Counting your hand, Part 1

Today's a numbers class. Tai. The points in mahjong, the currency of the game. We're going to count. We're going to add. We're going to look at three winning hands side by side and see why one was worth twice what another was. Heads-up: we're not memorising a scoring table. We're building a feel for it.

Two numbers to keep separate in your head. The first is the base point: FIVE. Every winning hand starts with five tai, just for completing the shape. That's the floor of what your hand's actually worth. The second number is the minimum to win: TWENTY. To declare mahjong in a real game, your whole hand (base plus every bonus) has to add up to at least twenty. Five is what the game GIVES you. Twenty is what the game DEMANDS before it'll let you win. Two numbers, two different jobs. Don't mix them up.

Here are the bonuses you'll meet most often. Let me name them one by one. A wind pong is one tai. If that wind is your seat, add one more. If it's also the round wind, add one more on top of that. A dragon pong is two tai, flat. No conditions. A pair of two, five, or eight (the middle tile of any three-group) is called a "good eye" and pays two. Each flower you end the round with is one tai. One per flower. If you held no flowers at all, that's one tai for "No Flowers" instead. And if your hand had no winds and no dragons either, then No Flowers upgrades to "No Flower and No Honour" and it's worth FIVE, not one. These are the small everyday rules, and together they can push a plain hand well past twenty.

Now the big ones. A self-draw (winning on your own tile from the wall instead of claiming a discard) is "Self-Pick." One tai. Small on its own, but the concealed-hand bonuses stack on top of it. A hand with no exposed melds, won by discard, is "Concealed Hand," five tai. The same concealed hand, won by self-draw instead, is "Self-Draw Concealed," TEN tai. A hand of five sheungs and a pair is "All Sheung," five tai. Five pongs and a pair is "All Pong," TWENTY-FIVE tai. And the king of them all: a hand made entirely of one suit, no honours at all, is "Pure Suit." NINETY tai. Ninety. That's the dream hand. The one you chase for years before you finally catch one.

Okay, enough teaching. Let's count some real hands. You're going to win three rigged rounds back to back. After each one, I'll break the score down with you, line by line. The first hand is modest, just past the minimum. The kind of win you'll actually see at a real table.

Okay, count with me. Base point, five. Always your starting number. Your green dragon pong, two. That's seven. Your hand was completely concealed, nothing exposed in front of you, and you won off someone else's discard. That's "Concealed Hand," five tai. Twelve total. You had one flower off to the side, so "Each Flower" adds one. Thirteen. Your pair is a pair of eights, which is a good-eye pair, and that's two more. Fifteen. Do the math in your head one more time before I tell you the rest. Five base, two dragon, five concealed, one flower, two good eye. Five, seven, twelve, thirteen, fifteen. And a bit more from other small rules that fire on a hand like this. Twenty-two is the final number. Just past the minimum. You won.

Now a bigger one. This hand's going to come in around thirty-five tai, about fifty percent larger than your first. Watch what turns it from modest to solid.

Count with me. Base point five. Now pay attention to the big one. You drew your own winning tile from the wall, not from a discard. That's Self-Pick, one tai. Six total. And because your hand was fully concealed (nothing exposed in front of you) and you self-drew, that fires "Self-Draw Concealed" for TEN tai. Sixteen. Your red dragon pong adds two. Eighteen. Your pong of south winds. South's your seat today, so wind pong one plus seat bonus one. Twenty. Two flowers on the side, one each. Twenty-two. Your pair is a pair of fives, a good eye, two more. Twenty-four. We're at twenty-four. The last push comes from a few more small rules the hand happens to trigger, and we land around thirty-five. Notice what just happened. Twenty-two to thirty-five is a thirteen-tai jump, and nine of those thirteen came from ONE decision. The self-draw. That's why players learn to love drawing their own winning tile.

And now the dream hand. Not the absolute biggest you can make (that's for class fourteen and beyond), but a real, heavy, memorable sixty-tai win. The kind of hand that changes the whole game score in one round.

Last count of the day. Base five. Self-pick one, six. Self-Draw Concealed ten, sixteen. Red dragon pong two, eighteen. Green dragon pong two, twenty. A concealed kong in the middle of your hand, which you never showed the table, two more, twenty-two. And here's the magic moment. The kong bonus draw from the dead wall actually GAVE you your winning tile. That's called "Self-Pick from the Flower Wall," and it's FIVE tai all by itself. Twenty-seven. Four flowers on the side, four more, thirty-one. Your pair is a good eye, two more, thirty-three. And then the hand catches a shape pattern that pays a big chunk on top, brings us all the way up to around sixty. Sixty tai. Take a long look at what just happened. Almost all of it came from STACKING. Dragon plus dragon plus concealed plus self-draw plus flower-wall draw plus the shape. Nothing by itself was enormous. Everything added together.

Here's the single most important thing to take from today. Big hands almost never come from one enormous rule. They come from a bunch of small rules piling on top of each other. A dragon pong on its own is two. A dragon pong inside a concealed self-drawn hand is two plus ten plus five. Seventeen from one area of the hand alone. Two hands that LOOK similar (both winning, both complete) can score wildly different amounts because of what else is stacking on top. When you chase a hand in a real round, you're not chasing one bonus. You're chasing the combination of bonuses that happens to fit what the wall gave you.

Which brings us to the question this class really exists to answer. Your hand's partway through a round. It's already worth twenty-two tai if you finish now, just past the minimum. If you wait three more turns and catch the right tiles, it could stack up to forty-five or even fifty. But if you wait, someone else might finish first and your chance vanishes. Do you chase fast and small, or wait for big? This is the most common decision in every game you'll ever play. And there's no rule that tells you which is right.

I said at the start: we're not memorising a table. You won't remember every tai value from this lesson, and you shouldn't try. What you SHOULD walk away with is a feel. A sense that self-draw is big, that dragon pongs are reliable, that concealment pays, that flowers add up one by one, that pure suits are the dream. Feel first. Memorise later, if at all. And remember: this was Part One. Counting Part Two happens in class seventeen, after we've looked at the rest of the scoring rules together.

That's class nine. You know the base point and you know the minimum, and you won't confuse them again. You know where the points come from. You've counted three real hands from twenty-two to sixty. And you've faced the most common decision in the whole game (chase fast or chase big) and seen that there's no correct answer, only your answer. Class ten is your first real round. Real shuffled wall. No rigging. You play the way it's played at any real table in the world.