Performance Review
We’re doing employee performance reviews in the office at the moment. Typically, a time where you work out what you did well and what you did not so well. The aim being to keep doing what you do well and fix what you didn’t do so well.
Why not review my Mahjong performance at the same time? Anyone who knows me will be aware that my performance at tournaments recently has been pretty poor. When I say recently…I mean twelve months or so. Therefore a performance review is well due!
The first question I need to address is why was I winning before and now losing. I don’t think it’s a case of me or my strategy changing – it’s everyone else has changed! I stayed the same because what I was doing was getting me results. However, everyone else got better and left me behind.
So not changing has resulted in my current stagnant results. To fix this, I need to assess what I’m doing so I can change it. I tweet my scores when I attend tournaments so this has kept a record of my scores. One observation I have noted is that I seem to have two modes.
Mode One: Play conservatively and just lose a little and win a little so I comfortably cruise around the middle of the rankings
Mode Two: Play like a lunatic, win big and lose big!
Neither of these modes seem to be working (obviously). I believe (but please correct me if I’m wrong) the underlying problem is that I am failing to read the situations correctly to know when I should be taking the risks and when I should be pulling back.
This means I’m throwing good hands that I should have pushed on or conversely just going for everything. This results in me losing constantly, because most other European players have grown beyond this error.
How do I fix it? Playing more hands is the obvious thing to do. Online games are the easiest way to achieve that. However, I don’t think they’re as effective as discussing games over a table with players in real life. That can be aim one.
The other thing to do is watch games. Luckily YouTube has plenty of games that I can watch. That’s aim two.
In all good performance reviews, one needs targets by which one can measure success. My first target will be to win another tournament in the next 12 months. However, this won’t be able to measure if I’ve achieved sustained improvement. Therefore, my second target will not to end up in the bottom half of the table in any tournament I participate in.
Let’s just hope I can achieve it!
I wrote a lot about what I wasn’t doing well, so what I have been doing well? That’s easy! Enjoying Mahjong and my Mahjong friends. Every tournament has been massively enjoyable even when I was losing. I’ll keep that up!
