Shin’s Eye #6: Mahjong Psychology and Philosophy (part 2)
These are things that apply when you are playing against a beginner. Since they are just starting, this player will not have the idea of hiding their thoughts and emotions, making it very easy to catch these things. This time I will cover these standards and next time we will go over intermediate players, and then advanced.
For example, in the middle of a hand, one player’s draws and discards may slightly speed up or slow down. So, how can you catch this phenomenon?
It is common in Mahjong, especially for beginners, to think about what they will do after they draw a tile. What I’m getting at, is that with a difficult hand, the time after the draw will be longer and if it is not difficult it will be shorter.
However, speed in hand movements of draws and discards themselves are not based on this. So what is it?
There are a few reasons.
First of all, when direct discards of drawn tiles becomes faster or slower, there are a few conclusions we can make.
The first one is that the player is feeling stress.
This stress is:
A. No good tiles are coming and they are frustrated with this hand that is going nowhere
B. They have a good hand, maybe 3 Lucky Tiles (dora) and are 1-away from Ready, but the last tile they need isn’t coming and they are getting frustrated with that.
Both of these things may cause a player to draw and discard faster than normal.
However, A and B are complete opposite situations. A has a bad hand and B has a great hand. How can we tell which is which?
First, if this is a player shows this stress so easily, they will show opposite emotions as well. When they draw a good tiles, they will have a reaction that shows this. In the situation of A, above, even if some good tiles come, it will take much longer for this reaction to appear than it will for B. But with B, the reaction when a useful tile is drawn is a complete 180. The draws that were quick before become much slower. I’ll explain this more in the next section, but this is because the player wants to call another player’s tile to make their hand Ready (especially if they have 3 Lucky Tiles/dora), so they are worried about the other discards as they play. Specifically, they can pon or chow the tiles of the player to their left, so inevitably they will have to double-check these discards and the speed of drawing their next tile drops.
On the other hand, if they are Ready, then they will be looking for their winning tile and there will often be one beat after the player to their left discards before they start to draw the next tile.
This timing is prevalent even in very strong players. That is because humans see the tile with their eyes and this message is sent to the brain before a decision is made and that message is sent to the hands that will be drawing the tile. As humans, this second of thought can’t be helped. The way to hide this is to make sure that each draw includes enough time for double-checking the previous player’s discard and using the same timing for each draw. However, if each draw is very slow, that is bad manners, so you need to practice this and make your confirmation as short as possible. This is human body physiology.
Many intermediate players go from this step to slowing down their discards to match the draws. They think that if only the draws are a bit slower then all of the things above will be noticed by their opponents.
This is the most important part of this article. When a person is trying to hide something, then that person will show some sort of reaction. Mahjong is a game with a lot of hidden pieces. Because of this, it is important to think of ways to hide things from your opponents and find things that they are trying to hide.
Once you can do this effectively, it will be a key to winning much more often.
We brushed on the topic a few paragraphs ago, but the change of speed of draws and discards are usually because there is a tile that the player wants to call for. This is a bit technical, but when a person’s draws are slower than usual from the very first discard, there is a very high possibility that they want to call for a tile to pon or chow. At this stage in the hand Honor tiles are the most common. You need to catch this and take the proper care by squeezing tiles you think may be useful to them.
Shintaro Kamimura is in C2 League in the Japan Professional Mahjong League and is Grade 2. He runs multiple parlors in Tokyo and is very involved in the ReachMahjong.com Cups.
