When to make referee calls
How strictly should you enforce rules and when should you call a referee? I'm usually all for letting tiny mistakes slip in favour of keeping the pace of the game up (especially in MCR which can often be a bit of a grind).
Here are a couple of situations I have been involved in:
- At an MCR tournament, I neglected to take the winning tile and place it in my hand before I started counting points. This was a silly mistake on my part - I had been playing riichi almost exclusively for the past year, so I was in the wrong set of habits (riichi games can have multiple winners and you are not supposed to move the winning tile). One player quickly called the referee and I was told I had a dead hand. The game resumed and another player won the hand. We were then informed the referee had made a mistake: I was not supposed to get a dead hand, but score as usual with a 10 point deduction. We now had a much more serious problem to deal with: recovering from an erroneous referee decision. Was the other players win still valid? This time we both had cheap hands and it was early in the game so it made little difference who won, but it would have been grievous for the new winner if they had a game-changing hand and it was taken from them because the ruling was reverted.
(Normally referee mistakes shouldn't happen, but sometimes they do. For the record, the referee resolved the situation well in the end. This was in the first game of their first official tournament, so I'm willing to give them some slack.)
- At a riichi tournament, I knocked down a tile from the dead wall. I don't recall if it was the 4th kan dora or the 3rd replacement tile, but it was one that most likely would never come into play. I was having a good streak and one player who was under pressure raised the question if I should receive a dead hand for this. The others quickly dismissed the complaint, saying that the exposed tile was indeed irrelevant.
In both cases I did make mistakes, but neither actually disturbed the game or provided an unfair advantage to any single player. However, the problem I see with this is that while technically the other players were right to complain, their motives were questionable. It left me wondering if they did it out of principle, or just tried to pin it on me because it benefited their own game at that point?
The MCR situation in particular created ripples of tricky side-effects; whatever the intention of the player to complain, the referee call disrupted the game much more than my mistake ever did. A better way to handle it would have been to just point out the mistake; I would have apologized and tried not to do it again. In this case the player insisted on getting a referee involved and penalizing me.
If you're going to invoke rules, make sure you know your shit. The purpose should be to curb bad behaviour in the future, not to impose disadvantages on other players because it suits you. The long-term effect of the latter is that you come off as a whiny, sore loser and people will be less willing to play with you (tournaments and professional gambling aside, mahjong is still supposed to be a pastime). Also, I'm a mediocre player at best; you shouldn't need to grasp at technicalities to beat me.
Then there are of course situations where it is entirely appropriate to correct players or, as a last resort, call a referee:
- When players are obviously cheating, obstructing or stalling (though in the last case it hardly helps to waste more time)
- When players are obviously misinformed about the rules (and you are absolutely sure you are right)
- When players are doing things in deliberately confusing or non-standard ways
- When players are speaking in a language others at the table do not understand (this is of course especially sensitive during scoring)