Mahjong is -not- about the beauty of the hand, but about winning. The more you put this into practice, the more you win and the better you feel. For example, what would you do with this hand?



Ryanpeikou tenpai. With a tanki on any 2-8 tile, ryanpeikou+tan yao. Quite a rare hand, wouldn't you say? But that's half of the story.
Look at the points and round. A 2 fan tsumo from the guy on the left, and goodbye to first place and game over. Seeing this is oorasu, I am good with even a 1000 points hand (agariyame ari).

Here, riichi with a wait on the East is awful. The guy on last is last by 3500 points. Seeing that he has no reason to fold, he could easily build a 3900 hand and either get his tsumo or hit us while in riichi. Both mean 2nd place to us.

Riichi might make the guy in 2nd and 3rd fold, maybe, but that is no good either. Assume the guy in third has an East pair and is ready to attack, and the guy in second has an East and folds, never discarding it (why would they discard our Double East?), our hand is dead, so is the hand of the guy in second and third, but it's the guy in 4th we should perhaps worry about. In his attempt to hit third place, we might end up second.

Damaten is not a bad move, but the east has to go when we get a better wait, even if it means sacrificing the ryanpeikou. We have no need for such a hand here, just winning is enough. A tanki can easily be upgraded to a multisided wait in 2-3 turns.



I ended up with a 4-sided-wait and decided to riichi, in order to aim for a tsumo. We have 8 tiles available to win on, and that's good enough to tsumo. Riichi prevents the 1000-2000 points damaten/open hand from the guy in second if he sees we are really quiet.

Also, a fast tenpai here is key. West has a pon on the dora, and if he somehow gets his mess of a hand together in a few turns, the tsumo would leave us second place too.

By riichi with a good wait, we disable the guy to our left, aim for the guy on our right, slow down the player in front, and we have a high chance to tsumo. All of which means first place.

Of course, there is a chance I would have dealt in into West's "East Dora 3" with that live tile discard, but I'd rather aim for a nice chance at first than aim for a wide chance at second place.

When you're first by nothing, these are things to contemplate.

Notice how I had no problem taking appart a ryanpeikou in order to aim for a faster win.

Don't hold so desperately to rare yaku when you don't really need them. That goes for Suu An Kou iishanten as well. Just pon if you are first.



That's my new Janryuumon's account. Pretty, huh?

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Tonari no Riichi by xKime is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Unported License.
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