SAN DIEGO - The first day of the year started with a new series of Global Mahjong Tournaments on Mahjong Time. 44 players subscribed hoping to get a medal on their avatar and to gain some golden coins. Maybe due to too much drink before and playing with a hangover, or perhaps the consumption of too many doughnuts (‘oliebollen’, a Dutch tradition), only 31 players made it to the finish. Or was it because of nerves?

Four times 50 minutes of riichi and in a year the level of play has increased significantly. The impression is that last year there has been a tendency to play less Hong Kong and MCR and more RCR. Every day when a Sit&Go tournament is started at 13.00h (Amsterdam/Paris time) that will bring in a bonus prize of 200 golden coins, needed to participate in the GMT’s. And every day it is a RCR-tournament that gets started. Most of these players register for the GMT and the increase of skill, as well as players getting to know each others strategies, is noticeable. The fierce combat, accompanied with the luck in getting a lot of points with dora tiles, led to a ranking after the third round where still 15 players had a chance to become victorious.

Nerves

The leader at that moment, Fury10, either couldn’t keep his nerves or got thrashed: he left the game and was subsequently disqualified. Table partner Irenika took advantage and scored over 40,000 points, enough for a third place (where I had to struggle to get the same amount of table points but didn’t manage to achieve a high score, leaving me empty handed fourth). Second was mika192847, also 13 points but with high scores in the first two rounds. The winner of the first online tournament of 2011 was Oleg72, the only one to manage 14 table points.

Not only Fury10 was disqualified: another 12 players were. And Mahjong Time has acknowledged that these players are to get zero points in the end result, which of course affects the overall ranking. Because of these adapted ranking there is no need for Mahjong News to keep the ‘correct’ one. That can be found now on the pages of Mahjong Time itself (http://mahjongtime.com/mahjong-international-global-rcr-ranking.html).