait on 3-Coins, but also with the option of going out on 2 or 5-Coins. Ray threw the 3-Coins and handed the PLC a much needed 65,000 points, which could possibly be the record single hand score for the year.

Hide arrived in time for the third game, and it turned out that the foreigners’ fortunes, such as they were, had peaked. Ray never got past zero, and the PLC never got that far, -14 being the best cumulative score of his evening.

Noda won the third and fourth, and called it an evening on a healthy +209, a score which ensured that he had broken through the +1000 point barrier in style.

I’m sure that Ray and the PLC would have been happy to have called it a night at this stage too, but Kayo had arrived and not yet had a game so they stayed and both continued on the downward slope as Hide won the fifth and Kayo the sixth games.

The result was that Ray took the “worst result” from Jaime by racking up a total score of -193. It was a bit harsh really, when you consider that 65 of those points came from one discard!

The Grand Accumulated Results Table is beginning to look rather embarrassing as the top four players are all Japanese and all in the black. All the foreign players are in the red, and the only Japanese player down there with them is the rookie Nobuhiro, and he is moving up the table by default as the foreigners drop below him one by one…

Not only that but Nobuhiro is an improving player who is expected to record a positive finish any time soon…

Noda +116, -3, +59, +37, –, — = +209
Hide –, –, -10, +13, +38, +11 = +52
Kayo –, –, –, –, -9, +45 = +36
===
David -116, +102, -5, -14, -16, -55 = -104
Ray 0, -99, -44, -36, -13, -1 = 193

David Hurley
Japanese Games Shop