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 CLS, a Houou veteran who has played almost 10000 games in the room. He’s characterized by his extremely defensive playstyle (even by Tenhou standards), folding early and avoiding unnecessary risks unless the situation absolutely calls for it.

Player: CLS, the 17th Tenhoui
Twitter: https://twitter.com/cls10327299_cls

East Round Analysis

Replay: https://tenhou.net/4/?log=2020080400gm-00a9-0000-8afd67c7&tw=3

South 1-0

Instinct: Cut 2m. It’s the tile that isn’t surrounded by any other tile. We’re pretty happy with both 24s draws, letting us cut 79m to get a strong ryanmen wait.

CLS: Cut 3s. We have a fighting hand, so we want to increase our winrate as much as possible. While our shapes are stronger if we keep 3s vs keeping 2m, we’ll be feeding simocha a potential chi, speeding up their hand. So, confirm the 5s dora pair and delay throwing manzu into simocha until we hit tenpai.

Takeaway: Even when you have a strong fighting hand, don’t be overly selfish and make sure you’re looking at the rest of the board. When you have a hand that you really want to win, try to slow down your opponents as much as possible to maximize the chances that you hit tenpai first and win the round.

South 2-0

Instinct: Cut 4s. Keep haku as a potential safe tile and also prevent the other players from calling and potentially disarming our mangan hand.

CLS: Cut haku. No reason keeping the shonpai haku here as we have a fighting hand, and dropping the haku only gets more dangerous as the round progresses. 4s is also potentially useful for our tile efficiency, as if we’re able to pon the xia, we can use the strong 3334s to create a head + mentsu. This would allow us to cut the 45m, which is redundant given we have 78m.

Takeaway: Make sure to consider all possible progressions for your hand (pair / ankou draws are easy to miss) when trying to determine whether one tile is more useful than the other.

Summary

• Pay attention to your opponents, even when you have a good hand that seems like you could Solitaire. You can increase your winrate by reducing their winrate!
• When building hands, try to consider all possible progressions, and don’t get overly attached to holding onto jihai as safe tiles.