One tile away.
The terms in this chapter — tenpai, shanten, outs — come from Japanese mahjong. HK mahjong doesn't use them officially, but every serious HK player who thinks analytically borrows them, because they're the clearest language we have for a universal problem: how close am I, and what gets me there?
The underlying math is identical across all mahjong variants. A 5–6 Bamboo fragment waits on 4 or 7 whether you're playing HK rules or Japanese rules. The concepts describe the tiles, not the ruleset.
Tenpai (聽牌) means your 13-tile hand is exactly one tile short of winning. Here's a hand in tenpai:
Three complete melds, one pung, one isolated tile (7 Dot). Waiting for a second 7 Dot to form the pair. Draw it or claim it — you win.
In Japanese mahjong you declare tenpai publicly (riichi) and lock your hand for a bonus. In HK mahjong there's no declaration — you hold tenpai silently and win when the tile arrives.
Shanten counts the minimum number of useful tile swaps needed to reach tenpai. Tenpai is 0-shanten — the destination. Most hands start a round at 3–4 shanten and work down.
Distance zero. One tile wins.
One good draw puts you in tenpai. Most hands spend a few turns here.
Two good draws needed. Still buildable early; dangerous past turn 12.
A hand at 1-shanten — three complete melds, a pair, one tile that doesn't yet belong anywhere:
One useful draw puts this in tenpai: pair the 9 Dot, or find a new pair and discard it.
Reading it quickly: count orphans — tiles with no connection to anything else in your hand. One orphan → likely 1-shanten. Two or more → likely 2-shanten.
Optional arithmetic: shanten = 8 − (2 × complete melds) − (partial sets) − (1 if you have a pair). Don't count a tile twice.
An out is any tile that completes your hand at tenpai. There are 4 copies of every tile — subtract what's visible to get the live count. The shape of your tenpai wait determines how many outs you have.
Two-sided wait — up to 8 outs
Completes on 4-Dot or 7-Dot. The strongest common tenpai shape — always prefer this over a gap or edge wait.
Gap wait — up to 4 outs
Completes only on 5-Bamboo. Half as many outs as two-sided. Acceptable when nothing better is possible.
Edge wait — up to 4 outs
Completes only on 3-Character (or 8–9 → 7 only). No two-sided option. Avoid deliberately building into this.
Pair wait — 2 outs
Waiting on a third copy to complete a pung. The weakest tenpai shape — build toward anything else if you can.
Every tile discarded face-up kills one potential out. A 5-Bamboo thrown by any opponent removes one of your gap-wait outs. Track discards even before you're in tenpai — a wait that starts with 8 live outs may be down to 3 by the time you arrive.
The wait, turn by turn
Starting with 8 live outs — a healthy two-sided wait.
By turn 12 your once-strong wait has bled to two live tiles. Past this point, the wall itself runs out before your tile arrives.
Your shanten number changes what matters. At 2-shanten the only goal is maximizing outs. At 1-shanten the goal shifts to the quality of the tenpai you're about to enter. If your best wait is already mostly dead, pivot to a different shape earlier rather than reaching tenpai and discovering you're waiting on a ghost.
Drop the gap wait at turn 9
Reshape toward a two-sided wait elsewhere. You lose a turn but gain a wait with 6+ live outs.
Push the dead wait to turn 16
You reach tenpai right as the wall empties. The 1 live out you're chasing is sitting in another player's hand.
You often have two paths to tenpai. Ask which gives more outs. A two-sided wait (8 outs) beats a single-tile wait (4 outs) — worth an extra draw.
One claimed tile can move you directly to tenpai. Weigh the faan cost against the speed gain.
Tiles discarded by multiple players are safer when you eventually need to discard defensively.
Each draw either fills a fragment or lands as an orphan. Prioritize tiles that connect to the most other tiles in your hand.
Claiming costs your concealed bonus and usually only moves you to 1-shanten — not tenpai. Rarely worth it.
Keep tiles that work in multiple configurations — you can't yet see the final shape of your tenpai.