The idea to use some kind of system to ease the administrative burden for tournament hosts has already existed for some time, and after a few test games with Pantheon at the Ryanpin club meetings it was decided to give the System a spin at a small tournament with more Members of the Austrian Riichi Mahjong Association.
After contacting Oleg Klimenko, a member from Seihoku Mahjong Club from Saint Petersburg, who is the Lead developer of the Pantheon Project he created a Club rating for Test Games at the Mahjong Club in Graz at mjtop.net, where most tournaments and club ratings from the russian riichi community are hosted.
Because of GDPR concerns and to have more flexibility in configuration we decided to install our own instance of the System for our first test tournament.
This is possible as Pantheon is Open Source and hosted on a Github Repository.
So after all this preparations 12 players gathered in Vienna to see how things would work out in a real world test.
We did a few things differently then the Russian community , from what i have heard:
1.) We did use one smartphone per table which we placed in the middle of the mat, instead of everyone using her separate phone, to keep scores in view for everyone and unnecessary interaction with devices to a minimum during play.
This worked quite well, and received positive feedback from all attendants
2.) We used a predefined assignments of players to the tables with the winds at the table being randomized before the game by the program. Pantheon also provides other options like completely predefined seating or Swiss Seating System which is used mainly at Russian tournaments and which sounds like a real good option to keep in mind for other tournaments in any case.
After the tournament, which ran really smooth without any errors or problems there was also a feedback round with all attendees, producing really positive feedback about future use, ease of use, availability of statistics with the only things being mentioned resulting from the way we used some functions differently then intended(i.e. one smartphone per table), and which, because of the Open Source nature of the project can be easily adapted to local needs.
The winner of the title and a shiny diadem was Matthias Hadolt, followed by Alexander Doppelhofer and Lena Weinguny.
The Results and a plethora of tournament statistics can be found on the tournament page.
We are quite sure that this system will see use in Austrian tournaments in the future.
A huge Thanks and shout-out once more goes to Oleg Klimenko who created this project and was also really helpful with setting up and running the system, and the mahjong community for providing an such a thriving environment for this great game we all love.
A big thanks also to everyone who has participated and Lena and Kasu for providing the venue, prizes and cakes!
