Intermediate Skills

By now, you should be familiar with the three types of hands normally played to reach 3 Fan: all pongs, suited, and all chows. If you’ve played a few rounds with more advanced players though, you might notice that they’re able to build their hands quickly and consistently, and they rarely deal into other players’ hands.

For the intermediate guide, we’ll be looking to level up your gameplay by improving tile efficiency, adding flexibility, and deducing other players’ hands.

Tile Efficiency

How are some players able to complete their hands so quickly when you’ve only found 2 pongs? The first key is tile efficiency.

Tile efficiency refers to the speed of hand development. — Riichi Wiki

Having good tile efficiency means that you’re maintaining the best odds to complete your hand as soon as possible. Luckily, it’s easier to play with greater efficiency in HK style 3 Min compared to other styles such as Japanese due to the limited number of hand types you can win with.

Key Concepts For HK Style Tile Efficiency

Early Game (Straights):

If you’ve already decided to go for straights, prioritize discarding honor tiles starting with guest winds (winds that will not give you any points). This increases the chance that any tile you draw will connect with your hand.

Early Game (General):

To start off, prioritize discarding isolated tiles or terminal tiles of the suit that you have the least of. Terminal tiles are ones and nines, so a hand with 2-3-9 of characters should first discard the 9. In this case, the 9 is also isolated because it’s not connected with any other tiles.

If you’re left with a pair in the suit with fewest tiles, keep it and start discarding tiles of the suit with the second fewest tiles. This is because if you suddenly draw into 3 pairs, you can choose to play All Pongs or All Pairs instead of a single suited hand.

Mid Game (General):

At this point, you should be left with only honor tiles, pairs, and tiles of a single suit. If you decide to pursue a suited hand, your discard priority will look like:

1. Any remaining tiles of other suits
2. Unpaired guest winds (since they won’t add to your score)
3. Unpaired honor tiles

If instead you have enough pairs in your hand and decide to pursue an all pongs hand, your discard priority will look like:

1. Tiles where the other 3 are accounted for in either the discard pile or revealed tiles
2. Tiles where 2 others are accounted for
3. Tiles where 1 other is accounted for
4. Any unpaired tile

Note that this is simply the most efficient way to build a hand and does not take into account what other players might be going for or holding in their hand.

Straights and Late Game Waits:

We won’t be diving too in depth into optimizing different hand structures here. Instead, we’ll follow the general rule of thumb that having more options is better. For example:

• If you have a 7-9 structure and draw a 6, you can discard the 9 because now you can wait for a 5 or an 8 instead of only an 8 to complete the chow
• If you have a 4-5-5-6 structure, it’s often better not to call for a pong on the 5 because that will isolate your 4 and 6

Similarly, when you are waiting for a tile to win, you generally want to have more options available:

• Prefer an open wait over a closed wait
• Always count how many tiles are left that you can use to win. If you’re waiting to pair an eye but the other three tiles are all already discarded, you won’t be able to win

Flexibility: Seven Pairs To All Pongs

The tips in the previous section can not only help you improve your tile efficiency but also help you play with greater flexibility. If you noticed in the Early Game (General) section, you can prioritize discards in a way that allows you to play either all pongs or a suited hand later on. To further increase your options, there’s another hand that we skipped over in the beginner guide: the All Pairs or Seven Pairs hand.

Pros:

• You can play concealed to hide your intentions
• You can hold crucial tiles to slow down other players or entirely prevent them from winning
• You can choose to flex into All Pongs and quickly reach a ready hand

Cons:

• Slightly lower scoring potential. Although Seven Pairs is worth a base of 4 Fan, suited hands can combine more easily with pongs for 6 Fan ( Clean Hand/Half Flush + All Pongs ) or even 10 Fan ( Pure Hand/Flush + All Pongs )
• Single tile wait win condition

When to Play:

• If your hand is still concealed and you’ve accumulated 3 or 4 pairs
• If you don’t want to discard some tiles that you know other players will need

How to Play:

• Play similarly to an All Pongs hand in terms of discard priority for efficiency
• You can discard tiles of two suits first to make it seem as if you’re playing a concealed suited hand
• Defensive: Hold onto suited tiles that the player to your right might want
• Defensive: Discard dangerous tiles earlier (honor tiles, non-terminal tiles)
• Aggressive: Convert to All Pongs to go for a quick win since you should already have 4 to 5 pairs in your hand

Reading Open Hands

So far, we’ve focused on how to build winning hands and how to build them quickly. However, if you win a few small hands for 3-4 Fan each but end up discarding into a Pure Hand/Flush , you’ll lose multiples of your winnings.

To avoid a disastrous loss, we can use a player’s melded or revealed tiles to deduce the hand they’re aiming to make. This is because we know that an open hand almost always has to be either an All Pongs hand or some form of a suited hand in order to reach 3 Fan.

Example 1: A player calls for a chow of character tiles

Unless that player has 2 points from flowers, you can assume that they’re playing a suited character hand.

Example 2: A player calls for a pong of 2-dot tiles

This player may be playing a suited hand or an All Pongs hand. If they later call for a pong of 5-bamboo, then they must be playing an All Pongs hand.

Example 3: A player has this for their current hand:

With only 4 unrevealed tiles left in their hand, this player could be aiming for a Pure Hand/Flush , making it extremely risky to drop any more dot tiles.

Reading Discards

You can combine information from melds with information from discards to determine what type of hand a player is aiming for and how close they may be to winning.

In the previous Example 2, if the player discards a 9-dot right after calling for a pong of 2-dots in the early game, it’s likely that they’re playing for All Pongs. However, if it’s late into the game and you noticed that they haven’t dropped dots all game, they might be ready to win with a suited dots hand.

Similarly, in Example 3, if you notice the player is now discarding honor tiles, they might be aiming for Pure Hand/Flush . However, if they start discarding dot tiles, they could have settled for Clean Hand/Half Flush , making honor tiles the riskier drop.

Additionally, you can leverage information from discards to guess at which hands a player is aiming for even before they reveal any tiles.

Question 1: Given this order of discards, what hand might this player be building?

Answer: This player started by discarding dot tiles followed by bamboo tiles but never dropped character tiles, making it highly likely that they’re playing a suited character hand. The south tile discard at the end could indicate that they’re close to a ready hand or that they’re looking to make Pure Hand/Flush .

Question 2: Given this order of discards, what hand might this player be building?

Answer: Since this player started off discarding honor tiles, they’re probably trying to build an All Chow type hand. This theory is reinforced by the fact that they then toss out terminal tiles and any newer honor tiles they drew.

Question 3: Given this order of discards, what hand might this player be building?

Answer: Although the discards initially suggest a suited character hand, the character tile drops later and the lack of honors or terminals in the discards indicates a greater potential that they’re aiming for a Thirteen Orphans hand.

If you recognize that an opponent is ready to win or close to ready, consider folding (giving up) your hand and discarding safer tiles to avoid feeding the winning tile.