Problems

Played a few games today to figure what are the problems with my play that I am trying to solve. A lot of these mistakes are extremely bad A-tier mistakes, which I attribute to a combination of both my bad mentality going into today, and my general inability to make concrete reads on the game state, relying instead on intuition and "feel".

Problem 1: Pushing Tenpai hands

I've noticed in a lot of my recent matches that I have a tendency to push extra hard for tenpai when I don't actually need to. In this situation, toimen shows us that he is folding with his 5s -> 7s toitsu drop, and simocha could also be folding with the 7s. My goal here should be to drop the tile that is safest to both kamicha and simocha; moreso kamicha, because it's pretty likely that simocha isn't tenpai given their discards. 

In this situation, 4s looks like a good option because there are 4 visible 2s, and 7s is safe, meaning that for the riichi, it would have to be a shanpon or tanki wait. Both are extremely unlikely given the surrounding manzu in kamicha's wall before the riichi. Instead, I greeded for tenpai and played 8m, which led into me dealing 5200 points.

Problem 2: Inability to read safe tile overflow

4p is dangerous here because kamicha's hand is basically screaming tenpai. They have two calls, dropped an aka tile, and also dropped the 4th haku tile, which it's clear that they were holding as safe tile. This is a part of a bigger problem with my play, which is that I have a tendency to ignore the threat of open hands, and end up dealing into them way more often than I should.

Even with the score situation, considering simocha's hand also looks tenpai and is probably a mangan, the best course of action is to pray that kamicha deals into simocha.

Unfortunately, I was tunneling in on completing my hand and instantly tsumogiri'd the 4p. This usually happens when I'm in a point deficit and am looking to build a hand (in this case, even riichi tsumo would be enough to get me into mangan tsumo range for South 4). The most egregious part of this is that, because I was so focused on building a hand, I wasn't even looking at either of kamicha's or simocha's discard piles, so I didn't notice that both of them were tenpai.

At the very least, I should be throwing 9m first and fighting if and only if I get into tenpai.

Problem 3: Dangerous calls when ahead

This one is a pretty simple problem. Oftentimes when I am ahead, I make aggressive calls (3+), and get into a tenpai shape that is very hard to defend with. This forces me to push into hands that I should otherwise not be dealing into. While I think this is ok to do in a flat situation / when I'm behind, the first priority when ahead should be defending the points that I have; this means that the hands that I make should also have ways to fold.

Solutions?

The goal for the next two weeks is to find and attack the root causes of these problems. I will be trying my hardest to follow my daily mahjong meditation, with a main focus on cutting these mistakes out of my gameplay. Each time one of these mistakes occurs, I will note down my general mental state, as well as what train of thought led to me making the mistake that occured.