Playdate: Mahjong Mornings II

Loving this series - you have already learned the two most important things to get you started IMO (the difference between an open & closed hand, and what Riichi is). Preamble was a ton of fun, and it's good seeing you start to figure out your strategies and recognise the yaku.

As for clients, I would actually recommend playing within one of the Yakuza games if you want to practise against AI - their presentation is great and some of the more recent entries also label the tiles in English for clarity. I'd avoid Judgement as that uses a variant (wareme mahjong). Honestly outside of that, if you want a decent client (especially one with an active playerbase), you're going to find it hard to avoid anime girl avatars. Heck, I have quite a few hours in "Mahjong Sexy Girls Battle" on Steam because it was one of the few viable options at the time outside of Yakuza. It's not ideal but it is what it is.

Also it's not too late to rename the series "This Is The Ron" yet.

This might've been discussed in the video already or someone else already mentioned in the podcast, but just fyi, pon I believe is translated from "pong", which means "touch" in chinese, which is what you call out when playing mahjong in chinese :)

@janman, @benpack: If you both do switch to Mahjong Soul, you can still play versus AI. Here's the steps:

1. Go to "Friendly Match"
2. Set the Length to "Vs AI"
3. You probably want to set the "Thinking Time" to 300.
4. Hit Create
5. Hit Start

Alternatively, if you want to verse each other but still have AI. You can:

1. Set the Length to anything other than "Vs AI" (East Only is recommended)
2. Hit Create
3. Invite Ben. You can do so by inviting him as a friend or by sending him the room link. Both options are on the right side.
4. Click Add AI.
5. Then start.

You might want get that stuff set up off screen, 'cause I think people may be able to find rooms and join them.

Hope you both keep this series going!

A lot of these terminologies confuse me a little, as I am used to playing Chinese Mahjong (specifically in Cantonese), but some of the basics seem to carry over.

A basic thing to always keep in mind is that in order to win, you need 4 "sets" of Straights or Triples and then a Pair, which roughly translates to "Eyes" from Cantonese. Your hand starts off with 13 tiles, but you win with 14 cards, which makes the math up there work (4x3=12 tiles, plus a pair, equals 14). Jan nailed it at one point that it makes it harder to win when you don't have your "Eyes" already set up because now you can only win from one tile, whereas if you had a Straight, it's quite possible you can win from two different tiles (ie - if you had a 4 and 5 in addition to your "Eyes", you could win with a 3 or 6 tile). So as tempting as it might be, it would still be advantageous to pass on a Triple pon opportunity to keep your "Eyes" in tact.

One thing that I'm not 100% sure translate over both versions, but seems like it does, is that most seasoned players will not recognize a certain hand as a "winning" hand, unless they sometimes allow it for a beginner. Generally the higher level players will go for hands of just one suit (Honor tiles are an exception), in which case you can have both Straights and Triples. However, if you are mixing suits, then you should stick strictly to only Straightsor onlyTriples. I'll try and make a visual below.

C = Circles, S = Sticks, M = Characters

1) 1C/1C/1C 3C/4C/5C 7C/8C/9C 5C/6C/7C "Eyes"

2) 9S/9S/9S 2M/3M/4M 5C/5C/5C 3S/3S/3S "Eyes"

3) 1C/2C/3C 4S/5S/6S 7S/8S/9S 4M/5M/6M "Eyes"

So the first hand is acceptable since it only contains Circle tiles, and the third hand is also okay because although it contains all 3 suits, the hand only contains Straights. The second hand would not be acceptable in many situations because there are multiple suits, and a mix of Straights and Triples; I was allowed to win with this hand when my Grandma was first teaching me to play, because I was a newbie. Also, winning with a hand composed of only one suit usually results in higher winnings as well, compared to one with 2 or more suits. And drawing the winning tile will result in higher winnings than taking it as someone else's discard tile. And if a player wins by drawing the tile they need by themselves, everyone pays the same amount. If a player, let's say Player A, wins by taking a discard tile from player C, everyone pays player A but player C needs to pay more than the other two because they threw out the tile that allowed player A to win. If you thought there was a lot of rules to determine a winning hand, there's even more to determine the amount of points/money the winning player gets, including what round it is and even which seat you're in.

I will leave out special hands that you guys have seen like Thirteen Orphans as those hands are heavily luck based and can be hard to win with as you need to collect all the cards by drawing them yourself (closed hand).

Hope this was somewhat valuable, and didn't repeat any information that had been previously provided.

It's a testament to Giant Bomb that I enjoy these streams. Also weirdly hungry for Olive Garden.

am i correct in seeing that, in the second game, they were screwed either way? the opponent looks to have 7,8 so if they discarded either the 6 or the 9 they lose? if so, that's hilarious

I thawed out some minestrone to eat while watching this