Notes From The Tiger’s Cave

The most common form of Japanese mahjong is called “riichi maajan” (commonly rendered in English as “reach mahjong”). Like many other things, mahjong did not originate in Japan, but the Japanese imported it (from China) and then set about improving and perfecting the game. The result was “riichi mahjong”.

Riichi mahjong has several features which are absent in the original Chinese game. For example, in the Chinese game, everybody tosses their discard tiles into the centre of the table, but in the Japanese game you have to line up your discards in an orderly row in front of you. Your discard row provides the other players with useful information about what you are doing with your hand. Also, you cannot complete your hand with another player’s discard tile if the tile is the same as one of your own discarded tiles. This adds a dimension of calculation to the game that is absent in the Chinese version.

In addition, in the Japanese “riichi” game a player can “buy the right” to complete his hand on another player’s discard by paying 1,000 points and declaring, “Riichi!” Once you have declared “riichi” you cannot change your hand, so when it is your turn, if you have declared “riichi” and you don’t need the tile that you take from the wall, you have to discard it no matter how risky it may be.

So why would you want to go “riichi”?

Because you may have a hand that is ready to complete, but which lacks any special combinations (called “yaku” in Japanese). Building “yaku” into your hand gives you the right to go out on another player’s discard tile and also increases the value of your hand.

So, if you do not have any “yaku”, you might want to “pay for a yaku” by declaring “riichi” in the hope that someone will discard the tile you need.

Here are some other reasons why you might declare “riichi”:

1. to increase the value of your hand. You may already have one or two “yaku” in your hand, and one or two bonus tiles. By declaring “riichi” you may be able to get your score up into a higher bracket and earn more points if you go out.

2. to gain access to the “ura dora”. At the beginning of every hand of mahjong a tile (”mekuri-pai”) is turned over in the tile wall to indicate a random “bonus tile”. The bonus tile is the “next one up” in the same suit as the “mekuri-pai” - so if it is the 3-of-Coins, then the bonus tile will be the 4-of-Coins and so on. If you declare “riichi” and complete your hand, you can also use the tile underneath the “mekuri-pai” (i.e. the “ura dora”) as another bonus-indicator.

3. to frighten the opposition. Maybe your hand is not worth much, but it can sometimes be an effective strategy to bluff by declaring “riichi”. Maybe the other players will be afraid of giving you the tile you need and so will be forced to break up their hand in order to discard “safe” tiles. (Note, this tactic can backfire if not used with discretion…)

4. to take advantage of “kan”. Sometimes players declare 4-of-a-kind combinations. This is called “kan”. When a “kan” is declared, the player takes a tile from the back of the wall and adds it to his hand (to make up for the tile that was melded to make “kan”). When this happens, another “mekuri-pai” is turned over. Now, if you declare “riichi” and complete your hand, you will be able to check two “ura dora” tiles for potential bonus points in your hand. This increases your chances of getting a “lucky” high score. It can also be intimidating to the opposition if you declare “riichi” in response to somebody else’s “kan”.

5. to psychologically “crush” an opponent who has just declared “riichi”… This is a risky move, but it is often worth holding back a “riichi” declaration until somebody else declares “riichi”. By immediately declaring “riichi” after another player has declared, you deflate the impact of their declaration - and if you go out first the other player may feel that the luck is not with him, and how you FEEL in mahjong can be crucial to winning or losing…

These are just some very basic tactics for declaring “riichi” in Japanese mahjong. Mahjong is an intensely fluid game and therefore very tactical. If you want to improve your game it is essential that you learn to be observant and flexible in your approach. Even something as simple as declaring “riichi” is fraught with tactical implications depending on the particular situation at the moment when you are ready to declare.

 

At the beginning of this year SFI launched an ecommerce store where you can sell your own stuff as well as buy both new and second hand items.

http://www.tripleclicks.com/bargains

There are several great features to this site that are worth mentioning.

1. It is cheap - starting at just 19 cents a listing - and easy to list your items for sale.
2. You don’t have to relist items or pay anything extra if your stuff has not sold after the first week on the site.
3. Tripleclicks acts an escrow between the buyer and seller.
4. People from many different countries can view the listings in their own local currency.
5. You can use up to 700 words and three photos to describe your item.
6. Tripleclicks accepts a wide variety of payment methods.

Tripleclicks offers the ideal solution for people looking for a quick and easy way into Internet marketing. You can test what sells by posting it on the Tripleclicks site before committing to selling it on your own website.

For anybody who is starting an Internet business from scratch, http://www.tripleclicks.com/bargains offers a nice way to generate some income which could go towards funding your monthly expenses.

Also, anybody who joins Tripleclicks through your links becomes your affiliate for life and will generate a commission for you everytime they buy something on the site. So it makes sense both to post items on the site that are likely to sell, and tell as many people about it as possible in the hope of (1) selling your goods and of (2) recruiting new affiliates to join Tripleclicks

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Tripleclicks Goes Japanese!

Last night I posted my first item on the Tripleclicks site. It was, of course, a Japanese mahjong set and it is on offer there for a nice low price of just $35 (plus shipping and handling), i.e. $10 cheaper than you can get it on my website at http://japanese-mahjong.com/standardmjset.html ;-).

Standard Japanese Mahjong SetI’ll be adding some more Japanese mahjong and other games-related items in due course.In the meantime, to check out the mahjong set, run a search for “Japanese mahjong” on the site after clicking this link:http://www.tripleclicks.com

 

The Japanese manga comic series Akagi follows the exploits of its eponymous hero at the Japanese mahjong table… 

 In one game, called Washizu Mahjong, Akagi has to stake his blood while playing with a Japanese mahjong set in which three quarters of the tiles are made of glass.Playing with transparent mahjong tiles means that the players can follow each other’s moves and see how close they are to winning.

This obviously affects the way the players play the game and interact with each other. In mahjong you can complete your hand either by collecting the winning tile yourself, or by claiming it off another player when he throws it away. But in a game where you can see three quarters of the tiles you are far less likely to throw a tile that somebody needs, or to go out on a tile that somebody throws…

In short, you have to try to win on your own, while keeping a close eye on the opposition. You become more aware of how the others play the game, and more self-reliant in seeking to win the game with your own resources.

Why Adapting To Transparency Is The Best Internet Marketing Strategy

A similar situation exists on the Internet where the Internet marketing strategy of every single website owner is open to a large degree of scrutiny from other marketers, and where everything that one player does can be seen and imitated by another.Of course, in a few cases of utter brilliance we scratch our heads and wonder, “How the blazes did he do that?” It is as if the player had his hand stacked with a large percentage of non-transparent tiles!!

When developing a viable Internet marketing strategy, you can take advantage of the transparency of the Internet both in researching the best internet marketing strategies and in promoting your own website.

Internet Marketing Research: Don’t Be Afraid To Look Through the Glass Tiles And Read Your Opponent’s Hand!

Google is a wonderful tool in helping you to track down websites that are operating in a similar niche market to your own. What do the top sites look like? What are their Alexa rankings? What insights can you glean from them? DO NOT copy and paste their stuff to your own website, because you will be breaking copyright law - and remember, in a transparent market you will most likely be found out! All the website owner has to do is run a Google search and he or she will be on to your case…

What you can do, however, is learn from your competitor’s website and use what you found as inspiration to help you develop your own unique product.

Turn An Unavoidable Circumstance Into A Money-Spinning Virtue

Seeing as it is inevitable that your opposition will also come and check out your site, it is meet and apposite that you turn an inescapable circumstance into an undeniable virtue.

Seeking to protect your copy with copyright notices is jejune and defunct. Seeking to control your copy by insisting that it stay on your site is downright perverse and obtuse.

The way to take advantage of transparency on the Internet is to give your copy away to all and sundry!

All you have to do is either, add your own link and author info to the bottom of everything you post on your site, and INVITE visitors to copy your page to their site, complete with link and all.

Another way to do this - actually, an even better way - is to go to creativecommons.org, get yourself a Creative Commons Licence and slap it on the bottom of every single page on your site.

Then, when people copy your stuff they will take the CC licence complete with link back to your site with them. It is quite possible that people who read your article on someone else’s site will see the CC licence and take your article and put it on their site…

Also, your page will appear in the Creative Commons listings.All this equals links back to your site, which adds up to more publicity, higher search engine rankings and more traffic. And it didn’t cost you a penny!!

In an upcoming post I’ll talk about some way that you can also try to cloak your online activities… remember, the Akagi mahjong set was only 75% transparent!!.

David Hurley

Internet Marketing Strategies

If you are a complete beginner when it comes to Internet marketing strategies and are wondering where to begin, my advice would be to build your own Internet marketing strategy around a clearly defined niche market.

If you are wondering how on earth you can choose your niche market, let me tell you my own mini success story, which happened before I had even got around to thinking about what an Internet marketing strategy might involve. I was making money before I had heard of anything like “keyword phrases” or “search engine optimization”!!

I succeeded simply because I tripped over a highly defined, but viable, niche market.OK, to tell the story, I need to track back to September 1990, when I began teaching English at a certain English language school here in Hiroshima.

Japanese Mahjong

In one of my first evening classes one of the students, a certain Mr Noda, asked me what I wanted to do in Japan. I replied that I wanted to play mahjong!

“Oh,” he said, “I can teach you to play…”

And, that was, to borrow a line from the end of Casablanca, “the beginning of a beautiful relationship…” (You can read about our endless mahjong adventures on this blog, if you really really want to!)

Actually, what Mr Noda, and one of his classmates, Mr Yoshimoto, had in mind was a regional variation of Japanese mahjong, called “Sannin-uchi maajan”, or “Japanese Three-Player Mahjong“.

For several years I said that I “ought to write a book about it” since there was no literature in English about the three-player game.

However, being young and dissolute, I much preferred the idea of talking about writing books than actually writing them, preferably while playing mahjong and drinking myself under the table at the same time…

Then the Internet came along!

It proved so much easier to build a website than to write a book! For one thing, mistakes were so much easier to correct after publication that you never had to worry about uploading perfect info from the get-go.

Thus http://japanese-mahjong.com was born!

Having got the rules of the three-player game posted, it then seemed natural to offer some Japanese mahjong sets and accessories. So I teamed up with a local “traditional Japanese games shop” and started to post ads for their sets and accessories on my site.

I never expected to sell anything. I mean, who would buy a Japanese mahjong set from a Japanese supplier and pay Japanese postage rates to get it shipped across the world?

Quite a lot of people apparently!

My website began to show up in searches for things like “Japanese mahjong sets” and people began to buy.

As I say, all this happened before I had any knowledge whatsoever of Internet marketing strategies or keywords and so forth.

In short, I had stumbled upon a nice compact well defined niche market.

So, what does all this tell us?

Firstly, you can make money out of your hobby or passion!

Secondly, you don’t have to be a marketing wizard to succeed online!

Thirdly, if you have a well defined niche market, keywords will crop up naturally and people who are in the market for what you are offering will find your site via the search engines.

David Hurley

Internet Marketing Strategies