Each week, I’ll be going through the replays of a different Tenhoui, looking at key positions and trying to understand the thought process behind their decision making. The Tenhoui I’ll be examining for this week is the newest one, yoteru, who is a semi-famous Mahjong blogger/researcher. From what I’ve seen, he plays relatively textbook, with a very well-rounded style grounded in strong fundamentals, so he is easy to learn from.

Short post today, as there weren’t too many key positions that happened in the South round.

Player: yoteru, the 18th Tenhoui
Twitter: https://twitter.com/yoteru11

East Round Analysis

Replay: https://tenhou.net/0/?log=2020102120gm-00a9-0000-d5d6fe8a

South 1-0

Instinct: Cut Xia/Pei. The main line here should be to progress normally with a menzen hand. Pinzu chiniitsu is worth considering if we draw into pinzu. However, as the dora is manzu not pinzu, and our floating jihai aren’t yakuhai, honiitsu would end up being 2900 open unless we draw into aka 5p.

Yoteru: Cut 4s. Our hand is a little too slow to be played menzen right now unless we draw into strong shapes around our floats. So calling into pinzu honiitsu / chiniitsu is the main line, and we want to sakigiri the dangerous suuhai to prepare for that. We drop souzu to make the suit of our honiitsu ambiguous. Since 9m is dora, there is also the potential for 789 sanshoku + dora with the right draws. As such, we drop 4s instead of 7s.

Takeaway: If your hand looks too slow to play menzen unless you hit some key draws, it’s fine to increase your ukeire for your open outs, especially if you get added safety as a tradeoff.

South 3-0

Instinct: Cut haku/hatsu. Truth be told, given the point situation and how mediocre our hand is, I feel like we can do anything here as long as we keep enough safe tiles. So I’ll just default to cutting hatsu/haku while I figure out how to best pass the round.

Yoteru: Cut 5m. This hand is too awful to be played as a regular hand, and even if we do draw into yakuhai, we’re most likely either going to be sticking to chiitoi or toitoi as our yaku. The only way we’d play for a mentsu hand is if we drew into 2p, but then we still need yakuhai for speed, so keeping all three yakuhai works well both for chiitoi and standard mentsu hand. Honiitsu is another value out, and since we have 4 tiles of each suit a piece, we cut 5m here while we figure out which direction our hand is going in.

Takeaway: Don’t make lazy default discards just because your hand is bad and you “have nothing better to do.” Always look for the most probable ways to gain advantage / secure your lead.

South 4-0

Instinct: Cut 7s. Even though we have a value hand, chasing after 1st place toimen is almost impossible, since we’d need a baiman tsumo or haneman direct to catch up to them. With that in mind, our goal should be to get to tenpai and pass the round as safely as possible. Given the point situation, they only way we potentially get 3rd/4th here is if we deal into kamicha. If kamicha tsumos anything equal to or greater than 2600 all, they’ll end up busting simocha, so we don’t really need to be worried about that.

Yoteru: Cut 9p. We’re getting rid of a safe tile, but we actually have some potential baiman tsumo outs with mentanpin + iipeikou + 2 dora + 1. We probably still have some turns before kamicha does anything aggressive, and we have suji 7p which is relatively safe for them. As we aren’t worried about dealing into anyone else, we only need to keep safe tiles for them. Keeping the 7s pair lets us draw into good shapes around manzu and potentially even have a chance at ryanpeikou. Of course, we can always call for kuitan and end the round if necessary.

Takeaway: Don’t automatically give up if your only placement advancing outs in all-last is haneman / baiman. If there’s little to no risk in doing so, then why not shoot for the moon?

Summary

• Honiitsu and chiiniitsu are good yaku – it’s fine to ditch suuhai for jihai if your menzen completion rate is too low even with the additional floating tile.
• There is potential in almost every hand; don’t be negligent and make lazy default discards.
• If there’s little to no risk incurred, then try your best to go from 2nd -> 1st. If you intentionally build towards them, haneman or even baiman potential hands are rare but not impossible.