This guide is meant to get a new player to rough Mahjong competency. When learning a new skill, progress isn't a straight line. There's a sharp spike at the start that later levels out. In this article, we'll climb the spike, and then Riichi Book 1 and other resources will cover the rest.
Step 0 - The Rules
Of course, you must know the rules in order to play the game. If you want a written explanation, check out A Beginner's Guide to Riichi Mahjong. If you prefer watching videos, check out this playlist by Light Grunty, with a runtime of about 50 minutes.
Step 1 - Building a Hand
When people talk about efficiency, they're referring to the ability to bring a hand to ready (tenpai) as quickly as possible. At the lowest levels, simply having good efficiency when building a hand will allow you to win many games, since your opponents will not have good efficiency.
The best beginning strategy is to use the Five Block Theory. It's easy to understand and holds up at all levels of play. For an explanation, read through Mahjong Fundamentals 2: Starting Hands & Five Block Theory.
Once you've read through that article, a good way to practice is with the Mahjong Efficiency Trainer. After you discard, it will tell you the best choice, along with how many tiles each choice accepts. If you apply what you've learned from the article, you should be able to do well. For a challenge, you can open the settings and reduce the number of available suits.
Step 2 - Calling Tiles
Keeping your hand closed all the time will not let you win consistently. At high levels, people will call riichi with one in five hands, and they will call one in three hands. However, calling is risky. You must have a yaku (winning condition) when you call, otherwise you won't be allowed to win. With a closed hand, Riichi can always provide a yaku, but you lose that when you call and need something else.
If you look at a yaku sheet, there are a lot of options, but there are only a few that are common.
There are two main yaku you should look for when considering whether to call. The first is Yakuhai, which is an umbrella term for three similar yaku: Dragons, Round Wind, and Seat Wind. All together, these are present in 64% of called hands. Dragons is very simple. If you can get a triplet of one of the dragon tiles, either the Green Dragon, Red Dragon, or White Dragon, you will have a yaku. This is a fool-proof way to get yaku.
Round Wind and Seat Wind are a bit trickier, but still not too bad. Let's take a look at the center of the Mahjong Soul table.
In the center, it says East 2. This means that the Round Wind is the East. In the bottom left, there's an N facing us. That means that our Seat Wind is the North. So, if we have a triplet of Easts or Norths, we can also score Yakuhai. Tenhou and other platforms will have similar setups.
The second most important yaku for calling is Tanyao, or All Simples. This is present in 28% of called hands. This hand consists of only tiles between 2 and 8. No ones, nines, or honors allowed. This is a very flexible hand and the possibility for it comes up quite often, as removing the honors, ones, and nines early is the standard strategy in the first place.
With Tanyao, you only need to be careful with shapes that can break it. For example, if you have a 23 shape, you might not want to call other shapes, since if you draw a 1 you won't be Tanyao anymore or you'll end up furiten. With Tanyao and Yakuhai, we've covered 92% of open hands.
To start, you can call these hands whenever they're available. For further reading about when to call and the trade-offs compared to staying closed, I recommend Puyo's Guide to Calling Tiles.
Step 3 - Defending
Sometimes, the other players will get to tenpai (ready) faster than you. That's just mahjong. With four players, if everyone has equal skill, then you'll only be first a quarter of the time. The other times, you should defend.
If someone calls riichi and your hand is not ready, then defend. It feels bad to break your hand up, yes, but it feels worse to deal in, and dealing in will happen a lot if you don't defend. By defending, your games will be a lot more stable, and you'll have a better sense of control. Other players will deal in instead of you and save you a lot of points.
Defending is fairly simple in mahjong. Due to the furiten rule, players can not win on tiles that are in their discards. So, if you discard tiles that are in the other player's discards, you will not deal in to that player.
However, you won't always have those tiles. That's where the main defense concept, Suji, comes in. Suji refers to tiles that are 3 higher or lower than a tile you can see in the opponent's discards. For example, if they have discarded the 4 of circles, then the 1 and 7 of circles are suji tiles, and are safer to discard.
The reasoning here is that, due to furiten, if they had a 23 shape in circles, that 4 would prevent them from being able to win. Furiten affects the whole hand, so they can't win on the 1 either. Since riichi hands have a two-sided shape like that around half of the time, the 1 is quite a bit safer. If you're curious about the exact danger levels, here's a chart from my Tile Deal-in Rates by Live Suji post.
Here, "Half Suji" refers to a 456 that is only suji from one side. For example, if you can see a 1 of circles, then they can't win on the 4 of circles on a 23 shape, but they could still win with a 56 shape, so this is called Half Suji. Riichi Suji refers to the suji of the riichi tile, which is a bit more dangerous because of shapes like 135. If they have that shape, they can riichi on the 5 and be waiting on the 2.
For further reading, check out Mahjong Fundamentals 6 - How to Defend.
Step 4 - Improving Further
With these things in mind, you should be able to play Riichi Mahjong pretty competently. When you're ready for more, you can read through Daina Chiba's Riichi Book 1, which can bring you to quite a high level (Tokujou on Tenhou, Jade on Majsoul). I also have some other resources in the sidebar to the right under the Useful Links section. Good luck!
Great post!
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