Hey, everyone, the blog is now open. Yay.

I decided to open this blog up because of the large amount of mahjong discussion that takes place at the store (Hammergirl Anime in Rochester, NY, an anime store), and now that the nearby college (RIT) has a great club too, why not run a league – and why not run a site, too? There’s a lot less discussion in English about mahjong than you’d think online, and although the blogs that do are excellent (I’m a big fan of osamuko), one more shouldn’t be too bad.

So, without further ado, an introduction. I start playing Mahjong in college in the mid 90′s, against players that A: would only play for money and B:  wouldn’t teach you the rules. -_- Trial by fire, I guess. after college, I stopped, what with nobody to play, and ended up opening an anime store. I stopped by the RIT Anime Club to make some announcements, and I heard the shuffling of tiles (a sound I hadn’t heard for ten years) – lo and behold, there was a fledgling mahjong club starting up at RIT@ With that, the rise of mahjong anime, and a few calls to some old friends, we were ready to go.

Hopefully, this blog will help people get over that ‘step 2: ????’ hurdle that I see so often in players – they learn to play, get some simple strategy in them, but then don’t have strong players to play with, and don’t have strong enough Japanese-reading ability to ‘go to the source’, so they languish at the 2-Dan level on Tenhou forever.

Maybe we can change that. :)

Okay, now to get a post up on how to use the tile shortcuts