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sasuraiger
@sasuraiger

You can just have seven pairs, that's a hand too. This is one of the hands that American mahjong popularized, actually! Turns out it fits into the strategy in a really satisfying way, so we have it in riichi.

When you're starting out with the game you already have enough on your plate, but as you play more you'll learn to keep an eye on the pairs in your hand, in case you need to shift your hand to chiitoi.

Two pairs are good for a regular hand, but three pairs are too many for a regular hand and you will probably want to cut a tile from the third least useful pair if you're building a normal hand. Four pairs is where you really have to start thinking about the possibility of committing to a chiitoi, and at five you're basically locked in already.

It's a fun hand to play because the rules completely change: your opponents will be confused by your seemingly random discards, and they may become cautious of whatever you're cooking over there. Unlike other hands, chiitoi leaves very little room to guess a player's wait. Both of the Riichi City wins pictured here were easy deal-ins off opponents who didn't even stop to think about letting go of the winning tiles. You're waiting on less tiles than a typical pinfu hand, for example, but you can also deliberately choose a tile that's extremely hard for your opponents to keep. (The player who discarded my 5s doesn't really have an excuse, though.)

Sometimes a hand can qualify for two different but incompatible yaku, like in the third screenshot. In these cases we go with the higher-scoring hand, so this hand that has seven pairs is not actually a seven pairs but a ryanpeikou (two pairs of identical sequences), an insanely rare hand that nevertheless sometimes appears when you're going for chiitoi.



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