One of the subgenres of manga I read a lot is stuff about gambling. After a lot of failures I found something that can be considered as remotely good, though for the standard of gambling related manga that usually means 'wouldn't infect you with stupidity'. Kake Gurui looks like some pretty girls in high school who are always playing some ridiculously huge amount of money in random games, and while the games and the strategy involved is pretty minimal, the story is really about a bunch of psychos who will bet their entire life on a game of tic-tac-toe or whatever. The most notable part of Kake Gurui is that everyone looks like a crazy drug addict when they start gambling which probably makes it a lot more realistic than anything else on the same subject. It reminds me a lot of "The Abridged Version of Yugioh" on Youtube where there's always this saying of 'we'll decide the fate of the universe... with a children's card game!' Lose your left eyeball in a game of war? You still got your other eyeball to bet! Maybe the manga is supposed to be a lesson like 'don't gamble or you might turn into these guys'. Whatever the reason, it's surprisingly entertaining. The strategy involved is some rudimentary that it's unlikely to be an insult to anyone's intelligence, and the main character openly admits that luck plays into winning a lot, and even if you lose, well, you can always bet your other eyeball.
This also brings me to some example of bad gambling manga. Recently there's something called The Invincible Man from the guy who did Liar Game, which is about some guy who never loses a game of Mahjong. It's probably more likely that someone wins every event in WSOP for a whole year compared to this, but if you read stuff from the same guy you'll know that stuff that would embarrass even armchair quarterback has never stopped this author from showing off his superior intelligence. The story seems to be about some guy who after an accident has a super memory so he becomes unbeatable in Mahjong. For example it says he watches every one of the millions of mahjong games played online and memorized everything, because if an average game of Mahjong takes a minute (it's quite a bit longer) to complete you totally can watch 1 million minutes of mahjong (close to 2 years without sleeping) in a couple of months if you got a photographic memory. Honestly it'd make more sense if this guy has X-ray vision after an accident though from what I understand having that is still nowhere close to enough to never lose a game of Mahjong because there's a lot of luck involved even if you can magically see every tile your opponents have. It seems to me this author just wants to create controversy by drawing provocative stuff kind of like how Liar Game turned into a political thing about college students getting ran over by tanks in the last chapter that literally has nothing to do with the rest of the story.
Honorable mention of respectability for gambling manga goes to Akagi. Well, it's actually dumber than the average bad manga, but most recently a key scene helps rescue this from the depth of suck. The story is about a guy named Akagi who never lost in Mahjong (if this sounds familiar, that's usually what Japanese gambling manga is about), and in another mahjong to the death battle his arch rival realized that Akagi was actually using the power of a black hole to suck away the tiles and luck away which is why he was winning, so to counter that he used the power of a white hole (not a wormhole, a white hole. I think the author thought this was a real astrophysical object) to create light that not even a black hole can suck up to counter Akagi's black hole power. This elevates it to the realm of the merely insane as opposed to insulting. I mean, if you talk about a guy who never lost a game of Mahjong, it probably makes more sense that he does have the power of a black hole compared to armchair quarterbacking his strategy. If a guy can suck away his opponent's luck and can suck in the tiles he need to complete his hand, that'd actually be a somewhat plausible reason as to why a guy never loses a game of Mahjong. In the battle of the white versus black hole, the bad guy used the power of the white hole to draw every tile he needs, but he wasn't able to get the instant kill (remember this is to the death) because Akagi had the foresight to use his black hole powers to suck up tiles needed for the best hand and since he's already holding those tiles, the other guy's super power cannot draw tiles that are no longer in the pool which prevented the instant kill.
This also brings me to some example of bad gambling manga. Recently there's something called The Invincible Man from the guy who did Liar Game, which is about some guy who never loses a game of Mahjong. It's probably more likely that someone wins every event in WSOP for a whole year compared to this, but if you read stuff from the same guy you'll know that stuff that would embarrass even armchair quarterback has never stopped this author from showing off his superior intelligence. The story seems to be about some guy who after an accident has a super memory so he becomes unbeatable in Mahjong. For example it says he watches every one of the millions of mahjong games played online and memorized everything, because if an average game of Mahjong takes a minute (it's quite a bit longer) to complete you totally can watch 1 million minutes of mahjong (close to 2 years without sleeping) in a couple of months if you got a photographic memory. Honestly it'd make more sense if this guy has X-ray vision after an accident though from what I understand having that is still nowhere close to enough to never lose a game of Mahjong because there's a lot of luck involved even if you can magically see every tile your opponents have. It seems to me this author just wants to create controversy by drawing provocative stuff kind of like how Liar Game turned into a political thing about college students getting ran over by tanks in the last chapter that literally has nothing to do with the rest of the story.
Honorable mention of respectability for gambling manga goes to Akagi. Well, it's actually dumber than the average bad manga, but most recently a key scene helps rescue this from the depth of suck. The story is about a guy named Akagi who never lost in Mahjong (if this sounds familiar, that's usually what Japanese gambling manga is about), and in another mahjong to the death battle his arch rival realized that Akagi was actually using the power of a black hole to suck away the tiles and luck away which is why he was winning, so to counter that he used the power of a white hole (not a wormhole, a white hole. I think the author thought this was a real astrophysical object) to create light that not even a black hole can suck up to counter Akagi's black hole power. This elevates it to the realm of the merely insane as opposed to insulting. I mean, if you talk about a guy who never lost a game of Mahjong, it probably makes more sense that he does have the power of a black hole compared to armchair quarterbacking his strategy. If a guy can suck away his opponent's luck and can suck in the tiles he need to complete his hand, that'd actually be a somewhat plausible reason as to why a guy never loses a game of Mahjong. In the battle of the white versus black hole, the bad guy used the power of the white hole to draw every tile he needs, but he wasn't able to get the instant kill (remember this is to the death) because Akagi had the foresight to use his black hole powers to suck up tiles needed for the best hand and since he's already holding those tiles, the other guy's super power cannot draw tiles that are no longer in the pool which prevented the instant kill.
