Tag Archives: texas hold em

Mahjongs at Dawn

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Friend, mahjong ally, and translator kransom is currently in Japan, and in a conversation online he mentioned to me the fact that Texas Hold ’em has a similar reputation in Japan that Japanese-style mahjong has in America. In other words, it has a small but devoted following where if you say to someone that you know how to play Texas Hold ’em, they’ll get really excited and invite you to play, possibly showing off their Real Authentic poker set in the process. Having a passing familiarity with Texas Hold’em and more of an understanding of mahjong, I can see why they would have a similar exotic and wild appeal. They’re both games where you have to manage your luck.

The only thing that’s missing for Japan is an Akagi equivalent, an intensely dramatic series that thrills you into loving poker. If such a thing could be produced in the US, then the circle would be complete.

Thinking about mahjong as a storytelling device however, I realize that there is an inherent “flaw” of sorts with the game that doesn’t quite exist in Texas Hold ’em, and that is mahjong’s inability to naturally come down to a one-on-one situation. That’s not to say that a 1v1 battle is impossible, but mahjong is inherently a four-player game, with a strange three-player variant if you’re one man short, but no long-standing rules for two players. As a result, mahjong stories have to go through great efforts to transform the game into a duel, whether it’s coming up with an entirely new (and untested) rule set (Ten, Shin Janki), pushing two of the players into supporting or even essentially non-existent roles, or modifying it into a 2v2 game. Texas Hold ’em however can start with a large group and as more and more players lose all of their money, the game can end up in a 1v1 with no wild changes made to the basic rules of the game.

So Texas Hold ’em has potential, though I think anyone who’s seen games knows that. Make it a series about female poker players who really enjoy each others’ company if you have to.

Speaking of, I realize that Saki prefers to have all four players in a mahjong game be their own characters, as opposed to lackeys for more prominent figures in the story, and is kind of an exception as a result. That route is, of course, also a good one.

The Illusion of Equality is the Best Equality! …At Least in Mahjong

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In the past year, as I learned to play mahjong, I’ve had quite a few opportunities to play against people I know, whether it’s online or in live settings. Sometimes I win, many times I lose, and though I’m sure I’ve improved, I can’t tell you what strengths I have as a player, if any at all. I honestly have no idea. I also had a revelation that I have absolutely no idea if I’m better than any of my peers or vice versa.

When I think about it though, this is actually a strength of mahjong. Unless an opponent is significantly better than you, it’s actually very difficult to gauge who is the stronger player. If I had to hazard a guess as to why this is the case, I’d say that it has to do with 1) the large influence luck has on the game and 2) the fact that you can only see results, and not the process through which they succeeded.

Both factors manifest themselves, for example, when an opponent declares riichi. If you’ve watched mahjong anime, this is when a character throws a white stick on a table to indicate that his hand is “about to win,” sort of like declaring “Uno,” except it’s optional and you get bonus points for it. At this point, an opposing player has two basic choices: break up their own hand to avoid dealing into the opponent’s hand (in Japanese-style mahjong, a player cannot win off of a tile they already discarded, so you can “play it safe” by discarding things they have already discarded), or continue to build your hand towards victory, at the risk of losing. You either prioritize winning, or not losing. In other words, you attack or defend, advance or retreat.

You can tell to a certain extent what another player is doing, as there are situations where certain tiles are considered “dangerous,” particularly because none have previously been discarded, but there’s no guarantee. So when a player manages to avoid dealing into the riichi player’s hand, you might wonder, are they actually destroying their hand to avoid losing, are they getting lucky with their discards, or are they actually that good? Is it luck? Is it skill? Can you even tell the difference? Watching a replay will give you some of this information, but trying to figure this out in-game is another matter entirely.

Given the random nature of the game, sometimes good tiles are dealt and sometimes you get garbage, but the real influence comes from a combination of luck and the illusion of luck, derived  from being able to read only so much information. At the same time, luck is not an all-consuming factor, as the beauty of mahjong is that even if you’re doing terribly, you always feel like you have some control of the game, coming down to that simple choice again of whether to attack or to defend, to go for victory, or to cut your losses. It’s vaguely similar to Texas Hold ’em  (whose rules I just learned the other day) in that respect.

The result of not being able to tell who’s actually a better player is that the game feels more fair, even if it isn’t, and it’s exciting to not be able to tell who has the greatest chance of winning. It makes every game exciting.