Quote:
Originally Posted by Sol Falling
Certainly I play mahjong myself, I mentioned my tenhou ID in a bit of a non-sequitur not too long ago. Dumping safe tiles is not really relevant in Shizu's specific case because the opponent who won off her was in damaten. Defending against damaten is really more about detecting when your opponents' reach tenpai and estimating the value of their hands once they have it. Then, certainly, you proceed to play safe tiles, but the nature of furiten in riichi mahjong actually means that safe tiles tend to become more available the longer you spend in betaori, and the majority of wins against opponents in betaori tends to be within the first two rounds of tenpai, against opponents who either decide to push or have no safe tiles. Unless there are multiple players pushing/attacking, it is quite extraordinarily unlucky to be hit by a player you are against in full betaori. Meanwhile, if you are under attack by multiple players and are completely out of safe tiles, that's when you make a bet on estimating your opponents' hand values (open hands are good) and try to play into a cheaper player's hand.
As far as going for quick fast hands, you are never 'forced' to do so unless you are flat out gambling (i.e. betting on luck). Only certain hand shapes are suitable for going after quick wins, if you're in a defensive position the rest of the time you should betaori. Regardless of the narrowness of your lead, if you have a poor starting hand it is pure recklessness to try to force a winning hand out of it.
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Sorry I had neglected to reply to that. My bottom line was really that yes, there is an objective and optimal way of going about playing defensively, and yes it works most of the time if you commit to it. And yes, if you play defensively you shouldn't be dealing into hanemans. However shit does happen, and that's why when we look to the performance of a mahjong player you look at his aggregate statistics rather than the results of a single hand because of all the hidden information going around. Heck this is true
to an extent even when analyzing the performance of open information games like chess.
In any case I really feel like we (as in, everyone in this thread) are going into cyclical arguments with this whole debacle.