Just a short post today, as I am absolutely bushed from the weekend's adventures, but I thought it might be nice to revisit my tournament goals and sum up how we went.
1) To get a net positive score for the tournament
Success! I rubberbanded back and forth around the zero mark throughout, despite a couple of games in which I felt like I should really have scored a not better than I ended up scoring. I managed to get ahead and stay ahead thanks to my two wins the last two games, which also shot my up the rankings so that I ended up in 17th place overall, just squeaking into the top 25%, which was a very pleasant surprise. One of my mahjong students (who mafe it clear by leading me all weekend that 'student' is no longer the appropriate word!) also achieved a positive score, which is an improvement for both of us, and though I'm not at all surprised considering how much better we've gotten at this game lately, I am a bit chuffed, to say the least.
2) Get one of the top ten match scores of the tournament
I did not even get close to this one. But it was always a little aspirational, so I'm not that upset about it. I was left 20,000 points shy of making the list and even my two best scores combined fell well short of the best score overall, which was a whopping 70,100, which I'm just glad I wasn't on the receiving end of. Scores like that in a zero-sum game rarely have happy stories behind them.
3) Not to end up on the chombo list
Despite a couple of moments of panic that I had perhaps made an error before calling riichi, and a couple of flagrant etiquette breaches caused partly by nerves and partly by exhaustion, I managed to stay off of the penalty list. One of my compatriots wasn't so fortunate, having misread a tile and claimed an invalid win, but one error in the 32 games that we collectively played over the weekend isn't such a bad result.
4) For everyone to be willing to play mahjong again afterwards
I don't think anyone who turned up at this tournament went away disliking the game. It was played in good spirits and with good cheer and the love of the game can be infectious in those sorts of environments. I'm sure we'll all be around a table again some time soon, trying to take our mahjong to the next level now that we've had a snapshot of just how good some of Europe's best players can be. That said, I suspect this was probably the last big tournament for some of the gang, but we'll just wait and see how we're all feeling once the dust has died down and caught up on some sleep.
Speaking of which, I'm going to go work on that deficit now. Who knew that playing games could feel so much like hard work?
0 Comments