Currently Kakegurui and The Journey Westward are the only manga I look forward to reading, though honestly that's a lot better than having nothing worthwhile to read.
Kakegurui - The gambling manga that's actually kind of about gambling, and people show a surprising amount of common sense. In a standard 'guy with more money almost always wins' poker game that's par for course for the genre, Yumeko found her opponent raise her by $10 million and since she obviously don't have that much money she does the standard 'put my life on the line' and then was told that her life was not worth $10 million. I've always wondered why you got like these mysterious Illuminati entities that obviously control everything and is totally willing to value Average Joe's life at tens or hundreds of millions when they're short by that much if they put their life on the line. As is consistent with Kakegurui's nod to common sense, Yumeko has already sweet talked someone with way more money to put her life on the line (daughter of some multinational conglomerate) and she's worth $100 million, and honestly the whole scene looks like a con man trying to get you to invest in some fraud because Yumeko is pretty much like 'with your money and my gambling skillz no way we can lose!!!!' I mean, honestly, most of the so called gambling legends would be guys who have a hard time selling girl scout cookies. It's refreshing to see a gambling manga that stars a main character who actually looks like she can be a successful con man, and in a story that basically involve rigged games where the guys with more money almost always wins, Yumeko does a very good job at conning more people to donate millions of dollars to her cause so that she actually has an amount of money comparable to her opponents and thus making the game actually fair, instead of doing the standard 'if we only believe in the heart of cards we can totally win rigged games where I have 0.000001% chance of winning'. Well, having super luck also doesn't hurt.
Invinicible Man - New manga by the author of Liar Game, and easily in the Hall of Shame of gambling manga. I don't actually know too much about Mahjong, but I think it's actually quite comparable to Texas Hold'em with a higher variance. The premise is some guy who has a photographic memory has never lost a game of Mahjong, and again just change 'Mahjong' to Texas Hold'Em and that roughly describes how ridiculous the premise is. I guess the guy supposed to have memorized every game ever played by everyone so he can analyze every player's tendencies and that makes him invinicible. I mean, there's some truth in that, like if you have information on your opponent's every hand played it'll obviously offer you more insight than not. But even with such a database there's still way too much unknown to never lose. For example say a guy considers KQ and A3 hands that he's willing to go all in on without ever seeing the flop. If you knew that, all that tells you is if that guy went all in it's possible he has 2 relatively weak hands which is very useful information but that's far from enough information to be able to win all the time. Currently there's this scene where the main guy says his opponent prefers to form a Mahjong hand with 7 pairs and the 8th pair is waiting on a 1 of some suit. Well, that's great if someone really loves to get a 1 of some suit for their 8th pair, but you'd have to draw the '1' in the first place. That is, 7 pairs of whatever + 1 of some suit is exactly the same hand as 7 pairs of whatever + 2 of some suit (or 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9), and no matter how much fetish a player may have toward the '1', you're still supposed to try to form the first possible complete hand so this information is actually pretty useless.
I always wonder if guys who write about sports or gambling just totally sucks at it and have an inferiority complex. At least Billionaire Girl says right in the front jacket that the author lost all his money doing day trading which is why Yukari is a daytrading super whiz to make up for the author's shortcoming in real life, and Billionaire Girl surprisingly never pretends to offer any investment knowhow. Yukari literally just has super powers and whatever stock she buys goes up. It might be self-indulgence, but at least it's not offensive.
Akagi - After the battle of the Man with the Power of a Black Hole versus the boss's White Hole power, Akagi survived a wound that nobody could possibly survive (playing Mahjong is seriously hardcore business in Japan) and came back from the dead, and what metaphorical exaggeration will he bring now? Oh, he just told the boss that no king lives forever and he's going down. So yeah, after the previous round where Akagi used his black hole powers to suck away all the tiles the boss needs to complete his hand (metaphorically), apparently the boss is going to be rattled by some 'no king lives forever' deal. I mean earlier the boss was compared to having the power of a supernova (which is why Akagi needs to use his metaphorical Black Hole powers). Talk about a metaphorical fail. The gambling aspect of Akagi is actually fairly bland. The author obviously did his homework but like most manga is obviously not as good as he thinks he is (otherwise he could be a pro gambler instead of writing manga), but at least everything in theory sort of make sense. What makes this actually worth reading is the metaphoric craziness, like in a similar manga The Legend of Kaiji, Kaiji is playing War against the boss, and he had a K and it shows him on a tank (shows K) running over hapless soldiers (shows a 7/8) or blowing away a guy with a machine gun (shows a J) and yelling 'I'm invinicible!', and then the boss turns over an Ace and you see an Apache helicopter fire a Hellfire missile and blowing Kaiji to smithereens. I'd have expected Akagi to say like death has made him stronger and now he can suck up the entire universe with his black hole or something.
The Journey Westward (Hong Kong) - Written by one of two guys in Hong Kong that knows what he's doing.
Himouto Umaru-chan - Hikari can really just go die in a fire. At first I suspect many people thought she was actually Taihei's sister for the standard 'marry your little sister' twist, but in a nod to common sense it turns out Umaru, whom we were told all along was Taihei's sister, was actually Taihei's sister. So that means Hikari doesn't even have the 'forbidden love' deal and it's probably established like an year ago that Taihei is most definitely going to marry Ebina, so what's her purpose in the story besides wasting space? The lack of resolution of some very basic stuff is getting tiresome too, like Taihei still hasn't told Ebina that he ran into her brother even though Ebina asked him to look for her brother. I also think Umaru has lost her identity once she started making friends because she's supposed to be the super lazy couch potato but since she never shows that side to her friends and she's always with her friends, then why even have that other side of her? I'm not even sure what's the point of Umaru being worried that her friends found out she's a super slacker. Are they supposed to renounce their friendship forever because she eats potato chips at home and plays games all day?
Kakegurui - The gambling manga that's actually kind of about gambling, and people show a surprising amount of common sense. In a standard 'guy with more money almost always wins' poker game that's par for course for the genre, Yumeko found her opponent raise her by $10 million and since she obviously don't have that much money she does the standard 'put my life on the line' and then was told that her life was not worth $10 million. I've always wondered why you got like these mysterious Illuminati entities that obviously control everything and is totally willing to value Average Joe's life at tens or hundreds of millions when they're short by that much if they put their life on the line. As is consistent with Kakegurui's nod to common sense, Yumeko has already sweet talked someone with way more money to put her life on the line (daughter of some multinational conglomerate) and she's worth $100 million, and honestly the whole scene looks like a con man trying to get you to invest in some fraud because Yumeko is pretty much like 'with your money and my gambling skillz no way we can lose!!!!' I mean, honestly, most of the so called gambling legends would be guys who have a hard time selling girl scout cookies. It's refreshing to see a gambling manga that stars a main character who actually looks like she can be a successful con man, and in a story that basically involve rigged games where the guys with more money almost always wins, Yumeko does a very good job at conning more people to donate millions of dollars to her cause so that she actually has an amount of money comparable to her opponents and thus making the game actually fair, instead of doing the standard 'if we only believe in the heart of cards we can totally win rigged games where I have 0.000001% chance of winning'. Well, having super luck also doesn't hurt.
Invinicible Man - New manga by the author of Liar Game, and easily in the Hall of Shame of gambling manga. I don't actually know too much about Mahjong, but I think it's actually quite comparable to Texas Hold'em with a higher variance. The premise is some guy who has a photographic memory has never lost a game of Mahjong, and again just change 'Mahjong' to Texas Hold'Em and that roughly describes how ridiculous the premise is. I guess the guy supposed to have memorized every game ever played by everyone so he can analyze every player's tendencies and that makes him invinicible. I mean, there's some truth in that, like if you have information on your opponent's every hand played it'll obviously offer you more insight than not. But even with such a database there's still way too much unknown to never lose. For example say a guy considers KQ and A3 hands that he's willing to go all in on without ever seeing the flop. If you knew that, all that tells you is if that guy went all in it's possible he has 2 relatively weak hands which is very useful information but that's far from enough information to be able to win all the time. Currently there's this scene where the main guy says his opponent prefers to form a Mahjong hand with 7 pairs and the 8th pair is waiting on a 1 of some suit. Well, that's great if someone really loves to get a 1 of some suit for their 8th pair, but you'd have to draw the '1' in the first place. That is, 7 pairs of whatever + 1 of some suit is exactly the same hand as 7 pairs of whatever + 2 of some suit (or 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, or 9), and no matter how much fetish a player may have toward the '1', you're still supposed to try to form the first possible complete hand so this information is actually pretty useless.
I always wonder if guys who write about sports or gambling just totally sucks at it and have an inferiority complex. At least Billionaire Girl says right in the front jacket that the author lost all his money doing day trading which is why Yukari is a daytrading super whiz to make up for the author's shortcoming in real life, and Billionaire Girl surprisingly never pretends to offer any investment knowhow. Yukari literally just has super powers and whatever stock she buys goes up. It might be self-indulgence, but at least it's not offensive.
Akagi - After the battle of the Man with the Power of a Black Hole versus the boss's White Hole power, Akagi survived a wound that nobody could possibly survive (playing Mahjong is seriously hardcore business in Japan) and came back from the dead, and what metaphorical exaggeration will he bring now? Oh, he just told the boss that no king lives forever and he's going down. So yeah, after the previous round where Akagi used his black hole powers to suck away all the tiles the boss needs to complete his hand (metaphorically), apparently the boss is going to be rattled by some 'no king lives forever' deal. I mean earlier the boss was compared to having the power of a supernova (which is why Akagi needs to use his metaphorical Black Hole powers). Talk about a metaphorical fail. The gambling aspect of Akagi is actually fairly bland. The author obviously did his homework but like most manga is obviously not as good as he thinks he is (otherwise he could be a pro gambler instead of writing manga), but at least everything in theory sort of make sense. What makes this actually worth reading is the metaphoric craziness, like in a similar manga The Legend of Kaiji, Kaiji is playing War against the boss, and he had a K and it shows him on a tank (shows K) running over hapless soldiers (shows a 7/8) or blowing away a guy with a machine gun (shows a J) and yelling 'I'm invinicible!', and then the boss turns over an Ace and you see an Apache helicopter fire a Hellfire missile and blowing Kaiji to smithereens. I'd have expected Akagi to say like death has made him stronger and now he can suck up the entire universe with his black hole or something.
The Journey Westward (Hong Kong) - Written by one of two guys in Hong Kong that knows what he's doing.
Himouto Umaru-chan - Hikari can really just go die in a fire. At first I suspect many people thought she was actually Taihei's sister for the standard 'marry your little sister' twist, but in a nod to common sense it turns out Umaru, whom we were told all along was Taihei's sister, was actually Taihei's sister. So that means Hikari doesn't even have the 'forbidden love' deal and it's probably established like an year ago that Taihei is most definitely going to marry Ebina, so what's her purpose in the story besides wasting space? The lack of resolution of some very basic stuff is getting tiresome too, like Taihei still hasn't told Ebina that he ran into her brother even though Ebina asked him to look for her brother. I also think Umaru has lost her identity once she started making friends because she's supposed to be the super lazy couch potato but since she never shows that side to her friends and she's always with her friends, then why even have that other side of her? I'm not even sure what's the point of Umaru being worried that her friends found out she's a super slacker. Are they supposed to renounce their friendship forever because she eats potato chips at home and plays games all day?
