Twilight Zone Mahjong

Friday 31st October
Kodama Jansou
Hiroshima

After finding out that Dave was unavailable, Hide contacted me to tell me that he had the day off so he contacted Noda and we got an early game of Mahjong underway.

It started with me, Noda and Hide, with Kiyo joining us later after he finished watching his favorite TV drama, apparently about a “host club”. I pressed Hide for more info, but there was none coming. Apparently Kiyo has some interesting hobbies.

Anyways things got underway very quickly, with me flying out to an early lead getting up to Rianshi on my first Oya-ship, after taking Noda’s Oya away from him. However Hide dominated the rest of the match to win the first round in strong fashion, with Noda absorbing most of the damage.

Then we started our seesaw battle, with me winning the next two games and Hide taking the brunt of the damage putting me ahead. Hide then won game four to make the game close.

Kiyo showed up for the fifth game which started off in a very unusual way. After the last game ended I slipped off to the bathroom , and they distributed the tiles while I was away. But when I got back and counted my tiles I had only 12, which is a problem, but since I was clearly uninvolved they didn’t mind me grabbing number 13. However the real problem was that Noda himself had 14 tiles, picking up a Chombo in quick fashion.

Hide won game five as well, moving back into the lead. Game six was the one game all evening where Noda finished up, with me second and in the positive to take the lead back.

Hide won game 7 to take the lead back, and I took game 8 to move to within two points for the race of the evening and Noda took leave of us, with a rare poor evening finishing on -104, with 7 games in the negative and a Chombo.

With Noda gone Kiyo really got into his groove. He took game 7, but I was well positive on +28, which meant that Hide went from first to -4 all at once.

Kiyo won game 10 to end the evening, and make the results for the evening a reverse of the yearly scores, with me in first and positive, Kiyo second and positive, Hide in third and in the negative, and Noda a distant fourth.

The highlights for the evening were the high number of Rianshi’s with Oya’s really controlling play, lots of quickly ending hands, and a number of Yakuman Tenpais but no Yakuman finishes.

Here are the scores:

Kenyon: -18, +41, +42, -8, -11, +5, -23, +47, +28, -31 = +72
Kiyo: –, –, –, –, -5, -24, +4, -23, +53, +28 = +33
===
Hide: +73, -31, -37, +20, +38, -26, +28, +12, -81, +3 = -1
Noda: -55, -10, -5, -12, -22*, +45, -9, -36, –, — = -104

* Noda’s chombo

KC