Mikofag's Mahjong Wisdom

Picture used

"Yakuman is basically Jihad."

-A Drunk mikofag sometime during the late 2021

Saki and Akagi are best watched thrice. As a newcomer, as an intermediate and after 10 years to truly
appreciate them for the masterpieces they are.
Also there's tons of ways to play the jong and literally all of them are situational, so most tips come from
statistics.
Learning the Yaku extends to the point where you see your hand and inside your head know how long yaku
X would take to assemble from here, most of them will take very long but there's basic forms of patterns
you will begin to see very soon.
For starters, the best training is to

STOP calling, at all. This actually is for when you understand what you're doing and by the time you get
there, you automatically do it less. This is why everyone pisses on the nyaggers in Bronze.
ANY hand with a 3-3-3-3-2 structure can be Riichi'd, which is a Yaku in itself.
The most common Yaku to remember are MenTanPin which stands for Menzen, Tanyao, Pinfu.
Menzen: Just have your hand closed
Tanyao: 2-8 tiles ONLY in any combination
EX: 2-3-4 | 4-5-6 | 5-5-5 | 6-7-8 | 88 any suit
Pinfu: any winning hand getting no Fu if we want to be technically correct, you can remember it by NO
HONORS, NO WINDS (which are your wind), SEQUENCES ONLY (and a pair)
This includes Terminals 1 and 9 as well, so do NOT aggressively throw them if you get them.
EX: 123 | 234 | 456 | 789 | 55
Yaku I find easy to remember for newcomers are Hon-Itsu and Chin-Itsu:
Hon-Itsu: HONORS and one Suit
Ex: 123 | 789 | 345 | WWW | EE (one suit)
Chin-Itsu: ONLY one Suit
There's also only honors but that's a Yakuman, be that lucky.
Some other useful ones to remember first:
Chanta: The "opposite" of Tanyao, every triplet and sequence as well as the pair has to INCLUDE a terminal,
so 1-2-3 is as fine as 1-1-1. The Ten manga makes a good case as to why Chanta is actually easier than
Tanyao, many guides don't feature this shit and it enrages me beyond belief.
EX: NNN | 123 | 123 | 789 | 999 | 11 (any suits)
Junchan: Chanta but without Honors
EX: 123 | 789 | 111 | 999 | 99 (any suits)
Iipeikou: 11-22-33 of ONE suit (you still need the rest of the 3-3-3-3-2 setup)
Sanshoku-Doujun: 345-345-345 of ALL THREE suits
Sanshoku-Doukou: 333-333-333 ALL SUITS, this one is so fucking rare I never even saw one.
Chiitoitsu: One of only TWO yaku (the other being Kokushi-Musou) to remember which does NOT follow 3-
3-3-3-2 but instead it's seven Pairs, so 2-2-2-2-2-2, hard to combine with other yaku and it's ALWAYS a
single wait, but very hard to read
Next post will be basic tile efficiency which is quite important to pay attention to.

Touka's hand

A primer in tile efficiency:
Check out Touka's hand right now.
This is not a winning hand (yet) but Tenpai, and quite the good one.
We see she has a red 5 which is immediately one Han on top, we see 8-8-9 which was a formation waiting
for a 7 or an 8 so it could make EITHER of 7-8-9 or 8-8-8, this is why going for double tiles is not that bad of
an idea, even better if something already connects.
We see no honors which immediately tells is pinfu, her discarding the 9 after this also makes this one
Tanyao as well as closed so we get
Riichi, Pinfu, Tanyao (MenTanPin) and at least one Dora which is close to Mangan, Ura-Dora or the actual
Dora (not shown here and I don't remember) might already make this 5 Han and therefore Mangan, or in
case she is dealer 4 Han are already 11700 points as well.
What's important here is her waiting formation. It is not yet decided if her sequence with the bamboo is 2-
3-4, 5-6-7 or 1-2-3, 4-5-6 OR 2-3-4, 4-5-6
2-3-4-5-6 is a GREAT wait because it's not only dual but TRIPLE, you can wait for 1-4-7 here and all three
sides of the wait qualify for Pinfu [insert boring shit about why Pinfu has to be dual-wait or better here]
Dual-waits are so fucking common they have some voodoo bullshit connected to them, which is Suji. Some
cumguzzling retards preach Suji is a GREAT way to read discard piles, which is bullshit, but being aware of
them makes you compute Mahjong just that much faster.
If you see 5-6 in a hand you immediately think 4/7, if one of those comes in the sequence is ready. The
other way around, if you find ONLY 4 and 7 in your hand you can discard one of them once another number
from that suit comes in.
If you draw the 2, that connects to the 4. 3 connects to 4. 4 is double 4.
5 connects to 4 and 7 but it's better with the 4 because 4-5 already makes you ready for 3 or 6, while 5-7
ONLY accepts the 6.
Now if you draw the 6, it's the opposite: throw the 4.
NONE of this is rules, ALL of it is pointers. Mahjong is a cruel mistress and might give you 4-7, you discard
the 7 because it is slightly less optimal then you draw the 8 and the 6 right after. The problem is you will
HAVE to discard.
This is where SKILL comes in:
The only thing you can do to actively improve your mahjong is being constantly aware of what setups are
possible from the tile you draw, keep as many possible hands open to you as you can, and discard what you
think has the least chances of connecting to something.
THIS is precisely why the most common opening to a hand is discarding Dragons and Winds because they
don't make sequences and are only ever useful in at least pairs.
Some other number combinations to watch out for:
55-66 or any other double pair NOT 11 or 99:
You might be in for Iipeikou here or just two double-waits which isn't bad.
3-4-5-5-5 is interesting because it sets you up for either waiting 2/5 on the 3-4 OR using the 5 as pair and
taking 3-4-5 as a sequence. This stacks indefinitely, look up Chuurenpoutou for some fucked up waits.
There is tons of other number stuff one can analyze but those two are common enough to be useful.
The other big part of Mahjong is NOT LOSING which is a whole other beast but tl;dr:
if you see someone either Riichiing or calling twice and your hand doesn't look fat enough, try to discard
what they have already discarded OR what other people discard without loosing.

Mikogeimu

SAFE TILES & GENERAL DEFENSE
or "How do I keep this lead now?"
or "How do I stop fucking everything up by dealing into someone else?"
Quick Primer on the Suitnames I'll use:
Man: Numbers
Pin: Circles
Sou: Bamboo
White, Green, Red: Dragons (Haku, Hatsu, Chun in that order)
Ton, Nan, Sha, Pei: East, South, West, North Winds in that order (this is also the Turn Order for the seats
etc. in bastardized Sino-Japanese, don't question it)
There is BOOKS on this topic, all things I say here are yours to try out, explore, learn more about, develop,
re-analyze after the game where it let you down.
A quick word about "Safe" Tiles:
The only 100% safe discard is what someone else discarded that round. EVEN IF someone is tenpai for that
tile, if he didn't call the other one, he WILL be Furiten for your discard until it's his turn again.
That said, what you CAN do is evaluate each players risk level for a rule of thumb. This goes too far into
Mahjong but for instance someone was discarding Bamboo and Circles all game and now suddenly throws
his first Number and declares Riichi, you KNOW the fucker MOST LIKELY (!!!) has a Hon-Itsu or Chin-Itsu and
waits on Honors or Numbers.
What you can then also do is discard any tile he already threw - you can NOT, in NO CIRCUMSTANCE, Win
FROM ANOTHER PERSON with a tile you already discarded that round. That is called Furiten a.k.a. Bronze
Room's delight, is impossible in Mahjongsoul (until Masters anyways) and IRL will cost you -8000 (-12000 as
Dealer) Points in "Chombo" as it is a misplay.
That's the technical side.
Since one image is not enough, we will look at one of my logs.

MikoApproval Link to the replay

South 3 and 4 are the easiest for me to explain. The situation is I am in a comfortable lead in Gold Room
and can already see me getting sucked off by my Jongfus for this ridiculously lucky round, so spirits are
high. I am dealer in South 3 with a lead, which means I either have to win high to kill someone or stall until
the game is over, in which case you need luck for the first one and skill for the second, so of course I went
for the first because you know me - retarded.
So South 3 starts boring with a shitty hand and I actually for once recognized the pain will start in Turn 14
which is where I draw the Pin 2.
You see three calls on the right (Shimocha), two calls on the opposite (Toimen) and nothing at all on the left
(Kamicha).
What we now know is that the Kamicha actually was ready with Pin 3-4 so waiting for the Pin 2 I just drew,
but I didn't know that in that situation.
What we DO see though is that shit is dangerous all around, and the Pin 2 actually connects to my Pin 3, I
have 3 Pairs (Pin 5, Sou 3 and White) but the Sou 3 connects to the Sou 2 and Sou 4-5 each so I don't think
of it as a Pair.
Still, that's one pair too many, and seeing as we are in Turn 14 already with only 18 tiles remaining in the
pond, I better start defending.
Looking at the discards now reveals there is only a single White left which I don't know where it is. To win
off a White you either have it as a Pair waiting for the third or as a single wait, both highly uncommon in
Gold (but cheeky). And I already see one. So the odds that someone waits for White is LOW, which is why I
discard it.
Turn 16 you see me give up and discard Sou4 instead of the South, which I suspect the Toimen might wait
for having called West and some Pin already.
Turn 17 has the Man 3 which is already discarded by everyone else - the best situation. Perfectly safe to
discard.
At the end of Turn 17 my fears actually materialize as the Toimen now IS Tenpai on South. Kamicha calls it
as well and keeps his South, going so far as being Tenpai in a single wait on that.
Turn 18 I discard the Pin 3 which was discarded by the Shimocha just before, so it was also a safe bet.
I end the round as the only idiot not being Tenpai, which is actually the best outcome here.
Cont next post where we talk about the desaster that was South 4 for me.

South 4 begins uneventful.
I discard in my usual pattern with zero awareness of any danger yet, nobody calls, it looks peaceful until
Toimen decides to Riichi.
His setup is a pair of South, 2-3-4 of Sou and 2-9 of Man which is DISGUSTINGLY good to have. His wait is
now 1, 4, 7
My desired play would've been throwing the Man 6 after I pull a Man 3 to be Tenpai myself, but well... we'll
see what happens.
So we're in Turn 11, there's danger and I need to under no circumstance lose this round.
I am lucky and draw a West which is already on the field twice, one of which is the Toimen I watch.
The Chun next pull I already discarded and so did someone else, same situation as the Haku last time, when
you see 3 it's safe-ISH.
Pin 8 was thrown by the dealer, out with it in Turn 13.
Turn 14 I pull a Man 4. Of all fucking tiles. I know it can't be safe. It would've been better to fold there and
throw the other Pin 8 I have just to be safe.
But anyways, why the Man 1 then?
In retrospect it was foolish, I wanted to stay Iishanten at least and not break my hand, and of course
expected the terminal to be somewhat safe because they usually are - but that is nothing more than 10
years of anecdotal evidence, with this round being the proof that you
CAN
NOT
GET
INTO
DISCARDING
HABITS
WITH
SAFE
TILES
AT
ANY
MEANS
This is why I am still a Goldshitter. Any rank above Silver will mercilessly slay you if you're lazy and just play
casually, you have to actually watch what happens.
So I played into Riichi, Itsuu and some Dora for 12k which was with a direct hit more than enough to kick
me from 1st.
Some Voodoo I use, DO try this at home if you want or find your own ways:

if you have a fat hand of let's say all Man and some Honors and a single red 5 of Sou, throw the Sou 5
immediately as long as you think it's quite safe. This goes for the first 6 Turns. Throw it while it's not hot
yet.
Reversely, it might be a good Idea to keep some dead tiles as fodder for later if your hand doesn't come
together. I made it a habit to keep North Wind autistically until Riichi and whenever I am unsure what to
throw I sacrifice it for the greater good.
When to throw: This is where psychology comes in. You might go dead by the numbers, you can also try to
analyze people during rounds.
If you want to overdo it and your hand is TRASH while someone else is already calling Turn 6, you might
also try to discard potentially dangerous tiles (usually 3-6 of any suit) early on while following other's
discards as good as you can.
If you are in a casual setting and drinking, to keep it fun, NEVER throw unless you do a tournament.
Remember this is a game, not an autism contest like Ranked is.
If there's any situations you played into someone and want an analysis, just tag me anytime in the threads.

Mikofag on lunatic strategies.

Flow Book 1 - Enter at own risk

The beauty of Mahjong is that it is complicated and volume-y enough as well as conceals the right amount
of information to keep people guessing. There's a german card game actually working quite similar to
Mahjong in a sense, I won't name it because juveniles and burgers would be very to hear the name.
Anyways it's played with only 32 cards and all of them are used.
At the beginning of the round, each of the three players gets 10 cards with two being a sort of bonus pile.
By calling your intended "Yaku" in a complicated mess of a ritual, a single player is determined who plays
against the other two in a battle of making 60 points out of a possible 120 with the single player needing 61
to win.
The problem is that those 10 cards as well as the called Yaku are usually quite enough to accurately predict
80% of games by a set of "truths", and you get called out in pubs for not knowing those by old men playing
the game for 20-50 years.
The dude who wrote those books is one of those old folks. Sure he could whoop my ass. However, the
language he uses will encourage new players to do very dumb shit they do not understand instead of
getting the fundamentals into their systems and gathering experience, which is crucial especially for 90% of
this thread here.
Tryhards are the precise reason I stopped playing 4P ranked, it's always a battle of doing enough non-
standard play to sneak in some Rons but also being painfully aware that everybody is trying that shit at the
same time, commonly making you paranoid and miserable playing a game which is ultimately determined
by lady luck blessing you with good starting hands or not. You can defend all you want, if your opponent
wins tons of quick rounds tsumoing you still lose.
The dude writing the books draws conclusions for play against seasoned players, which gold shitters like me
don't even count towards.
I just wanted to make clear that that book in particular will do more damage than good to the new players
we have here if read and applied blindly in the next 2-3 years. Stuff like Toitsuba will only make sense to
you once you experienced it, and even then it makes little mathematical sense to presume it as a sort of
weather condition. Still, there is fucking rules against it (九種九牌 kyuu shuu kyuu hai and 四風連打 suu
fon renda come to mind as well as 四開槓 suu kai kan, all of which abort the game.)
...
funnily enough if you search for the explanation of Suu Fon Renda or "4 of the same wind thrown in the
same round" you find a rXddit thread not getting it and blaming supersition. The actual reasoning is that it
would imply improper tile distribution with none of the players being able to use those winds. The
neccessity might also come from Mahjong tile distributions IRL being slightly less random than online play
for the sole reason that "shuffling" mahjong tiles as a manual process will not in 100% of the cases break up
any called melds or sequences, more likely leading to stuff like Toitsuba. Breaking the walls is another
intended method to remedy this.

I mean on the site, it's literally listed as "Lunatic" for who it is intended for, if someone new is reading

that, they kinda deserve to be shit.
well yeah, fair enough. Do not expect secret techniques making you win the dumbest hands in any
condition, you can trust old Akagi calling Pinfu and Tanyao the fundamentals of Mahjong.

Mikofag on occult strategies

I think the easiest little occult shit I personally do is keeping the North wind at all costs as long as I can. It is
surprisingly handy as a cop-out safe tile in many cases, if you single wait on it few people will expect it and
usually you make your yaku a little worse keeping it but if the hand demands it you can still riichi with it as
well, usually safely.
Shit like Suji-Traps also work better with advanced players who know what a suji is and who have heard
about how to use it (the theory behind it is that if someone waiting has discarded a 4 of a suit, the 7 of that
suit is slightly more safe because you can already rule out a 4/7 wait with a 5-6). So you throw out your 4
intentionally to wait for a 7 on 6-8.
The old geezers writing this also know the setting better, in our case it's some zoomies playing mongolian
rummycup online but if you think about rough japanese ojisans with implied ties to Yakuza or Drugs preying
on bored Salarymen, the way you play, react, think etc. factors wildly into how people will counter you. IRL
Jong for instance has some people trying to never sort their hands for the sole reason of preventing others
to judge their hands by the position of the discard (i.e. if a number comes from the very right of the hand,
you can assume he's playing with tons of numbers and little else), people count how many advances you
make by watching out if you discard what you drew or something for your hand (fun fact: mahjong soul lets
you do this actually), and ANY reaction to a call or discard will tell stories about you, which is where bluffing
comes in as well.
You'd be surprised how important having a good stack of stickers in Jong Soul can be.