Topic: How can you tell if you've improved?

Sometimes I'll feel like I'm doing really great, and then I'll go on a losing streak and even drop a rank in Tenhou. Other times I'll try to play as safe as I can while aiming towards speed, but no matter how quickly I complete my hand, someone else gets there quicker. A 5-turn tenpai is met by a 4-turn tenpai, reaching on turn 6 just means someone else tsumos turn 8.

And at the end of the day, I have to ask myself, "Have you really gotten any better over the past few months? Have you actually learned anything?"

How do you tell?

First, what does "better" mean to you? More wins? More scores above zero than below? Higher earnings? Whatever you want to improve, you must measure. I haven't done this with mahjong, but with blackjack, the distribution of profit is a bell-shaped curve. In blackjack, that curve is very short and very wide, so you get numbers all over the place, but you can plot your mean, mode, and other numbers over time.

I'm guessing it holds true for mahjong as well, so you cannot really gain any meaning from a handful of games or sessions besides frustration. It's also harder to know what you're doing well when the rewards and penalties are far removed from your actions. When you apply a new technique, you must measure enough play to be statistically significant. Then you can measure how much it changed your performance.

In order to improve you must identify what the problem is first. I will use myself as an example:

Once upon a time I played without a care to those who sat around me. I tunnel visioned my hand, and pressed onward. I could have an opening hand 6 away from tenpai, 7 away from tenpai; I would press on. I won a fair amount of games, but I also lost. I was one of those 1st or 4th players, all or nothing.

I wanted to change this.

So I practiced. I picked my battles. Hands I knew I could win I sought, and hands I had no business winning I defended. A nifty thing about JanRyuMon is the fact that it tracks your placements, and generates a percentage. Once upon a time my 4th place percentage was almost half my games. I got it down to maybe 30% at the time of this post. I find myself less and less dealing into other players. Almost to the point where I am genuinely shocked when I deal into someone. Actually… usually on there nowadays if I do deal into someone its usually because I have no other choice, I have to discard blindly.

Point of this story is I identified what error was in my play, and took steps to alter it. If you blindly try to "fix" yourself, you may very well fall into bad habits and worsening your play ability.