Advanced Skills

Imagine starting a new game of mahjong in the North position. The first three players discard the following tiles:

You draw a tile and look down at your hand:

What would you play here? Think about it for a moment because we’ll loop back on this later.

The Meta

Now that you’ve played enough hands of mahjong to get a good feel for the game, you might have noticed a few patterns in gameplay, including:

• The opening discards involve players discarding a suit from their hand.
• Players tend to play more defensively if they notice another player is close to winning.
• Players tend to play concealed until they’re far enough to commit on a hand.

These gameplay patterns arise from the meta of Hong Kong style Mahjong, or the general strategies and approaches that players use to play efficiently and win.

To understand the meta better, we can break the game down into three segments similar to chess:

• The Opening: Gathering information from initial discards
• The Midgame: Committing to a hand and reaching tenpai (a ready hand)
• The Endgame: Pushing or folding

The Opening

In Intermediate Skills, we covered how reading a player’s discards helps you infer their hand. We can take that one step further and build inferences from the initial discards.

Initial Discards

Let’s start by assuming that each player is playing optimally, meaning everyone tries to build a winning hand as fast as possible. Then, the opening meta is to discard a suit from their hand.

With the opening meta in mind, we can use the initial discards to infer:

• The distribution of tiles in other player’s hands
• The distribution of tiles remaining in the wall
• Which type of hand to play for the game

Looking back at our initial question where the players all opened by discarding dot tiles, we can reasonably assume:

• Other players have few dot tiles in their hand
• There are many dot tiles remaining in the wall, which we would be slightly more likely to draw

So even though our hand started with only two dot tiles, we can consider flexing into a suited dot hand and open by discarding character tiles.

The opening meta is to discard a suit

The Midgame

Sometimes, you might start the game with 10 bamboo tiles and already know that you want to play for a Pure Hand/Flush . However, in most games, players will follow the standard midgame meta.

The opening meta is to remove a suit from your hand, so by the start of the midgame, most hands will typically contain two suits, honor tiles, and perhaps pairs of the last suit.

At this point, players will begin discarding tiles of a different suit, which also tells you the suit they’re aiming to play. For instance, if the player to your left has been discarding dot tiles and then suddenly discards a bamboo tile, we can infer that they’re looking to build a suited characters hand.

Players will also start making calls and opening up their hand, providing you concrete information on the hands they want to build.

The goal of the midgame is to reach tenpai (or a ready hand), where you are waiting for the final tiles you need to win.

But before you get to tenpai, there are a few important points to consider:

1. Which suits are more contested
2. Which tiles are more dangerous to drop
3. Which hand to commit on

Contested Suits

In mahjong, the tiles are made up of three suits and the special honor tiles. However, there are four players. So very often, at least two players will have to fight over a contested suit.

Although playing a contested suit can slow down your hand, there are also times where you might intentionally contest another player’s suit.

Let’s look at a few scenarios when you’re contested with:

• The player to your left: this is the worst case. If your hand is far from tenpai or relies on chows of the contested suit, it may be worth pivoting to All Pongs or All Pairs .
• The player across: in this case, although a suited hand will be statistically slower, it’s often not worth pivoting if you have a lot of that suit. Be careful of losing chows to pongs.
• The player to your right: this is the best case scenario for contesting because you can call chows from your left while avoiding useful discards for your right. If the player on the right also has the point lead, you might even intentionally contest them to slow down their hands.
• Multiple players: these games often end in a draw or with the uncontested player winning. If you find yourself in this situation, you may want to force a pivot to an uncontested suit.

Now, we can use the information from initial discards and our understanding of contested suits to dive into the crux of the midgame: deciding on a hand to play.

Deciding on a Hand

There’s no one best hand to play every game, and many players will tend to favor certain playstyles such as committing early on a suit or playing defensively with All Chow hands or All Pairs hands.

The best players can play flexibly given the current game state, so let’s run through a few potential situations you’ll frequently encounter:

Situation 1: Everyone is still concealed, but you’ve inferred that the player on your left is playing characters. Your hand is composed of character, dot, and honor tiles.

In this case, you’d be looking to drop your character tiles as soon as possible (before the player to your left reaches tenpai) and play for dots.

Situation 2: The same situation as 1, but you noticed that the other two players also want to play dots.

In this situation, you might decide to force the less contested suit (characters) or switch to a defensive hand.

Situation 3: The player on your right calls for a chow of bamboo, and you still have 4 bamboo tiles left in your hand to discard.

Here, you might decide to pivot back into a suited bamboo hand to contest the player on your right and avoid discarding free melds.

N-Ready Hands

Another aspect to consider when deciding which hand to play is how far away your hand is from tenpai. In Riichi mahjong, a hand is N-Ready when it is N moves away from tenpai.

Strong players can determine a hand’s ready state at a glance. Let’s look at an example:

This hand would be 2-Ready from a Clean Hand/Half Flush and 3-Ready from a All Pairs hand. Depending on the game state, you might choose to start calling for tiles for the half-flush. If you draw a 4-Bamboo, you might also consider discarding the North or South to reach 2-Ready with All Pairs.

Looping back to the previous Situation 3, if your hand is 4-Ready and the bamboo tiles are the only tiles you need to discard to reach tenpai, you might also choose to push for the win and continue dropping bamboo tiles.

This means that you’re betting that the player on your right won’t be able to accept every bamboo discard you feed them and that they are further from tenpai than you are.

The Endgame

The endgame starts when one player has reached tenpai.

Not all players will know exactly when the endgame starts because a player could be ready on turn 2. However, in a typical game, players will usually have enough time during the opening and midgame to deduce the ready state of other players’ hands.

Observing Discards

Not only is it important to watch which tiles players discard but also how they discard them. If a player has three open chows and always discards the tile they draw, there’s a high chance that they’re in tenpai.

Additionally, if a player is playing a suited hand and they suddenly begin dropping tiles of that suit or honor tiles, there’s a chance that they’re close to tenpai.

Pushing vs Folding

Once you recognize that another player has reached tenpai, you’re forced to make a decision: whether to continue pushing to win with your current hand or folding and giving up on the win to avoid discarding into an opponent.

There are multiple factors to this decision:

• Does your hand still contain risky tiles that you need to discard?
• Did you just draw a risky tile?
• If you complete your hand, how many Fan will you score?
• How many Fan is your opponent’s hand worth?
• How deep into the game are you?
• Are you behind or ahead in points?

In cases where you’re close to winning with a large hand, it can be worth pushing, especially if it’s still early in the game. If you end up feeding into a smaller 3-4 Fan hand, there will still be many chances to come back.

Additional Tips

Obfuscating Discards

Assuming every player understands the meta and how to play efficiently, you can use discards to throw off other players’ deductions.

For instance, you might be planning to play an All Pongs hand but you can discard as if you’re playing a suited hand. You could also call for a pong of dots to fake contesting dots (just be sure not to immediately discard dot tiles afterwards).

In some cases, it can be helpful to play with slightly lower tile efficiency to throw off other players. For instance, if the player to your right is ahead in score, you could bait them into calling for a chow of bamboo and then force bamboos to contest them.