Make your next
decision count.

The reliable routes: a one-suit lean (mixed one-suit with honors, pure one-suit for a jackpot), all pongs, or a dragon/seat-wind pong plus the situational bonuses. Six or more tiles of one suit at the deal is a committed suit hand — start discarding your shortest suit immediately. No route at all? Your plan this hand is cheap discards and no payouts.

A pong of a dragon, your seat wind or the round wind is a guaranteed faan that survives opening your hand. It converts "find three faan" into "find two" — a useful value route, but still a choice to weigh against your shape, flexibility and the danger of the table.

A dead hand can still win: stay concealed and self-draw, and you reach 3 faan with no pattern at all

ADVANCED

A patternless hand still has one legal win: no flowers (1) + self-pick (1) + winning from the wall with a concealed hand (1) is exactly the 3-faan floor. The conditions are strict — claim nothing, draw no flower, win only by self-draw — but it converts a dead hand into a live one at zero cost. One pung call closes the exit permanently.

Worthless on a discard — legal by self-draw

No route, no honors — and still winnable if it stays concealed and flowerless.

A self-draw win collects from all three opponents, and the self-pick + concealed faan may be the very points that clear your floor. Claiming a discard to get there one turn sooner can strip both — same tiles, smaller and sometimes illegal win.

Middle tiles (4-5-6) connect to the most shapes — yours and everyone else's. Spend terminals and clocked-out honors while hands are shapeless; a middle tile hoarded to turn twelve is released at maximum danger, straight into ready hands.

Compare the value and distance of your own hand with the danger of a discard. In Hong Kong play, an opponent’s previous discard does not create Riichi-style furiten protection. Three visible copies also do not rule out that tile completing a sequence. Use the exposed sets, visible tiles and scoring context to judge relative risk; do not label a tile absolutely safe from those signals alone.

Before fixing your final wait, count that tile's visible copies across discards and exposed melds. Two gone means your wait is half dead; three gone means it is a decoration. Reshape toward a live wait even at the cost of a turn.

A player who has ponged one dragon wants the others, and a wind pong signals a value build. Feeding a second honor to an honor-collector is how small mistakes become doubled catastrophes — hold honors late against them or spend them first-turn early.

Someone claiming chows in bamboo while bamboo is missing from their discards is leaning that suit. That may make bamboo and honours worth extra caution, but it does not prove that other tiles are safe. Compare the calls with the rest of the visible hand.

The 4-5 shape completing on 3 or 6 (up to 8 tiles) beats the 1-2 shape completing only on 3 (at most 4). With just four sets to build, one bad shape can be the whole difference between ready and drawn.