Monday WWYD

07/14/2025

Following the previous post Thought on going forward , today is the first Monday that we are going to talk about a scenario in my game. Thank you for being here after all.

ARML C1 Session 1- Game 3/4 , Current standing point {-16}, Akanashi rule (no red doras) East 2 of South Game. Repeat 0, left-over Riichi stick 0. Turn 6, Dora: North

This is the screenshot from the ARML game from last Sunday.

The session started tough, I got a negative 2nd place, an a little more negative 3rd place, and this is the third game. As starting dealer, my first dealer turn was quickly finished by shimo tsumo-ed a 500/1000. Not the worst thing in the world. At turn 4, kami quickly riichied, after tedashied the pair of 6 of characters. Now that our hand is 1-shanten, we drew a 3p here. Considering the two 4p appeared in the discard, two doras in the discard, I decided to push the 3p. And as you would expect, the 3p dealt in to a riichi + 123 sanshoku + ura 1 = 8000, hitting me to be the one who needs to struggle climbing up from the well.

Now that I'm reviewing this situation in front of my computer, I think this very specific push/fold decision became the fatal blow of the game.

With the regret, I consulted NAGA the beloved AI.

NAGA - Balanced ver. chose to discard 7m.

Obviously, if NAGA was in this game, it would not deal in into this hand (at least in this round).

Indeed, with 6m pair cut from hand, and 4m discard from last turn, 7m is absolutely safe. Not only it's safe, I failed to notice that the 6m and 9m are both two discarded, leaving only 4 tiles for this 78-ryanmen shape.

Our potential point value should also be included in the thought process. Since there's no aka-dora, it would be generally harder to accumulate value, especially when the dora north is cut twice. This current hand of ours lacks value, the most we can see is a riichi+pinfu or a riichi+tanyao.

And each of those route requires good draw: for riichi pinfu we need to draw either 7m, 8m, 2s, 5s, or 6s: after drawing those, we face either -> one of the worst ryanmen (56s) or waiting on the half-gone ryanmen (78m). So either way, the expectation of the hand is not too high.

Maybe! Maybe NAGA is seeing this 3p as a route for 234 sanshoku mawashi.

That not only avoided the half-gone ryanmen, discard the relatively safer tiles, and opens up a new route for getting even more values!

My takeaway for today is, even when our hand also looks good from the first glance, we might need to look twice to assess if it's actually that good to push. And if not, we better cut the relatively safe ones, take some breath, and find another way out.

Another note is that I'm surprised NAGA labels 3p as more dangerous than almost anything but 78p despite the 4p in the discard. Maybe that is judged by the fact that no pinzu tiles has been discard before riichi? If you know the reasoning or math behind this assessment, feel free to leave in the comments, I'm eager to learn from you.

Picture of the day

Soba noodle with baked sesame sauce!