2019 Mahjong.Guide Tournaments

As we’re now well underway with the new year, I thought it would be worthwhile to make a post outlining our tournaments for 2019 and giving people a heads-up for what is to come.

2019 Spring Online Riichi Championships

We announced the 2019 Spring ORC this weekend, keeping the format largely the same from the 2018 ORC we ran in November and December last year, with the tournament running in March.

We’ve decided to run this one with red fives to change it up a bit from the last one and to add a bit of colour for the spring event (not just because the admin team did badly!)

We’ve also made a few tweaks to the rules based on things we felt caused issues in the 2018 ORC:

• People having an account on the Discord channel is now mandatory, and we’re keeping track of Discord names and Tenhou names. This should make it much easier for us to communicate things with players during the tournament, which was something we struggled with in the last event.
• Seeding is still by highest Tenhou rank, but will now only consider ranking over the last 3 months. This will stop players currently at a low rank from qualifying because their account was a higher rank a long time ago, and should also make things a bit more exciting in terms of people trying to improve their seed, as their current rank will naturally be a lot closer to their recorded highest rank.
• We now have an explicit temporary ban from future tournaments for players who drop out mid-event, or no-show without telling us in advance. We’re hoping this will reduce the hassle of trying to find subs at the last second, and will allow the staff managing the tournament to spend more time helping the players who have shown up rather than trying to cover for the ones that haven’t.
• The event is shifted to Saturday instead of Sunday, and the start time pulled slightly later to try and make it a more sociable time for North America whilst still allowing for East Asian and Australian players to compete.

Further details about the tournament and how to register can be found on the tournament page.

2019 Team Online Riichi Championship

For 2019 we’re aiming to host a new type of event over the summer, featuring a team format. For every knock-out round match, players from four teams will play one hanchan each, one after another, with the scores from the first hanchan carrying into the second hanchan, and so on (those who have watched/read Saki should be familiar with this format).

We hope that this will be a more exciting and dramatic format, and bring a bit more of the team element into play compared to team formats like the Invitational events, or the IORMC, where everyone plays simultaneously and scores are just added up at the end.

Details are still to be finalised, but the current plans are:

• Event will take place around July to September (we’ll do our best to try and avoid EMA and NARMA clashes)
• Event will be entirely knock-out, using byes for the first round rather than a qualifier
• Seeding method TBC – it will either be random, total Tenhou rank, or based on placement in the SORC
• Each round will be three hanchan (three players per team)
• Teams rosters can be three to six players to allow for flexibility/substitutions
• Team rosters must be provided upon registration to the event
• Team representatives for each match shall be provided no less than 15 minutes before the match begins
• Players cannot represent multiple teams
• Red fives TBC

We’re looking forward to the event, so start organising teams now!

2019 Online Riichi Championship

Assuming we’ve not run out of money for prizes, or patience running tournaments, we’ll cap off 2019 with another ORC. This one will most likely stick to the ORC format we’ve been using so far, but going back to no red fives. We’ll do our best to tweak the format where we feel we can improve, and try and fix anything that we feel doesn’t go well with the SORC (hopefully not much!)

We expect that it will again run around October-December, doing our best to avoid tournament clashes and work around the festival holidays.

2018 Online Riichi Championship Debrief

As a final thing I’d like to report on the 2018 ORC event.

Firstly, congratulations to our finalists!

1st: Curtis, Taiwan

2nd: 立直平和人, Poland

3rd: 電子實作專題, Taiwan

4th: ArthurM, Brazil

We’d also like to thank everyone else that took part. We had 101 people register for the event, from 29 different countries, which was far beyond the level of interest we were expecting to see.

Ultimately after people who couldn’t make it, and drop-outs on the qualifier day, we ended up with 72 participants, which is still a strong turn-out. Hopefully we can beat that for the 2019 events!