I got my play and my otaku keychains complimented by mahjong pros at the M.League x WRC meet in New York

At the risk of setting off any local rivalries, I am pretty certain that the center of the riichi (Japanese rule) mahjong boom in America is right here in New York City. To bring up just one point, I don’t think you’d see a large, dedicated riichi parlor running at capacity in too many other places in the country (with a second about to open as I write this). There are a lot of reasons I consider myself very lucky to be living here, but one of them is that I’ve been able to watch the scene finally start to blow up over the last four or five years.

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So I felt like I was in on some kind of landmark historical moment on Tuesday when professionals from the major league of riichi, the Japanese M.League, came to visit Sparrow’s Nest in NYC (the aforementioned large parlor) as the last leg of a Vegas-New York tour with the World Riichi Championship.

(M.League has big Japanese corporate and TV backing, and is comparable to a national sports league. To learn more about M.League, check out M-League Watch’s thorough week-to-week coverage. To watch the matches, you have to catch it live (Japanese time) on Abema or nothing. I have tried to get into M.League, but it’s extremely inconvenient to watch; Abema has my ISP geo-locked out and my VPNs insta-banned. I’d like for there to be a normal way to watch M.League from the States; I would gladly pay a couple bucks.)

The full M.League tour involved a weekend of tournaments in Las Vegas with some high ticket prices ($600, I believe?) but big prizes (one of the homies won a $2800 automatic table for making 4th). A trip like that would be a $1,200 weekeend on the low end, so instead I coughed up $100 to attend only the final night of festivities here in New York.

That last event, called “The Eastside Showdown”, fell somewhere between a play session and an idol meet. Upon entering, each of us drew a ticket out of a bag which determined our full schedule for an evening of 8 nonstop casual East-only matches at around 15 tables. This high-speed schedule gave every player two games with M.League pros, including time set aside for autographs (one signboard provided) and selfies. But which pro you got paired up with was entirely random, so there was no guarantee you’d meet your fave at this event. The severe time limit meant these games weren't really serious, but that was fine.

Meanwhile at the parlor's stream table, WRC was running a stream where some of the Japanese pros faced off against the strongest players from the very new WRC pro program. (I failed the written half of my WRC pro test and remain, as of right now, a mahjong commoner.)

(As you can imagine at an extremely rare opportunity like this, some folks really seized the moment and got in there for a selfie any way they could. I watched a staffer literally jump in front of a camera when some fans tried to get some more pro selfies after we were all sent home.)

As I mentioned, I don’t really get to watch M.League outside of highlight clips, so I was only vaguely familiar with the eight players who came out. But that didn't mean I didn't want to meet elite pro players, you know? I was with a lot of mahjong friends who admire and adore these folks, so I felt a little goofy meeting “idols” I barely knew… but as an anime convention veteran, that’s never stopped me before.

So who’d I meet? I was assigned for games with Yumi Uotani (formerly of the Sega-Sammy Phoenix, so it was fate) and Kotaro Uchikawa (of the current champion team EX Furinkazan), both of whom were very friendly. The pros gave off a chill and accessible vibe: they walked the parlor floor freely between games and showed genuine interest in us and our matches. There was shockingly little distance between us and the pros, and thankfully– having been thoroughly warned at the door– nobody at the meet decided to mess that up for the rest of us.

Uotani got excited after seeing the Rin and Neco-Arc keychains hanging from my bag, so you know she’s a good person of fine tastes. There was a Japanese fan at this table who spoke a bit of English, and we all communicated as best we all could via him. I of course represented New York by telling her to make sure to stop at a taco truck. (From what I overheard, the pros were all headed out on a plane that very night, so this probably wasn’t much help…)

I realized once I got my signature that yes, I did know Uotani from having seen her various M.League highlights.

Mahjong Pros also has her manga biography coming out soon; it's likely I'll end up writing about that!

My next game with a pro was against Kotaro Uchikawa, a true veteran and champ, even among the people we were with. He filled half his autograph board with "WRC TOKYO 2025 CHAMPION", and hell yeah, dude, own that. At this table the other two guys spoke Japanese and I kind of nodded along, half-understanding the conversation. After our match Uchikawa had a hands-on lesson ready for us: he taught us the cool-guy method he uses to draw tiles fast, shown to him by the legendary, departed Mr. Mahjong, Takeo Kojima. It's kind of a four-finger claw technique: you place the middle fingers on top, hold them with the sides, and then flip them down onto the table. Stuff that calls for practice.

I also had a dream interaction with the Abemas' Yoshihiro Matsumoto, the kind of story so good that you might have reason to think I made it up. The pros had plenty of break time, and they’d naturally walk around the parlor spectating games. In one match I had the pretty spectacular hand you see below.

This is a monster that could get to haneman (12,000) if I draw the right tile.

The choice of wait is between these two shapes, waiting on 5 and 8 in either the man or the sou suit. To make an informed decision on this, you need to look at the table and consider what tiles other players have already gotten rid of, thus what they don’t need, and thus what they might deal into you. Players were getting rid of sou tiles, not man tiles, so I chose to discard 5 man early, waiting on 5/8 sou.

(I'm definitely mis-remembering something about this scenario, because I did not riichi on 5m and did riichi at tenpai. But let's just let it rock.)

As most of the pros would do during their breaks, Matsumoto was drifting around the tables at this point, watching games. As a spectator at a parlor, you really don’t want to react to the tiles you’re seeing, even though it's really hard not to. The more interest you show in a player’s hand, the more attention you’re going to draw to them, and you could inadvertently interfere with the game. So the pro floated back and forth as this hand progressed, but I got the feeling our table was catching some glances.

And then I pulled my 5 sou right as Matsumoto walked by. Riichi, tsumo, tanyao, pinfu, sanshoku. Haneman! Matsumoto came by the table to congratulate me, and he specifically pointed out the point in my discards where I had chosen to discard 5 man, calling it a good decision. I was absolutely glowing. Who, me? Good?! It was like the inverse of being rattled by a bad deal-in; I lost a little bit of my concentration in the next hand because I felt so good about being earnestly complimented by a pro.

I was actually not feeling so great about mahjong the night before I went to this event: I’m coming off a pretty bad losing streak and a failure to promote online. (I plunged after getting just one second-place win away from retaking 9th dan on Riichi City.) Making mistakes and simply losing are natural parts of the process, but it can be so crushing that you feel totally incompetent, like you never knew what you were doing in the first place. But from now on, every time I feel that way, I’m going to remind myself that I impressed a guy who plays this game at the highest level in the world.

As we were all rushed out of the building at the end of the night, I moved fast over to my staffer friends, set on buying a couple of copies of the newly English-translated strategy books by Uchikawa and Matsumoto, The Essential Playbook and Balance Your Game, respectively. (Disclaimer: staff at the parlor, folks I consider friends, worked on production of these books, so I can’t really claim to be impartial.)

I intend to talk about these books more in-depth when I actually finish reading them, but both are strong choices meant to fill gaps in the English market that really don’t exist right now. Playbook is a review book on the fundamentals of a strong playstyle starting from the bottom: the player who wants to move on from Riichi Book 1 can start here. Balance is aimed at advanced players looking to optimize their game and drops you straight into the tough stuff.

I must assume, from the amount of work that clearly went into them and the many copies on hand at the parlor, that these books will eventually be made available for sale on a wider scale. I wouldn't worry about not being able to get them.

I was completely ready to let this event go, but I'm really glad I decided to go in the end (and slipped through at the last minute). Another thing about grinding out the online ladder is that you start to forget how good it feels not just to play with others, but to simply be with a whole lot of people who share your interest. (I stopped at Kajiken ramen to treat myself afterwards and four people who'd been at the event came in after me, just like at the anime con.) Online and the ladder are convenient, but they're incredibly isolating.

Being in a packed parlor, catching the contagious excitement of a crowd of fans around a bunch of visiting mahjong celebrities who are themselves interested in and curious about what we're doing... it's good feelings on all sides, back and forth. I've said before that the online ladder will drain the life out of you if you're not careful: well, community is the opposite. Community will replenish that life. Find it.