Choosing a hand, and when to switch

The hardest skill in the game

The hard part is choosing one hand and dropping the rest. Players who never choose end up holding a little of everything and winning nothing.

Count how far away you are

For any hand on the card you can ask: how many of its 14 tiles do I already hold? The rest is your distance. Five away is a real candidate. Nine away is too far.

This rack already holds ten tiles of an even-dots hand. The wind and the two odd tiles belong to nothing.

Count pairs first

Pairs are the bottleneck. You cannot call for one and a joker cannot fill one. When two hands look equally close, favor the one whose pairs you already have.

Keep two hands alive while you can

Early on, hold two candidates from the same family, so most of your tiles serve both. Two even hands share their 2s, 4s, 6s, and 8s. An even hand and a winds hand share almost nothing, and trying to keep both means building neither.

A rough timetable:

• During the Charleston: a family or two.
• The first few turns: two hands.
• The middle of the game: one.

When to switch

Stay while your hand is alive. Switch when the table shows you it is not.

• The tiles you need are gone. There are four of each. If you need a pair of 8 dots and three are already in the discards, that pair cannot be made.
• Someone else has them. A pung of the tile you need, exposed on another rack, tells you the same thing.
• A better hand arrived. Sometimes two draws change which hand you are closest to. Count again.

When not to

Do not switch because of one bad draw. Do not switch late. With only a few tiles left in the wall, a new hand that is six tiles away will not get there. At that point the better plan is to stop helping other players win. That is the subject of reading the table.

What you exposed still counts

If you have already called a tile, your exposed groups go with you. Any hand you switch to has to include them.