Ron2 as a Pro

This summer Garthe and I finally got Pro ID’s on Ron2, JPML’s online mahjong battle site. I chose to play in Ron2’s Riichi Battle room today. Riichi Battle is one of my favorite modes because of the red 5’s, the hidden dora’s and the high level of play. My rating started at only 19,795 today when I started playing and my goal was to move it up. Since I also wanted to get some Mahjong Fight Club in today too I chose to only play 2 games.

There are 2 challenges about playing on Ron2. One is that other players can see which tiles you discarded from your hand and which ones you discarded directly after drawing them. When I reached after my 4th draw -> discard in the last hand of the East Round, no one seemed scared and I ended up discarding someone else’s winner. The other challenge is the masses of people that come to watch every move once they see a “pro” is playing. This is especially bad if your computer ever freezes, leaving the CPU to play for you.

Things ran relatively smoothly as far as that goes and hopefully I didn’t make too many blunders for the 12 people watching me to notice. By the way, when I mentioned “masses” before, that would be for players like Takeo Kojima, not for me 😉

So, most of my chips were riding on a reach, dora-3 hand in the 2nd hand of the South round. Put as my luck was going, this hand wasn’t looking promising either. Until the player across from me let the dora go after ponning my red-5c. This gave me 8000 points and lead to my turn at dealer, which led to… nothing. So I go into the last hand with 21,900 points in 3rd place and 3rd place is how I ended… On to the next game.

This time I kept my head above water. I got a big hand in the East round and went into the South round as dealer with 29,400 points in 2nd place. This was after pushing out the 1st place dealer’s turn with a 2000 point hand. Sweet!
That got even sweeter when I drew my 18,000 point winner. Now, when you have 47k and last place has 8k, what do you do? Do you keep winning and try to bust the player? Or do you play it safe and try to keep the lead until the end?

Well that player got the next deal and reached on the 2nd discard and drew that winner. He still only had 13k after that but I started to get nervous. Sure enough I threw 2 winners to other players and went into the last hand 8000 points behind the 1st place player. And that’s all that she wrote. I got 2nd place, blew by lead again. I’m getting more used to playing online though. At first it was hard to play at home with all the distractions of animals, piled up laundry, and ringing doorbells. Now I’m finding it easier to concentrate and actually think of the game as practice and an important part of my career.

Hope to see you guys on Ron2! I’m playing as ジェン (Jenn) so check http://ron2.jp/ to see if I’m online from time to time. Also we’ll have a new tutorial up as soon as I can finish it. I know that I’ve been saying that for months… Maybe I’ll finally be able to get it up now that I have some more time.