Friday 21st April: Ray Gets Off the Bottom of the Sea...

On Friday 21st April Noda, Jaime and Ray met at Kodama and played a couple of games in which Ray made a bid to move off the bottom of the Grand Accumulated Points Table by racking up a healthy lead of +72.

David arrived in time to join the third game, in which Ray managed a classic sequence of

Pon... Ron.... Chombo!

His mistake was to have claimed an open South Wind when it was neither his Wind nor the Table Wind!

In that and the next two games Ray spent his time giving away and then winning back his earlier winnings.

Jaime, however, sank like a land lubber with stones in his pockets. I was going to write that he "sank like a stone" but the variation in the speed of his descent suggests rather that a bit of kicking and flailing occurred from time to time, and on one occasion a Chombo was committed..

David also slid under the water beneath the rising tide. Noda was the only one in the boat, although Ray managed to cling to a lifeline and haul himself off the bottom...

Noda left the jansou another hundred points ahead of the competition on the Grand Accumulated Points Table.

The three foreigners played out a final game, which David won, and which enabled him to grasp the lifeline with one hand - he ended up down but not sunk.

Noda +32, -38, +43, +68, -4, --, = +101
Ray -12, +84, -8, -44, +43, -28 = +35
===
David --, --, -34, -13, +4, +31 = -12
Jaime -20, -46, -1, -11, -43, -3 = -124


The next evening, Saturday 22nd April, David and Jaime, along with Don, joined Tim at a yakiniku joint that was offering very cheap beer and cheap servings of meat for us to cook on a brazier sunk into the table. Consequently, quite a lot of beer went down the hatch and quite a lot of hot air was generated...

We ended up at Kulcha attempting to watch a couple of football matches. I remember a game of darts with those tiresome plastic tipped arrows that bounce more than they stick. I remember persuading Don that he ought to stay and watch the Chelsea game in the bar - and then I remember wanting to go home myself. It had reached that stage when the game is on and you are watching the screen with glazed eyes and nothing is registering...


David Hurley
japanese-mahjong.com
japanese-games-shop.com