The Little Book of Mahjong by Seth Brown

Author:Seth Brown
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Adams Media

Discarding Defensively

So far, most of your strategy has revolved around improving your hand. But Mahjong is a game played with three opponents, and if any one of them wins, you lose and have to pay them points. What’s worse, if one of them calls Mahjong from a tile that you discarded, you’ll have to pay them more points than anyone else! For this reason, much of the late-game strategy in Mahjong revolves around not discarding tiles that will hand the game to your opponents.

A hand of Mahjong is not very long. One-third of the tiles in the game start in the hands of the players. If nobody plays a Kong to grab a replacement tile, it would only take twenty-one rounds to empty the wall—and the game will usually end from a Mahjong long before that. For your first half-dozen turns or so, players probably won’t be close to Mahjong, so you can worry less about discards and focus on keeping your hand flexible while you start gathering the tiles you’ll need to make a Mahjong hand.

Soon, however, you’ll see the number of tiles in the wall start to dwindle as only two sides of the wall remain, and the draw has gone around the table a dozen times. At this point, at least one player at the table is probably close to Mahjong. Hopefully you! If you’re just waiting on one tile for Mahjong, then you can ignore all discarding strategy and just hope to draw your winning tile. If you are further away than one tile from Mahjong, however, it’s time to play defensively. Defense, in Mahjong, basically means trying not to discard a tile that will hand your opponent the game.

A quick way to figure out what tiles are “safe discards” is to look at the tiles already discarded. The more copies of a tile being discarded, the safer it is for you to dispose of. The ideal discard is a tile where the total number in the discard pile and in your hand adds up to four, meaning that you know for a fact no other player is holding any of that tile. This is why you should hold on to a pair of Honors; if at the end of the game you see two West Winds in the discard pile, the two in your hand are very safe to discard, since you know nobody can make a Pung or even a pair with them (and Honors can never be in a Chow).

The more recently a player has discarded a tile, the higher the odds are that it’s a safe discard. For example, a Dot2 could have been discarded on the first turn of the game, but now everyone’s hands have changed and people may want one again. Whereas if your opponent discarded a Crak3 just last round and nobody called it up, Crak3 is very likely to be a safe discard.

Another thing you’ll want to do is look at what tiles your opponents have melded

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