Mahjong Masters

http://www.maru-jan.com/event/game_masters.html

Weekly Event - Short Term Skill Evaluation - Ability Based - Gain Points For Participating! - Compensation at 1000y

"Take an exam, get better Mahjong sense, play some games, and win points!"

Mahjong Masters is a combination of actual play on Maru-Jan and a side project of theirs, an online Mahjong skills test. This test (called the National Mahjong Exam on their page) has a link to Saikyousen's page, an official mahjong organization, leading me to believe this is a joint project of some kind. The event requires you to take this test AND play on Maru-jan, so we must talk about both separately.

The Mahjong National Exam

The Mahjong National Exam page is right here. It is a little javascript app that consists of 25 questions about differenet aspects of mahjong. Knowing Japanese is actually not required to understand the questions being asked. After taking your test, you'll be graded based on the accuracy and speed of your answers (so if you know the answer fast, respond fast for a better score on the test!)

The test is divided into 5 parts:

What's The Wait? Analyse the hand displayed, and select the tiles that complete it.

Survive This Turn! All your opponents are in tenpai. Read the discards, and choose a safe tile to discard.

What Should You Discard? Pick a tile that gets you closer to the most efficient tenpai hand. Sometimes there is more than one right answer.

Score This Hand! Open tanyao allowed, and 4 han 30 fu and 3 han 60 fu hands are counted as mangan. Make sure to pay attention to the info in the lower left hand corner. Info is sorted what round it is, what seat you're in. Tsumo, ron, and riichi are also in the lower box.

How Many Tiles Get You To Tenpai? Don't worry about making scoring hands, just think about how many tiles get the hand to ready.

Your score for the day is put on a leader board. Make sure when it prompts you, you enter something cooler than GUEST! You will get 10 points for taking the test, regardless of your outcome. You can get 10 more points for posting your results to a linked social media page. Click the social media page you want to link to the test. I created a mixi just for posting results, since most people I know would think my account got hijacked if it just started posting in Japanese every day. If you are in the top 10 on the leaderboard for the day, you will get more points. The process of adding these exam points to your Marujan account is detailed here.

Mahjong Masters

Now that you have the ability to take the exam, you can participate in the event, which requires an exam score and 3 games of mahjong on the server. Your highest placing on the leaderboard for the week (relative to everyone else that took the exam) will be converted into a point total. Keep in mind that there is rarely more than 250 people taking the exam daily, so even bottoming out can end up putting you in say....170th place and get you a decent score.

Now that you have your Exam Score, simply play 3 East South games of Mahjong. They can be 3 or 4 player, wareme table, League games, it doesn't matter. Your score (plus a bonus based on placing, +80 1st +20 2nd +10 3rd +0 4th) from those games will be added to your Exam Score, and voila! you have your Mahjong Masters score for the week. Only the first 3 games count, so be careful. Your Exam score has a slightly heavier weight, so it is possible to make up for a sub-par game (but probably not two) with an impressive Exam score. If you can top 3 games in a row though, that will definitely help your chances!

So lets say I end up 6th on the leaderboard for the Exam.

At the end of the week, the top 100 players that have both taken the Exam and played 3 games will get paid out!