European Mahjong Association

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The European Mahjong Association (EMA) is an organization whose purpose is "to encourage, disseminate and coordinate the playing of mahjong in Europe". Its membership currently consists only of national Mahjong organizations located in Europe, each nation being treated equally during procedural votes. Players are technically members of their national organizations and not directly of the EMA. The EMA does coordinate pan-european initiatives such as a coordinated registration and player database and the ranking system for members of the various national organizations. While a best effort is made to try to disseminate and coordinate the release of multilingual documentation, the default language is English. The current president of the EMA is Tina Christensen.

European Mahjong Association

EMA logo
Location Europe
Inception 2005
Leader Tina Christensen
President
Members 19 (or 20) associations
European Mahjong Association ruleset
Kuitan, atozuke ari-ari (2016+)
Starting points 0
Ending points
(Target)
0
Negative score Limitless
Oka
(total ante)
0
Uma
(placement bonus)
1st: +15,000; 2nd: +5,000; 3rd: -5,000; 4th: -15,000.
Multiple win cases 3
Call precedence Reasonable (3.0s)
Dora settings All
Renchan setting Tenpai-renchan
Abortive draws None (2016+)
Specific
House rules
Nothing abnormal since 2016.

Membership

The EMA was created in 2005 with 7 original members. At present, there are 20 members:[1]

According to past archives, the missing number 13 was meant to designate Bosnia and Herzegovina. Number 20 was also meant to represent Turkey: as of 2016, this number has been assigned to Belarus. The status for the missing number 18 is unknown.

Future Membership

As of May 2016, it is likely that [20] Belarus will become a new member organization, to be welcomed into the EMA at the next General Assembly. The EMA member page already talks about 20 member countries and lists a Belarusian as a board member, but according to statutes, only at a General Assembly can their membership be formalized.

Participation

As of January 2017, there are 437 active players (players with 2 or more riichi tournaments played within the last 3 years), an increase of 111 from July 2014 (306 members). There are other players within these countries, so the totals provided below are not ceilings of activity but rather a minimum baseline to count upwards from. Player counts can sometimes dip due to the seasonal nature of the data.

Code Country Players (2014.07) Players (2015.10) Players (2016.05) Players (2016.09) Players (2017.01)
01 Austria 22 22 22 24 25
02 Belgium 1 0 0 0 0
03 Denmark 23 20 21 18 16
04 France 51 50 52 53 52
05 Germany 23 31 34 34 36
06 Hungary 0 0 0 0 0
07 Italy 1 1 1 1 1
08 Netherlands 44 46 49 51 50
09 Sweden 11 12 10 10 12
10 Spain 0 0 0 0 1
11 Great Britain 20 29 27 26 27
12 Portugal 1 1 1 1 0
14 Finland 3 5 11 11 13
15 Russia 59 85 100 109 112
16 Switzerland 0 0 0 0 3
17 Slovakia 9 11 11 11 12
19 Poland 28 35 35 37 37
21 Ukraine 2 22 22 20 21
22 Czech Republic 3 6 7 8 8
23 Belarus . . 0 1 1
Total 306 376 403 417 437

The EMA has started to release historical data, that can be found on their website [[1]].

Rulesets

EMA currently uses two rulesets; one for Japanese Mahjong and another for a Chinese style. For the Chinese rules used, EMA uses the MCR ruleset that is regulated by one of two Chinese authorities and used in the Chinese Mahjong World Championship. For Japanese Mahjong, EMA has their own Riichi ruleset that is based on the World Riichi Championship rules, updated in 2015. The four differences from the WRC rules are: double/triple ron allowed, no kiriage mangan, unclaimed bets are taken by the winner, and more lax rules for call priority and timing. These rules take effect in April 2016.

The previous rules were loosely based on Dutch and Danish customs. Notable features included the lack of kuitan, the inclusion of kuikae (2008) and its removal (2012), the use of aka dora and ryanhan shibari.

Tournaments

Year #tournaments #event-players Comments
2008 6 196
2009 6 220
2010 8 324
2011 12 476
2012 16 512
2013 22 716
2014 23 748 Total does not include 2014 WRC (120 participants)
2015 25 792
2016 29 1056 Total *does* include 2016 ERMC (128 participants)

European Riichi Mahjong Championship

Ranking

Each national organization can apply to EMA to have their tournaments officially ranked. Each member country can hold one national championship (MERS-2) and two other events (MERS-1) per ruleset per year. EMA also admisters European Championships, held every 2-3 years, for both rulesets.

Ranking system

EMA's Mahjong Europe Ranking System (MERS) has separate ranking lists for Chinese Mahjong (MCR) and Japanese Mahjong (RCR) rulesets. Both operate in the same way. From each tournament a player participates in, they receive a rating from 0 to 1000, where 0 corresponds to last place and 1000 to first. Then their overall rating from 0 to 1000 is calculated as a weighted average of the tournament results. [2]

Quotas

For Championship events, EMA will allocate seats to each member country by using their quota system.[3] Once distributed to countries, national organizations are free to distribute them as they see fit.

External links

References