Reading the table

Today's a different kind of class. Every lesson so far has been about your hand. Your pongs, your sheungs, your wins, your bonuses. Today's about everybody else's. Today we talk about reading the table.

There are two things you can read at a mahjong table. The first is the tiles: the wall, the discards, what's been thrown and what hasn't. That's probability. Counting. Arithmetic. The second is the people. That's intuition, and we'll get there. But first, probability. Let's look at the discard pile.

Every tile that's been thrown into the middle of the table is public information. If a suit has been thrown a lot, that suit is probably safe. Nobody at the table wants it, because if they did, they wouldn't be throwing it. A suit that's been quiet for many turns, on the other hand, is dangerous. Somebody is collecting it. The tiles are telling you things, if you bother to look.

The loudest information on the table is the exposed melds. If someone's pong'd bamboos, they want more bamboos. That's obvious. What's less obvious is that they also probably want the NEIGHBOURS of those bamboos, if they're also holding sheung combinations nearby. Never throw a tile into someone's exposed suit unless you absolutely can't help it. Their exposed set is a warning sign.

Let's put it into practice. You're about to play a rigged round where I'll freeze the table twice at important moments and ask you about the tile you're about to throw. Don't worry about winning the round. Just watch the discards and think before you let a tile go.

Good. That was the tile-counting half. Now we do the other half, which is harder and more interesting. You're going to stop looking at the tiles for a moment and start looking at the players. This is what people mean when they say someone is "good at reading a table." They don't mean good at counting. They mean good at watching the humans across from them. At a real table, that's faces, voices, hands, how fast they breathe. Here with bots, you'll see it in their rhythm. How long they take, when they change pace, when they do something unexpected.

Watch seat east carefully for the next few turns. Don't look at your own hand. Look only at HER.

That's class eight. You've done the toughest class in the course so far, and the most important one. Everything from here on assumes you're looking outward at the table, not just inward at your hand. Next class is scoring: the math of tai, and why some hands are worth many times more than others. After that, one more class, and then you graduate.