Ben Boas '06.5 posted the best ever finish by an American at an international mahjong competition in June, placing third out of 133 competitors at the Open European Mahjong Championship in Copenhagen, Denmark.
Boas, who was playing mahjong in Finland last week when reached by The Herald, wrote in an e-mail that this year's championship was the first ever to have a full American team, and the first to have an American top finisher.
Mahjong, which originated in China, is a strategy-based four-player game with intricate rules in which competitors use tiles to try to build complete suits, usually of threes, from either 13 or 16 tiles. According to the World Mahjong Organization, the game has been a worldwide pastime for over a century, "owing to its comprehensive cultural content as well as its merits of being interesting, competitive and helpful to wisdom and friendship."
Boas was joined at the tournament by Alexander Young '07, whom Boas wrote wasn't planning on playing but "ended up substituting for a Russian player." Young finished in 59th place and was the next best American finisher.
"For someone who only learned the rule-set three weeks before the tournament, I'd say that's pretty good," Boas wrote.
The tournament's champion was Denmark's Martin Wedel Jacobsen, while Japan's Kohichi Oda finished second.
In his e-mail, Boas wrote that he has been playing mahjong since he learned it in Tibet in 2004 during a year off from Brown. When he returned the following fall he started a mahjong club, and later decided to write an honors thesis in East Asian studies on mahjong culture in Japan. Boas has since won a Fulbright fellowship to pursue the same topic next year while studying at Japan's Kyoto University and plans to compete at the World Mahjong Championship in November in Chengdu, China, he wrote.
Boas also wrote that he plans to "work with the European mahjong community" in the next year as a consultant to develop rules for their Japanese-rules mahjong tournament.
Though Boas was not available by telephone, he has detailed many of his experiences on his blog.
"With 13 points out of a possible 16, I had had a great start to the tournament!" Boas blogged on June 24. "But my luck soon took a change. Round 5 was a bit of a nightmare. My opponents included Sune, a very strong Danish player, and Emmanuel, the former French champion who handles his tiles so well, often he doesn't even need to look at them because he can feel the patterns on the tiles with his thumb."
"And yes, I'm not a Brown student anymore," Boas wrote on June 25, though it isn't clear to whom or what he was responding. "But hey, what can I say? I love my alma mater. Go Brown!"
