Mako Someya

Mako Someya is one of the main characters from the Saki anime and manga.

Mako is a second year student at Kiyosumi High School. She is the second person to join Hisa Takei in the mahjong club. Her Grandfather owns a mahjong parlor (a maid cafe in the anime), which is where Mako grew up and now works as a waitress. Her peculiar manner of speech appears to be a result of being raised by her grandfather.

In the AWA fics, Mako is a student at the AWa Academy.

Appearance
Mako has short, wavy seaweed to pale dark green hair. She has copper brown eyes and wears a pair of large glasses. She is seen in the Kiyosumi second year uniform.

Personality
Mako is a reliable person and a trusting friend, being the only person that Hisa shows her doubts to. She is often snarky when she speaks to Hisa. She was very close to her grandpa growing up and has adopted some of his personality, like the way he speaks. She uses the dialect from Hiroshima prefecture because of his influence.

However, she is also shown to be a bit vengeful, as she, along with Tomoki and Miharu, sought revenge against Kaori for defeating them in the prefectural final with her beginner's luck.

Play Style/Abilities
Mako has a unique ability called Spindle Territory. Because she has lived in a mahjong parlor for years, she has a mental image from countless of games. When she takes her glasses off, she can remember past games similar to the game she's currently playing to help her win by reading her opponents' hands. This can be used to figure when an opponent is about to win, or if Mako should play it safe or not. She also uses her ability by making confusing discards and calls to trick her opponents. It is later revealed that she rarely declares riichi and when she does, she usually wins.

In the prefecturals, she has problems with beginner players like Kaori Senoo because she hasn't witnessed many beginner-level matches, as only more experienced players went to her grandfather's cafe. She is also shown to have trouble using her ability when Hao Huiyu mixes in her Chinese-style mahjong into the current game. Whether or not this is also because Mako has never encountered Chinese mahjong, the game state did not match the Asia tournament's records (as Mako noted), or both, is unknown.

Mako herself claims her ability is like looking at the current game as a face. If the other players play the way Mako is expecting, the face is familiar to all of them, allowing Mako to change how the face looks by playing unorthodoxly, changing the flow of the game into her favour. Similarly, if her opponents are not playing a way Mako is used to (such as beginners or playing a different version of mahjong), then Mako will have trouble looking at the face and utilising the game's flow. This means Mako plays better against orthodox mahjong players while not doing so well against unorthodox players.

Mako is shown to make an unordinary amount of flushes and half-flushes. Over the course of several hands early on in the series, almost all of her hands were a flush of half-flush. This resulted in Mako being capable of winning a lot of points in a short period of time. Her favourite Yakuman is ryuuiisou, a hand in which all of your tiles are entirely green, meaning only some of the souzu tiles and hatsu are applicable for this yakuman, always making this yakuman a flush or half-flush.

Trivia

 * Mako's ability to make flushes and half-flushes a lot of the time is a reference to the Some of Someya, her surname. In Japanese mahjong someru, is a verb used for going for one-suited hands, as somete, is a term for a one-suited hand.