Mahjong Soul – Common Tile Shapes

Quick Guide to Common Tile Shapes

The first thing players are taught about mahjong is how to make a hand. Four melds of three tiles plus one pair allow you to win the hand, right? However, if you look at each hand that is won, the way that player makes these melds and pairs can be very different every time. Some special yaku don’t even follow this rule! In order to win faster and improve your mahjong play, you should look at the way these hands are formed a little more closely.

The Basics

These shapes you have probably understood without thinking about them, but it’s good to recognize them so you can understand their value and how they contribute to more complex shapes. Here’s a list of the basic shapes:

The most important basic shape is the Open-ended shape. Its biggest asset is that it can form a sequence on both ends, hence the name open-ended. In this case, the [6s] and the [9s] both form a sequence, and there are four copies of each. This is the most efficient shape that can be made with only two tiles. The Edge shape looks like an Open-ended shape, but it has a terminal. Since there is no 0 or 10, it can only wait on one tile instead of two and is not as good.

Tenpai

When you are tenpai (ready to win), the final shape that needs to be completed is called your wait, because you are waiting to draw that tile or to have an opponent discard it. If you maximize the number of tiles that you are waiting for, your chance of winning the hand goes way up! The open-ended, inside, and edge shapes all become waits when you are tenpai (waiting for the last tile to finish that shape), but there are some other shapes as well that only appear when you are tenpai.

Triplet Wait

A winning hand is composed of 4 melds and 1 pair. If you have a pair of tiles, and drawing the third copy would make you win by completing a triplet (so it’s no longer a pair), that means there’s a second pair of tiles in your hand that will have to stay as the pair. However, you could also draw a third copy of the second pair to make a triplet, and use the first pair as your pair to win instead! This is a good reason to generally keep two pairs of tiles in your hand as you build it during the round. Here’s an example of a tenpai hand waiting to make a triplet to win with either [6m] or [8p]:

Single Pair Wait

Sometimes you finish your 4 melds early and are left with a single tile in your hand! The benefit of this kind of wait is that you can choose any tile to wait for, including tiles that most players can’t use, like honor tiles that have been discarded already. Look at the hand below waiting for West:

Combinations

It’s good to start with the basic building blocks of shapes because the tenpai waits that win on the largest number of tiles are combinations built from them. Here are some examples:

Triple Open-Ended

Now that you know the open-ended shape is the most efficient way to use two tiles, here’s a way to put two of them together to wait on three tiles at once! An open-ended string of 5 consecutive tiles like [45678p] can be looked at in two ways: an open-ended wait of [45p] + [678p], or [456p] + [78p]. This allows it to accept [36p] in the first case, and [69p] in the second case, giving us a very large [369p] total wait!

Double Pair Wait

Huh? If you’re waiting with one tile to make a pair, how can you wait for two different tiles? The answer is to attach that single tile to the end of a completed run, like [5678s]. With a hand like this, it can be read as [567s] + [8s] or [5s] + [678s]. This is two single pair waits put together to make a double pair wait!

There are so many other ways to combine waits that it’s impossible to show all of them, but all of the combinations come from the basic shapes.

One Tile Away from Tenpai

It’s fine to see all these good tenpai waits, but you need to know how to get there from your starting hand! Rarely do you draw tenpai from the beginning, so let’s go one step to being one tile away from tenpai. In a real game, you will probably start three or four tiles away from tenpai, but you can apply these concepts there too.

The “Perfect” One Away Shape

If the open-ended shape is the best way to use two tiles and the triplet wait is a good reason to have two pairs while building your hand, why not use both together? With two completed melds, one open-ended shape, and one pair, your last three tiles can help you accept many different tiles to reach tenpai. Look at this hand:

We have two completed melds, [123m] and [888m]. We have an open-ended shape, [23p], a pair, [77p], and our last three tiles are [445s]. This combination of a pair and open-ended shape is called “perfect” because so many tiles can be drawn to reach tenpai! [14p] finish the [23p] shape where you can discard [4s] or [5s] for tenpai, [7p] or [4s] finish a triplet, leaving you to discard [5s] for tenpai, and [36s] finish the [45s] shape, discarding [4s].

Four in a Row

Mahjong melds have to be made with three tiles, so the fourth tile is extra, right? Wait, wait! That fourth tile in a row can be very useful! Look at this hand:

If you ignore [345p], the [5m] is more useful than the [2p] since it connects to more tiles. However, when you look at the [2345p] as a whole, it accepts many more tiles to get to tenpai than just a [5m]. While the [5m] can attach to [34567m] for tenpai, a lot of these end up as inside or triplet waits, which are worse than open-ended waits. The [2345p] accepts [1234567p] for tenpai, and many of these waits are open-ended. This fourth tile is actually more useful than just about any other tile!

I hope you found this useful. Wishing you luck!