Yuuki Kataoka

Yuuki Kataoka is the one of the main characters from the Saki anime and manga.

Yuuki is a first year student at Kiyosumi High School. She has been friends with Nodoka Haramura since middle school. Yuuki deeply loves tacos and any food with a name similar to taco. Yuuki even told Nodoka that she choose to go to Kiyosumi simply because the cafeteria sells tacos. She likes being a comedian, especially when she interacts with Kyoutarou Suga. Yuuki stars in her own miniseries that appears at the beginning and end of each of the manga's published volumes.

In the AWA fics, Yuuki is a student at the AWA Academy.

Appearance
Yuuki has a very short and child-like appearance. She has short orange hair with two short pigtails and blueish-green eyes. In addition to her Kiyosumi uniform she wears thigh high white stockings. She also wears a cat-like ornament around her waist that mimics her expression and sometimes mimics her entire speech. Starting in the national quarter-finals, she starts to wear a cape before and during her matches, stating that it looked cool on her.

Personality
Despite being a first year in high school, Yuuki is very child-like. She seems to be obsessed with Nodoka's large breasts and wants larger ones herself. She is flirtatious towards Kyoutarou; whether this is because of an actual attraction or because she likes to poke fun is unknown. She is also protective of her friends: during the nationals when the media says that the Nagano prefecture has been dropping in power, she gets angry because she feels that they are making fun of her friends and she vows to make them pay.

She is also quite prideful, as Nodoka noted that she wouldn't let herself cry in front of other first-years, but was willing to cry when only Mako and Hisa were in the room.

Play Style/Abilities
Yuuki's speciality is the East Wind round, where she plays much better mahjong, in contrast to her poorer performances in the South Wind round. In addition, she almost always starts as the dealer (the East Wind seat), which allows her to score a large amount of points early in the match through dealer repeats. In addition to her affinity to the East Wind, she also has an affinity to tacos, which she says she requires to play mahjong properly (she also jokes that she wouldn't be able to maintain her human form without eating tacos). Other foods that sound like "taco," such as octopus sausages ("tako" is octopus in Japanese) also serve to fulfil this purpose, although she is not as strong if she ate actual tacos.

Yuuki's typical style is to keep her hand closed and declare riichi when she can, though she has been shown calling tiles and advancing her hand this way, although to varying degrees of success: in the first episode she called for a honitsu 2000 pts hand, but in the first round of the prefectural tournament she called for a double-ton dora 4 haneman. Her tendency to keep her hands closed, however, led to her achieving high scoring hands within a few turns (compounding yaku like tsumo, ippatsu, and ura-dora in conjunction with her riichi), building a huge lead. At first, Yuuki was susceptible to changes of the flow, with Jun and Mihoko proving to be difficult opponent's due to their control over flow, but as of the National Tourney, she is shown to not mind changes in flow as much (although they still hinder her a little). Rinkai's coach has theorized that she may be the type that has to gradually build up her flow and therefore has to start accelerating early.

In the semifinals, it is shown that Yuuki practised and can use a high-pace style of play, in which she calls tiles to advance her hand quickly but winning considerably less points than before due to the open nature of her hands. This in effect does two things: gain points for Kiyosumi and prevents the other schools from making a move, as it capitalises on Yuuki's high luck and concentration in the East round. Satoha also noted that this style of high-pace play was probably created to combat Teru Miyanaga in the Finals, and that whoever came up with this was determined to win. She also considerably increased her defensive skills, being willing to lower her hand's value in order to play safer, and coming out of the first half of the semifinals with a relatively small point loss despite getting hit with the dealer penalty from Suzu's baiman and Satoha winning several hands during her dealership in the South round.

Trivia

 * Yuuki Kataoka was the captain of Takatoobara Middle School's mahjong club during her third year.
 * Over the course of two hanchan, Yuuki has lost the least amount of points possible with -100 points in the national quarterfinals.
 * Despite Yuuki's tendency to be the first dealer, the first game we see her playing has her in the North position first, meaning she'd be the last dealer.
 * Yuuki is the only member of Kiyosumi's team to be shown having only negative scores at the National tournament (although it is implied she won in the first round, that was skipped over in the manga and anime).