Quote:
Originally Posted by Kyuu
Of course. Via Riichi, forcing players to trash their hand is most definitely a plus. However, damaten allows you to target specific players, who may end up falling into your trap. Quite frankly, I did not want players to know, that I made it to tenpai (not yet anyways). Personally, losing points via ron - this "ticks" me off. So, on the flipside, I want to piss others off. XD
In a sense, y'treat the different ways of play as "weapons". In b4 Saki-verse.  It's all a matter on how y'use these weapons, and when. |
I did remember one time, when I was dealer at 3rd place, and trailing 1st and 2nd place by about 11-12k each, while 4th place had 2400 points (which went down to 1400 after he declared Riichi). I reached tenpai on the same goaround, on a yakuless doraless ryanmen wait. This is the kind of situation where you don't want to declare Riichi in, because you don't want to accidentally ron off 4th place and blow him away with 2000 points. Yeah you can't "target" the other two players without a yaku, but you can just try to hold to the end or hopefully win by self pick (500 all), and hope that the next hand is big enough for a reversal (as dealer it wouldn't be very hard). And of course if you do have a yaku (say pinfu), then damaten is in order here too.
(On that hand though, whatever I was thinking at that time - probably not something regarding the hand - I just followed my instinct of "oooh shiny button must click", and then clicked on autoron. What do you know - 4th place dealt into me a few turns after. And then I got 3 uradora and got 1st place anyways - which for some reason pissed me off even more than if I just hit for 1500 and stay at 3rd. I don't think I'll make that kind of absentminded decisions in a while
)
Those kinds of situations are pretty exceptional though. Generally unless it's all last and I REALLY need to target someone to improve my placement, or it's near all last and I only need a small amount of points (leading and wants the game over fast, very small difference with nearby players like South 4 of your game - damaten is the best move there, its better to just riichi right away. The chance of winning a good shape Riichi is about the same as the chance of winning a bad shape damaten (since you're going to let 8s pass, it essentially become bad shape), but the expected value of Riichi, after accounting for Ipptasu and Uradora(s), is around same or higher. Adding in that there's less of a chance that someone else wins the hand afterwards, and declaring Riichi comes out as a good deal more profitable than staying silent and waiting for 8s.
Well, taking a look at your table, I can see that if you want to keep the possibility of getting top in mind, you may want to silent tenpai since you don't want 4th place to deal into your takame (8000 minimum 12000 maximum, 100% 2nd place game over). But then you can still let it pass and hope for tsumo, I guess.
EDIT: I took a look at the game log, and found that your hand was 68m 123567p 22467s tsumo 7m. In this case, I'd have definitely declared Riichi here straight away. There's not TOO much danger of blowing away 4th place with this hand, but it's still decently large and can make an impact no matter how you win it, especially since it's only East 4.