Posted By :
liamjtolentino
20 Feb
Mahjong, Chess, and the Certainty of Choices and Consequences
Those of you who know me well might know that I have recently developed a fixation on the game Mahjong, specifically Riichi Mahjong, the Japanese style of the game. The more I learned about the game, the more I started to see how much the choices in Mahjong reflect the choices we make in our own lives. It also got me thinking about Chess again and how both games provide different perspectives on life choices. Before I continue, I would like to say that you do not need to know much about Mahjong or Chess to keep up with this discussion; however, I may make some references to certain actions that can be done in both games. I will try my best to explain them, but ultimately, I don’t think knowledge of these games is necessary to get my message.
In most versions of Mahjong (at least the ones I researched), you begin with a hand of 13 tiles and your goal is to draw and discard tiles until you reach a point where the next tile you draw completes a 14 tile hand of a certain pattern. That is perhaps the simplest way to summarize it as there is obviously a lot more to it than that and it varies between versions, but it describes pretty much every game of Mahjong. Much like in real life, you have no control over your starting hand. You may start with a very lucky hand allowing you to achieve a lot more earlier on, but at the same time, you may also start with a very unlucky hand that forces you to work much harder just to catch up to everyone else. Even then, unexpected things can occur throughout the game and a person with a lucky start may end up at the very bottom while a person with a terrible starting hand may end up on top. Still, that does not take away from the effect that skill has on the outcome. As I played more Mahjong matches and learned more patterns, I started to see that what may seem like a bad starting hand is actually really good and I just needed to learn new patterns that I could not recognize before. This is reflective of real life where learning new things can open up a lot more opportunities for you that were always there but you just couldn’t see them until you learned about them. For example, let’s say you were learning a musical instrument. At first, you may see very limited options of what you can play as you might only know a few notes or chords. However, as you study the instrument more, and maybe even a bit of music theory, you start to notice certain patterns that allow you to find notes that sound good together. Suddenly, a world of possibilities starts to open up and before long, you can play any song you want and even other instruments are a lot easier to learn now that you can notice the same patterns appearing. Much like with a starting hand in Mahjong, you have all the same tools and choices available to you, but now you are able to do a lot more with what you have.
Let’s take a step back and talk again about the luck aspect of the game. I mentioned before that sometimes, unexpected things may happen that are outside of your control. Does this mean that your choices don’t matter and it’s all just a coin flip or a roll of the dice? Not exactly. Much like in real life, in Mahjong you have to prepare for things to suddenly go wrong or right. From the games I played, I found that the best moves are the ones that open up the most opportunities for you. I’ll elaborate a bit more to paint a better picture. In each turn, you draw a tile and then choose whether to discard this tile or to discard a tile already in your hand. Usually, you’d want to choose to get rid of a tile that doesn’t contribute to the winning hand, but other times that decision is not so simple and you may have to even take a risk and choose a move that might give you more choices down the line or play it safe and choose moves that won’t necessarily win you the game but will guarantee that you won’t be completely screwed over by random chance later. That’s just life. Sometimes we have to make choices that keep us on a stable path, but other times, we may get opportunities to take a huge risk that pays off even more. Things can and will go wrong, but as long as you are able to make choices that leave more choices open, you will most likely find a way out.
Eventually, you reach a point where choices become limited but much simpler. In Riichi Mahjong, there is a state called tenpai or ready hand in which you only need a certain tile to complete your 14-tile hand so your only choice is to keep discarding the tile you drew until you draw a tile that completes your hand. If the game ends in a draw, you still end up winning some points afterwards. Still, much like the rest of the game, there remains a huge risk of everything going wrong like if an opponent manages to complete their hand before you. This is like in real life where things may seem like smooth sailing until something happens out of nowhere and ruins everything. However, we still keep going. Life isn’t about keeping things perfect; it’s about being ready for when things inevitably go wrong, even when it seems that everything will be alright in the end. The best choices aren’t guaranteed to be the perfect choices, but we always need to be ready to make the right ones.
Now let’s talk a bit about Chess. Unlike Mahjong, a Chess game always begins the same way, and even if it’s Fischer random, the opponent still has the same starting position as you, so the outcome of the game depends entirely on the skill of the players. What’s more is that there is absolutely no randomness in Chess, so with every move, a good choice will always be a good choice and a bad choice will always be bad. It’s a system that rewards good decisions and punishes bad ones. In some moments, you will encounter some unexpected consequences, but those will always be due to player oversight like if you successfully capture the opponent’s queen but completely miss the checkmate you granted to them. Chess is a very complicated game, but it is still predictable and every move has complete certainty in which position it will result in.
To me, Chess represents what we expect life to be like. It’s complicated and difficult to learn, but we expect things to always turn out in our favor when we do everything right. They say a game of Chess in which both players make all the perfect moves will always end in a draw, and a lot of times we expect life to be like that, to be played so perfectly as we expect. But most of the time, life is not like that. A lot of times, you’ll do things right, but then something happens that you didn’t prepare for, like if you spent months studying an opening but then your opponent plays a variation you never looked at and it doesn’t matter if that move was good or not because it throws you off balance. Or even worse, you might play a move that seems brilliant but it either turns out to be a huge blunder or it forces you into a position where none of your available moves seem right, not even the one that wins the whole game. However, with Chess, you can always learn from all these. When things play out the same way as before, you learn from your mistakes and know exactly what moves are right and wrong. Most of the time, life is like that. We make mistakes and keep learning from them until we learn to play effectively.
Unfortunately, there are times in life where it goes from a game of Chess to a game of Mahjong. You play all the right moves, you make all the right choices, you do everything completely right, but all of a sudden, because of random chance, something completely out of your control, it all falls apart. You can try all you want to prepare for these things, analyze every move, every position, every possibility, but nothing within your power could have prevented tragedy from striking. You can only move on and hope to recover. To me, that’s what Mahjong represents. If Chess represents our illusion of complete control, Mahjong represents the harsh reality of the universe: that we have no control. Even a lot of professional Mahjong players admit that even with all the skill involved in the game, you will always be at the mercy of random chance. Does that mean our choices don’t matter and that we have no free will in the universe? Not exactly. To me, it just means that we should not expect the right choices to always have ideal consequences. We can make the best choices to make sure the outcome will more likely fall in our favor, but ultimately, we can never really set the chances of failure to zero. We just have to keep trying and keep getting better.
I have quite a few friends who started university relatively recently. When I hear about their plans, it sounds to me that they are approaching this stage of life like a game of Chess, expecting the right decisions to have positive outcomes. It’s always good to have a plan and even a backup plan, but that isn’t always enough, so I always tell them not to worry too much about things falling apart and that it’s best to be prepared for a change of planning rather than planning ten steps ahead. Always have a goal, but don’t be too focused on your path to that goal. Going back to Mahjong, I play in a similar way in that if I see a possible hand I can go for, I try to go for it, but I always make sure my hand is ready to do something else in case things don’t go my way. For a more specific example, sometimes I’ll have a white dragon in my starting hand and keep it there in case I get the chance at yakuhai, but I make sure that if I see two white dragons on the discard area (meaning I can’t get yakuhai), the rest of my hand is still good enough that I can get rid of the first dragon and still have a chance of winning. We can’t always prepare for when things go unexpectedly wrong, but we can always keep ourselves open to change directions.
At the same time we need to prepare for when things go wrong, we also need to be ready for when things go right and make the most of that positive opportunity. (Side note, at the exact moment I was typing this paragraph, I received an email about getting an interview for the internship I applied to which is such perfect timing for the point I’m making) Going back to the Mahjong example, I once spectated a game from another beginner, and I got frustrated when I saw him blunder a winning opportunity. He drew a second East wind tile, and since he was sitting on the East seat and on an East game, he could have gotten 2 Han for simply picking up a third one, but he instead discarded the piece. With the way the rest of the game played out, he wouldn’t have won either way since most of the opponents won essentially by random chance, but it frustrated me every time he made a move that took away any chance of winning.
Obviously this was just a simple Mahjong game so it’s not that serious that he blundered the chance of winning since he could do better in another game, but I think it’s a good representation of a lot of life opportunities. I had the chance to get certified as a life insurance agent, but I completely blundered it because I could not schedule my days properly to make time for it. I had the chance to graduate with my bachelor’s one year early due to my high school AP credits making up my first year of uni, but now I’m graduating much later just because I got a bit greedy and tried to force a larger workload on myself to graduate even earlier. Experiences like these are why I’ve been trying to make myself recognize opportunities and make the most of them. I’m obviously still learning and still stumbling, but I think I am getting better. I’m playing this game of life a little more carefully now, but I’m back in uni studying again and applying to multiple jobs while also giving a bit more focus on my physical and mental health. Maybe I lost a few rounds, but just like in Mahjong, in life you can always make it back to the top. You just need to make the right choices and be patient and prepared for when the opportunity comes back.