Mahjong Match at Sasagawa Restaurant

The Mahjong Match at Sasagawa Restaurant is a Match in the Akagi manga series, taking place in Chapters 17-27.

Context

After the Mahjong Match with the Yakuza, Akagi challenged the Kawada Group to a rematch. Yasuoka organizes the rematch using his connections, getting the boss of another yakuza group to serve as a witness. The wager is raised on Akagi's request to 8 million yen: the 3 million won in the last match, Nangou's original 3 million debt and an extra 2 million fronted by Yasuoka. The Kawada Group chooses the blind player Ichikawa as their representative. They also request two changes in the rules for the match: the players must announce the tiles they cut out loud, since Ichikawa is blind, and the match must extend until either Ichikawa or Akagi have no points left.

On the day of the match, after 30 minutes Akagi has not arrived, forcing Nangou to play Ichikawa in his place.

Players

• Akagi's side:
  • Shigeru Akagi
  • Nangou
  • Yasuoka

• Kawada Group:
  • Ichikawa

Tricks

Nangou vs. Ichikawa

• Yasuoka comes up with a simple but reliable strategy for Nangou to play against Ichikawa: change into an open wait and declare riichi, aiming to draw the winning tile rather than have an opponent play into his hand. (Chapter 17)
• Ichikawa catches on to the strategy and, predicting Nangou's hand, changes his wait so that he wins with the tile that Nangou cuts to turn his closed wait into an open wait. (Chapter 17)
• Ichikawa, knowing that Nangou will now be afraid of discarding his closed wait and will instead opt for a tile that seems safe to play, instead changes his wait into an honor tile, having Nangou deal into his hand again. (Chapter 17)
• Akagi, arriving and taking over for Nangou just when all tiles that he can discard are dangerous, cuts a chun (red dragon) tile - which happens to be Ichikawa's winning tile - by pushing it on top of a previously-discarded shaa (west wind) tile, thus making it seem as if he had discarded the shaa instead of the chun. (Chapter 18)

Focusing on the extra players

• Akagi decides to focus on the other two players to win back their points before turning his attention to Ichikawa, reasoning that they are there just to fill up seats and will play defensively, a mentality that makes them easy to manipulate. (Chapter 19)
• Akagi calls riichi to intimidate the two players into only playing safe tiles, while hinting with his discards that his winning hand is a tanyao pinfu when it is actually an iipeikou. This tricks the kamicha (player to his left) into dealing the hatsu (green dragon), a tile that he perceived to be safe but was actually Akagi's winning tile. (Chapter 19)
• Akagi tricks the kamicha again into discarding his winning tile, a 3-pin, via a combination of using a four-of-a-kind to exhaust all 4-pin tiles - thus making it harder to form hands with the 3-pin - and hinting with his final discard of the 1-sou - a tile that had not yet appeared and therefore was a prime candidate for a win by drawing - that he was planning on having the kamicha deal into his hand. This makes the kamicha apprehensive to cut the honor or man tiles that comprise most of his hand, and which Akagi can read from his discards, causing him to choose the 3-pin instead. (Chapter 19)

Discarding one suit

• Akagi discards a triple of 3-pin as a way of implicitly proposing to Ichikawa that they remove a suit from play in order to speed up the game, while at the same time intending to hold a tile of the discarded suit in his hand in order to win when Ichikawa cuts that same tile. (Chapter 20)
• Akagi discards a 2-pin once all the other 2-pin tiles are out of play, making Ichikawa think that this was the tile that Akagi intended to trap him with and that his newly-drawn 1-pin is safe. In reality, Akagi was also holding a 1-pin in his hand, winning on Ichikawa's discard. (Chapter 20)
• Ichikawa counters Akagi's strategy of hiding a wait for a tile of the removed suit by instead focusing on forming hands based on the remaining suits, exploiting the fact that they are dealt more often in this situation. Since this method is easier to incorporate yaku into, Ichikawa's winning hands end up being worth more than Akagi's, putting him in the lead. (Chapter 20)

Evasion and pursuit

• Akagi starts using the tiles that he senses are Ichikawa's winning tiles to call on opponents' discards, thus avoiding dealing into Ichikawa's hand. (Chapter 21)
• Ichikawa starts changing his waits in response, adapting to the tiles that are still in Akagi's hand. (Chapter 21)
• Ichikawa lets his own winning tile pass when it is dealt by the kamicha, so that he can instead have Akagi deal into his hand later. (Chapter 21)
• Akagi uses the opportunity of Ichikawa passing on his winning tile to call on that tile and reach tenpai. (Chapter 21)
• Ichikawa, predicting that Akagi's wait and the only tiles remaining in his hand are the 1 and 4-man, changes his wait into the 1, 4 and 7-man, in order to be one step ahead of him. (Chapter 21)
• Akagi, upon drawing the 7-man and judging that all of his tiles are equally likely to be Ichikawa's winning tiles, throws away his tenpai by discarding the 4-man instead, knowing that if Ichikawa won with the 7-man his hand would have scored a baiman. (Chapter 21)

Kokushi musou bluff

• Akagi, after drawing a terrible starting hand, starts making bold and risky discards in order to make it seem like he might have a high-scoring kokushi musou hand. This makes Ichikawa apprehensive enough to abandon a good hand and deal into the hand of one of the other players, in order to stop Akagi from winning in the off-chance that his kokushi musou is not a bluff. (Chapter 22)

Cutting points down

• Akagi proposes to Ichikawa that they both divide their stock of points by 10, in order to make it easier for one to bring the other's points down to 0, but Ichikawa refuses. (Chapter 23)
• Akagi makes an invalid call on a discarded 6-man by forming a sequence with a 7 and 8-man while discarding a 9-man, knowing that he will be forced to take them back. Ichikawa reasons that this is a trick to make him think that neither the 6 nor the 9-man are his winning tiles, but in reality Akagi had used the opportunity of returning the 6-man to the kamicha's discard to secretly switch his 9-man for a previously-discarded shaa tile. When the blind Ichikawa discards a shaa, recalling that all other shaa tiles should already be among the discards, he ends up playing into Akagi's hand. (Chapter 23)
• Akagi uses his previous exploitation of Ichikawa's blindness as a threat to get him to agree to his previous proposal of cutting their points down. (Chapter 24)

Dead wall draw

• Ichikawa stops Akagi from completing a high-scoring hand which would win him the match by dealing into the kamicha's tenpai. (Chapter 24)
• Akagi accumulates the 4-sou tiles in his hand, sensing that it was one of Ichikawa's winning tiles. (Chapter 24)
• Ichikawa calls a kan on one of Akagi's discards, making use of the fact that if Ichikawa wins by the dead wall draw after the kan then Akagi will have to pay as if he had dealt Ichikawa's winning tile himself. Ichikawa then uses a sliding trick to switch the replacement tile with a winning tile from his wall, which he had memorized in advance. (Chapter 24)

Endgame

• Akagi places his last chance of victory on a risky strategy: if he can call a kan on one of Ichikawa's discards, then win with the replacement tile from the dead wall like Ichikawa did last round, and if he can get at least 2 dora in his hand from the kandora, his hand will score a mangan and take all of Ichikawa's points. (Chapter 25-26)
• Ichikawa palms a chun tile while discarding his pei (north wind) tile, so that if Akagi calls kan on the pei Ichikawa can switch the chun with the tile on the dead wall that Akagi will draw as a replacement tile, thus preventing him from completing his hand. (Chapter 26)
• Akagi uses the opportunity of reaching out to take the pei from Ichikawa's discards to block Ichikawa's hand from switching the chun with the dead wall tile. (Chapter 26)
• Ichikawa instead switches the chun with the tile that Akagi will flip for the kandora, making the haku (white dragon) tile the new dora. Since Akagi discarded a haku in a previous turn, Ichikawa reasons that he does not have any haku tiles in his hand. (Chapter 26)
• Akagi reveals a haku pair, having previously broken a haku triplet by discarding the haku as a way of tricking Ichikawa, who he had sensed had three chun tiles in his hand, into thinking it was safe to make haku the kandora. (Chapter 26-27)

Outcome

Akagi defeats Ichikawa, winning the 8 million yen wagered by the Kawada Group. The winnings are split as agreed between him, Nangou and Yasuoka. Although Akagi is uninterested in the money and wants to bet it all again in another rematch, he is convinced by the other parties to let it go, as Ichikawa's confidence had been crushed and the Kawada Group had no other representative lined up.

Winners

• Shigeru Akagi
• Nangou
• Yasuoka

Losers

• Ichikawa