Fighting my way out of the demotion zone, kind of, with a 4th place but also a 1st place finish. I thought I played pretty well today, but one hand inflicted serious psychological damage.
In the first pictured hand I am trying to evade a dealer riichi right in the middle of trying to build a chanta (outside) 789 sanshoku (3 runs of all three colors). My hand is unlikely, though, and it's pretty much fold time. 1s is 100% safe, but that discard means definitively giving up on my hand. Hindsight is 20/20, obviously I should have, but I don't think anyone would blame me for the choice I did make here, which is to discard East.
See, I'm holding a pair of East and there's already an East on the board. That means there's only one East left on the table. The only possibility this tile could be dangerous is if someone specifically chose to wait on a single East. The odds are unlikely and single waits on honors tend not to be high-scoring hands.
(I forgot in this moment that a single wait on an honor when an honor is already out is an extremely desirable wait, because it is so unlikely that players feel safe letting it go.)
So, you know, of course dealer had it. Dealer had a mangan, too. Dealer hits the ura dora and their huge hand doubles up to a baiman. I pay 25,500. A direct hit of 25,500 is so many points. It is almost a total guarantee of last place. It is a whole game's worth of careful defensive play zapped into dust.
I consider myself pretty good at bouncing back and taking things in stride, but a hit this bad fucks with you in a short-term mental sense. You have to shake yourself back into fighting shape. You have to remember that the last hand is over and not let the curse of hindsight infect your thinking or make you play scared in the now.
Anyway, this means I took a nice long break between matches, walked away, took deep breaths, and got back to playing my usual game. And I was able to win. Can't win if you're not in winning condition.
In the last hand I needed to win off the leader to get first place. Luckily they handed it to me. First win of the session is something to be happy about tonight, even though, well, all that other stuff.