Riichi Mahjong in Singapore

Hellloooooo

Here comes another piece of good news!

Introduction of Asean-Oceania Riichi Mahjong Association (AORMA)

For the past few months, I’ve been initiating and coordinating a formation of Asean-Oceania Riichi Mahjong Association. It is made up of Singapore, Indonesia and Australia. The original plan was to have Vietnam as well but there was some issue with them having a stable long-term coordinator. Hopefully once they have somebody, they can join us.

The whole idea of forming this association is to combine the pool of each countries riichi player to form a bigger riichi community. Currently, we are only competing amongst each other in a pool size of around 20-24. With an association, we can double or triple this number. As much as I understand how most of you think oversea tournaments like World Riichi Championship or World Mahjong Sport Games is a bit far-fetched, I hope having this association increase some exposure to oversea players and feel the excitement of competing with others, as a Singaporean Riichi player. 🙂

Trial League

Official activities will start in 2019. But before that, there are some things we need to test as part of our planning. This trial is a 4 sessions of league games, every Sunday from 14 October to 11 November. There is no session on 4th November as there is already International Online Riichi Mahjong Competition on 3rd November. This league will be held via Tenhou platform and uses Tenhou default rules.

We are trying to make this as flexible as possible to accommodate as many players as possible. So players can actually choose to register for whatever number and for whichever game slot that they deem fit! For example, you can register for game 1 and 3 only, or even 1 game or all 4 games!

Here’s the schedule based on SGT.

Registration

All registered players have equal priority to play if they register between 1430 and 1515. This will be gone through a google form which its link will be released on facebook or whatsapp (if you haven’t been receiving my WA messages, let me know and i will add you into the list. You need to add my hp number into your contact book)

After 1515, players can only register through a discord channel. Link will also be provided. These players will have a lower priority and will be slot in only if they make up the number to fill up the tables.

If there are no players who register late, then the sit-outs will be players who have gotten the lowest scores from the previous game. If this happens during game 1 (i.e no previous game), then unfortunately we have to go by first come first serve.

Players can register multiple game at once but for basic courtesy, please do not back out after doing so.

Players match-up

For the 1st session of the whole league, it will be random. Any subsequent session will be based on players’ overall ranking. Seat assignment will be random based on tenhou.

Ranking

A moving average score will be used to rank players. It will be an average from 4 to 12 games. That’s to say, if you play for full 16 games, your first 4 games won’t be counted. To have a rank, players need to have a minimum of 4 games. Otherwise your overall score remains 0 but this means you will be ranked higher than players who have an overall negative score after 4 games.

Facebook Group

We have made a facebook group call “Asean-Oceania Riichi Mahjong Association” whereby we hope to disseminate all related info there and also hope to make it as a common place for everyone across the borders to befriend with. So please join!

At the end of this league, we would hope to survey all players for their thoughts on this. Please do give this a try and support this initiative!

Feng