tacos - Osamuko's Japanese Mahjong Blog

BugMoney Mahjong Tournament Signups

Here is a link to an online tournament missing their last few signups. All the pertinent information can be found on the nicely-designed page, and any questions can be directed to Fuyutsukikaru on Twitter. They may also accept signups for substitute/waiting list players if the brackets are full, so

World Riichi Championship

Super-Late WRC Editorial

When I was asked to write about the WRC 2014 rules, I knew someone would be in for it. I don’t envy the people in charge of setting largely arbitrary rules. A lot of the time it’s a choice between A and B, each with their own pros

Berries and Boss Fights in Bad Vöslau

If you’re a follower of our humble blog, you’d know that the Osamuko community has a solid and active European contingent, who frequently get together on the EMA tournament circuit. Indeed we’ve collected a rather respectable array of tournament wins and rankings, that I’ve often thought

Mahjong League

Hey, You!

Hi guys, this is a small report on the first week of the mahjong league. Over the course of our first week, we’ve logged over 100 unique IDs in games, and by the time I’ve finished writing this, over 200 matches will have been played in this week

Touhou Online Battle

We’ve been playing quite a bit of Touhou Online Battle since it surfaced on /jp/. Ironically enough the link was originally posted in a thread about failed /jp/ projects. It caught on and the server logged about ~10000 matches in the few days before the reset. The game server

A Little Introspection

Hi guys, Tacos here, self-appointed editor of the blag. I had some free time recently so I’m doing some catching up, and I’d like to sort of talk about where we are right now, with regards to the blog and its content. If this sounds familiar, you can

Tournaments

BakaBT Mahjong Tournament Announced

The Slowpoke Express has just arrived bearing news – the 1st BakaBT Mahjong Tournament is a go. As the participants have just been sorted into groups, the tournament kicks off with a league format, probably with a cutoff into further rounds. We’re still rather unclear about the particulars. The tournament

rants

Dog Ate My Homework

Yes, I know it’s been some time since I wrote something. Yes, I do have a decent excuse. Yes, I do know that no excuses will be accepted. We all have things we’d rather be doing than banging out a couple hundred words for the leisurely perusal of

Entertainment

[FotM] Kongai - Mind-reading browser game

Going to unhide all the Flavor of the Month posts, but still gonna tag the title just in case you only want to know about mahjongs and nothing else. I’ve been meaning to write about this awesome game for some time but kept putting it off, partly because I

interviews

Interview with CEO of MahjongLogic

This is a looooooooong overdue update. We decided to get an interview with Mr Jonas Alm, the CEO of MahjongLogic a several months back when it was the Next Big Thing and no one knew what exactly they would unleash upon us. To enjoy this article in its entirety please

/jp/ userscript for mahjong font

This is pretty cool so I’m breaking radio silence to post it. Anonymous delivers again with a userscript to display a mahjong tile font using UTF-8 on /jp/ (or your site of choice, should you choose to enable it elsewhere). This should herald a golden age of in-depth mahjong

EZmodo

This will be a short rant because I am drunk and incoherent. Osamu edit this in the morning. It’s extremely often I read about discussions of various mahjong clients/software, and someone will come out of nowhere and say “but it doesn’t have ________!” As a normal player who

Tournaments

Q for Quarified

Congratulations to Lorizean and our own ron^5 who recently made the cut to represent Germany in the upcoming European Mahjong Championships! We were unable to find any reports of this tournament anywhere online, even though it’s been quite a few days since I was highlighted on IRC while

Entertainment

[FotM] Hyungjun Becomes a Progamer!

All of us have been playing quite a lot of Starcraft:Brood War recently for no reason. None of us actually played the game competitively (in any sense of the word) before – I recall reaching level 5-ish in the Terran campaign before giving up, back when I was twelve, and

Entertainment

FoTM - Strategy Games and other Stuff

While taking a break from feverishly constructing pon palaces and kan keeps, most of us play various strategy games. Osamu found a wordpress plugin that kind of does that blog-in-a-blog thing, so you can read while you read. To keep these posts from getting in the way of the normal

Complete Beginners Guide to Online Mahjong - Part 3 - Playan

That was all you need to know to play, really. For further and more detailed information you can check out detailed rulebooks and stuff. The thing is, although we do love to play and don't mind sharing what we know, there's a huge gap in skill between us and real

Complete Beginners Guide to Online Mahjong – Part 1.5 – Playing on Tenhou

This is a quick and dirty guide to jumping into games on tenhou.net, currently the biggest Japanese mahjong site online. For further information on everything on tenhou I would refer you to Alvin’s tenhou documentation site. Remember to sign his guestbook. Load it up and hit PLAY, and

Complete Beginners Guide to Online Mahjong – Part 2 – How to Not Suck

If you have never played online before or don't really know what to expect, I recommend skipping on to Part 3 and coming back later for the lecture. Now that we've gotten the rules out of the way, I want to give a brief idea of the stuff you will

Complete Beginners Guide to Online Mahjong

Table of Contents Part 1.5 Part 2 Part 3 (well, almost complete) This is the absolute entry-level page for anyone interested in playing Japanese Mahjong online on Tenhou and other sites. If you've always wanted to learn how to play but never really got down to it for lack

Entertainment

10 ADVANCED MAHJONG STRATEGIES FOR THE ADVANCED PLAYER

Always attack, unless you should be defending. Always defend, unless you should be attacking. If you are an expert like me, you can even try attacking and defending at the same time. Only deal tiles that other players cannot use, or you will be helping them form their hands. When

Saki-themed Firefox Personas

Osamu found these some time ago. Kind of distracting at first, but I’m used to them now. When I win a match I can look up and find approval in their eyes, and when I lose they are still there, tirelessly cheering me on. Here’s the link to

tenhou

Bots? In my 7447?

My attention was diverted to a mahjong thread the other day, and something among the posts caught my eye, a welcome change from the usual jaw-dropping, eye-bleeding, rage-inducing tenhou screenshots. There was a certain amount of conjecture regarding the quality of play as well as the amount of bots, or

Mahjong News

whoa

MahjongNews has just released an unofficial list of the best European riichi tournament players of 2009. For some reason, drob is in there. In spot #37. As the only Swede. If I’m not mistaken, this makes him the best Swedish player in Europe. “… since formal EMA riichi tournaments were

Statistics

Statistics: The Value of a Lead

After I started playing mahjong, I learned one thing very fast. It is great to be in the lead. It’s not just great. It is amazingly awesome. You are like a champion looking down on the rabble, watching them scrabble around for crumbs from your table, more often than

Guides

Stuff from around the internets

I’ll come out and be a little honest here. When I started writing for Osamu’s blag I wanted to do something special, to make a difference. There is virtually zero English material on the internet, which is surprising in itself, especially as people are extolling their helpful communities