Your starting 13.
Before the first discard, you already have decisions to make. What you build, what you keep, and when you change plans — these choices determine whether the rest of the hand flows or fights you.
Every hand passes through three phases. The wall tells you which one you're in.
- ▸Discard isolated terminals (1s, 9s) first
- ▸Then isolated honors that aren't seat or round wind
- ▸Hold seat & round winds even as singletons
- ▸Don't call discards — you haven't picked a plan yet
- ▸Many pairs early? Consider All Pungs or Seven Pairs
- ▸Commit to one plan — don't wander between shapes
- ▸Push hard toward tenpai
- ▸Protect the pair — re-pairing is harder later
- ▸Start tracking opponent discards
- ▸Call only if it advances a hand you've committed to
- ▸Safe discards beat advancing by one tile
- ▸If a win is unreachable, break up and discard safely
- ▸Watch for any player with three exposed sets
- ▸Speed beats score — call if it reaches tenpai now
Three ideas that apply across all phases and all hand types.
Suit tiles outnumber honors three-to-one. A chow fragment waits on two tile values (up to 8 outs); a pung waits on two copies of one. Bias toward chow shapes unless honors are already paired.
Don't pung your pair just because the third copy appears. Re-pairing later is harder than letting a good pair develop. Only pung if it clearly closes the hand.
The more tiles that complete your hand, the more likely you win first. Always shape toward two or more outs. Single-tile waits are a last resort.
You have four things to check before you throw your first tile. Do them in order — they take about ten seconds and orient the entire hand.
3+ pairs → lean toward Seven Pairs or All Pungs. 1 pair → build chow-heavy. 0 pairs → find the most connected tiles and grow a pair from there.
Two-sided fragments (4-5, waiting on 3 or 6) are worth 8 outs each. Kanchan gaps (4-6, waiting on 5) give 4 outs. Isolated tiles give 0. Maximise fragments.
Seat wind and round wind: keep, they score. Other winds and dragons: keep only if you already have a pair. Isolated single honors: discard early.
Four tiles of one suit with good connectivity? That's your anchor suit. A near-complete pung of a scoring honor? Commit to it. Early convergence beats late pivoting.
You won't always find a clear signal. If the hand is genuinely ambiguous after 10 seconds, default to the develop phase rules: discard isolated terminals first and let the draw sort out the plan.