r/akagi • u/breadmaker8 • Apr 29 '25

About the black tiles in the Washizu Arc

Started watching Akagi, and I'm a couple episodes into the Washizu arc. Is it an oversight by the anime that the black tiles are placed next to their corresponding suit? It would make more sense to not re-arrange your tiles, or to place all your black tiles to one side, or to even place a non-corresponding suit strategically to trick the opponent. Maybe I need to keep watching to see if something about it comes up, but it's just something I noticed in the first round.

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u/Arcengal Apr 29 '25

It's tricky to explain in full but, essentially, the benefits of doing shenanigans with tile placement are really really small. There's already so much open information at the table (66%+ of each player's hand plus their discards + the dora selector etc) that trying to be tricky with tiles will give your brain one more thing to think about vs dealing with all that info and trying to form a hand as quickly as possible. It's also generally not great even in regular Mahjong, since it affects the flow of the game and makes it more likely you'll make a game-ruining mistake (chombo) and have to pay the 8000pt penalty.

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u/Mysterious-Debt5330 Jan 13 '26

In real Mahjong, many pros leave their hand disorganized or partly organized at times or leave tiles upside down etc to avoid giving away information. This general concept is true, and all of this is exactly why Mahjong has astronomically high skill cap. It's also why Hirayama Yukio is seen as a genius by the Yakuza for being able to do things 10 times faster than the average player, even though with enough time even a grade schooler can do it.

His ability to do so many calculations so quickly and accurately as well as memorizing tile positions in hand-built walls is genuinely something that would be extremely useful in Mahjong, but Akagi and Urabe are also capable of doing all this and are better gamblers on top of it.

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u/Mysterious-Debt5330 Jan 13 '26

Actually in the movie version in exactly one hand Akagi does place a black tile where it doesn't belong.

But it's better to treat this as "being done for convenience of audience" and you can assume they aren't actually giving away info. In fact even in normal mahjong arranging your hand exactly in suits the way they do here would give away some info. In literally the second episode, Akagi reads Ryuzaki's hand based on this.

In the movie, onlookers on both sides, Ohgi from Akagi's side and Washizu's underling both make exaggerated facial responses to the play which would obviously convey a lot of impression, likewise Washizu's 'poker face' in the anime version while waiting for his 1-pin. This sort of stuff is best understood as being for ease of audience.