PARIS - It started with an impressive full minute of silence. All 64 players in the first French Riichi Open were silent in remembrance of the many victims of the earthquake, the tsunami and the imminent nuclear disaster in Japan. The riichi players feel a great involvement with the homeland of their favorite mahjong variant.

And it ended with an outburst of laughter and applause, during the festive award ceremony which concluded two marvelous days of riichi in the French capital. All players who made it to the top-ten, were treated with a warm applause - the foreigners almost just as much as the two French players who entered in ‘riichi heaven’. Of course the French were especially happy with Nicolas Poilleux, who ended in second position and thus was crowned as the French riichi champion. But the treatment of Sergey Dedikov, the Russian winner of the competition, was just as warm and enthusiastic.

Membership

After the riichi tournaments in the Netherlands, Denmark, Germany, Austria, Poland and England, France has joined the list of EMA-associated countries that get infected by the riichi-virus. Although the numbers of participants to riichi-tournaments are considerably smaller than the figures of the MCR-competitions, riichi is a booming mahjong variant. Plus - and this pleases the organisers even more - the average riichi player is much younger.
According to Oliv’ Boivin, member of the organising team, the French mahjong federation recently discovered a lot of mahjong players who were no members of the FFMJ. The reason: they play riichi, and this was not listed on the FFMJ menu.
“So we thought it would be a good idea to organize a tournament for them”, says Olivier. As a result of this, a good deal of the riichi players decided to apply for membership. And so, this first Paris Riichi Open, also presented as the 6th international mahjong tournament of Paris, was organized by four clubs instead of three: Magic Mahjong Social Pung, Orchid Flower, Mahjong Anime and TNT, the new Parisian riichi club. TNT actually stands for Tri-Nitro-Tiles.
It was remarkable indeed to see many familiar French MCR-faces, neither playing riichi nor inclined to do so, but just being in the venue to assist in the organization.

Level

And how about the level of the players? There were stars like Sergey Dedikov, like Tom Mustonen from Finland and like for instance Garence Kutukdjian. They ron and tsumo without declaring riichi, they spit out the Japanese terms of the hands and in the same breath tell you how many yaku and mini-points the hand is worth. They hardly ever throw away a dangerous tile. So when you have a waiting hand which is worth a yaku, you better not declare riichi since they would sooner swallow their tiles than to give them to you.
Then there were many debutants, who need much more time to decide which tile to discard. Who cash their fanpai (pon of dragons or pon of own wind/wind of the round) as soon as possible and then  sometimes blow their hand by trying also for honitsu (half flush, semi-pure). They are yet dangerous adversaries: when hunting for toi-toi (all pons) they are sometimes, unwillingly, helped by other debutants who discard their tiles rather recklessly. This way, they not seldom even win a hanchan (session).
But this happens at most mahjong tournaments, and that’s just one of the things that make mahjong so thrilling. Like one of the players in the tournament said: “If you cannot stand that, you better go and play checkers.”

Pictures of the tournament

More pictures (NEW!)

Final classification of the French Riichi Open