Scribbles

I had definitely one of the most interesting mahjong sessions this past Saturday night. After repeated requests from some of the players, we decided to go for a game this past weekend. Aside from me (not an expert to begin with), there were two beginners and an infrequent 13-tile player. Let’s take a look at some of the stats from our 4-quan game:

Total time: 4 hours
First quan: 1.5 hours
Xiang gongs (wrong number of tiles, equivalent of purgator for the game): 2
Za Hu (very rare, player erroneously declares victory): 1.5
Guang hua yuan (aka “stroll in the garden” or lost everything): 1 player, on the very last hand no less, in our 100 point system

For those of you familiar with 16-tile Taiwan style game, these numbers should baffle if not scare you. The most puzzling stat must be the 1.5 “za hu” caused by the two newbies. One person placed a nine tiao in place of his six in a 4-5-6 sequence, and called the win on that hand. We would’ve let it slide had he not “ganged” his six tiao. The egregiousness of it just couldn’t be overlooked. Now for the 0.5, our other beginner had a pretty good excuse: she misread the number characters in her wan sequence. Since she never could read Chinese anyways, we let it slide, and she promptly made up for it by discarding her misreads and recovering with a win for that round.

As for me, I’m not entirely proud of beating up on newbies, but I managed to win 200 points with some lucky hands, including a rare “pong pong hu zi mo”, and a few more zi mo’s that helped pad the score.

All in all, everyone expressed their enjoyment of the night, even the guy who lost it all. Heck, it was pretty awesome company and something we never do. Perhaps a few more of these and we can cut the 4-quan time down to a reasonable number. A few less za hu’s would be most welcome too.