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SLOPER ON MAH-JONGG

By Tom Sloper (トム·•スローパー)
2017年 2月 19日
Column #665

Japanese Modern (riichi/dora). On Feb. 18 and 19, there was a Riichi Mahjong tournament organized by the Pacific Mahjong League and Los Angeles Pride of Mahjong in Gardena, California. I didn't compete, but came to see the final round and the award ceremony.


Top left: in LAPOM's Dojo room, PML organizer Ryan Gan tests the camera setup on his laptop while PML owner Kira Nebilak looks on. The five cameras (yellow circles) are arranged so as to show each player's tiles, and a top-down view of the table.

Top right: tournament attendees, in LAPOM's office, watch the action on closed-circuit TV. There were two closed doors between the players and the viewers, but to make sure the players didn't get any information, we were careful not to cry out in excitement when a player neared mahjong.

Bottom left: the TV showed the top-down view at upper left, which gave us a view of the discards. On his laptop, Ryan pressed number keys 1, 2, 3, or 4 to display the view of the current player's tiles. This truncated image doesn't show all the tiles, but they were visible on the screen.

Bottom right: Owners of the dojo look on with pride as the ceremony concludes the tournament proceedings. First prize went to Teppei; he got a trophy, and the other winners chose a prize from the table.

Players came from far and wide to meet and compete. As well as Northern California, there were players from Colorado and New York. We can expect to see players from Europe and Japan at the World Riichi Championship (wrc2017vegas.com), organized by the USPML (the US Professional Mahjong League) and the WRC Committee (worldriichi.org). I teach on weekdays, but I hope to be there for the weekend bit!

West-coasters can meet up with the Pacific Mahjong League by checking my Find Players board or the PML's Facebook page, and east-coasters can visit the website of the USPML at uspml.com.

麻雀



Thanks to Daniel "Dasuke" Moreno!

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See Tom Sloper's interview at sinovision.net:
http://video.sinovision.net/?id=24552&cid=122
http://video.sinovision.net/?id=24550&cid=122

Links about Japanese-style mah-jongg: