Game Review - January 2026 (I)

It’s not often to have a hanchan full of interesting decisions. I played this match a month ago and wanted to do a full game review of this hanchan. I’ll focus on the interesting and difficult decisions.

I’ve also decided to ask others for additional opinions to cover my blind spots. Additional thanks to starfire, mdragon6580 and dooplis for their game reviews. The conclusions here are unfortunately filtered through a unreliable narrator of myself and are not representative of their advice.

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East 2-0

We had a hand that had average prospects, eventually getting a tenpai on Turn 11.

In the turns leading up to this, I was worried about drawing 7s. It is indeed tenpai, but with a middle kanchan 6m wait or a twice-cut 8m, I can’t bring myself to riichi if I draw 7s. On review, if I drew a 7s, I think I should cut 9m and dama, hoping for tanyao (+1 dora) or wait upgrades.

Now, we got fairly lucky, with a dora draw. We should riichi this, but which tile? With dora 1, even a wait of kanchan 6m is acceptable. Perhaps the thought of someone waiting on a twice-cut 8m instead is so absurd that the moro hikkake suji trap will work. Certainly, NAGA Kagashi thinks so. I took the straightforward route and riichi cutting 9m, but perhaps with stronger opposition, cutting 5m may also work.

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East 3-0

On our oya turn, luck graced us with her presence. We drew a fast hand with dora 2. Here’s our status by Turn 6.

We need to balance the offensive potential of 3m against the defensive value of 1z. I don’t tend to think about sakigiri as oya. From playing around with AI analysis, it seems more often than not, we don’t necessarily wish to sakigiri as often. But this is short-sighted.

What upgrades can the 3m bring? It really only is the 4m draw that we’re happy with. Perhaps, if 1m isn’t furiten, we can look at potential upgrades to a tanyao pinfu hand, but as we already have dora 2, speed should be a higher priority. The key takeaway, is that our hand has too many points, and the potential upgrades are unlikely to be worth.

That, being said, should with sakigiri and hold on to 1z? What if we draw 2s, 9p, 2z or 7z? (These choices all happened later in this round, as I stubbornly held onto my 3m.) What changes on Turn 6, Turn 9 or Turn 12? Let us compare the defensive value of the tiles. Here’s how I would rank them.

• 7z (Twice-cut jipai)
• 2z (Once-cut guest wind)
• 1z (Once-cut yakuhai)
• 9p
• 2s
• 3m

Where you wish to draw the initial line to be worth sakigiri on Turn 6 depends on the number of dora. With dora 0, the upgrade value of the 3m is so high that we might not even wish to sakigiri 3m for 7z. With dora 2, the offensive value of 3m is low that we can consider sakigiri 3m for 1z. As the turns proceeds, the offensive value of 3m decreases, while the defensive value of various held tiles increases.

The defense value can be estimated by saying assuming we have a riichi the next turn, what is the deal-in rate of this tile against that riichi. All things being equal, being safer against oya is also worth considering.

The way I’m thinking about it is that if the defense value of the held tile is greater than than the offense value of 3m, we should sakigiri keep the tile and cut the 3m. Hence, our intuition that “it is not worth cutting 3m for 2s since the 2s is barely safer”.

An important note in this sakigiri is that the 3m does not contribute to getting to tenpai any faster, unlike a perfect 1-shanten hand. I plan on discussing the perfect 1-shanten sakigiri in the future, but a key difference is the sakigiri in a perfect 1-shanten gives up the ability to pon-ten.

I do have one reservation with this analysis. Do we sakigiri if our hand is too weak? If we intend to fold at the slightest whiff of danger, then the defensive value of the held tile decreases, because we can use our whole hand to fold. I will meditate more on this point, and you can reflect on how you handle these hands.

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East 3-1

Keeping our oya turn, we slowly find ourselves in this situation.

We have a dora 2 2-shanten. The surface threat is our shimocha is in an honitsu tenpai. This is actually very unlikely, due to the 2p tedashi after 4z tedashi. Assuming that our opponent does play efficiently, then we should expect that their hand is block complete after 4z, and unlikely to have a tanki wait.

We should rather expect their hand to be Nan yakuhai with dora 1 and up to two aka dora. If 8m deals in, there can at most be one aka dora with a hand like 67m340p44s. (This requires some sub-optimality, as the 4z would usually be cut a lot earlier.)

Either way, I think if we’re not drawing 4m134p, we can push on with our 2-shanten dora 2. Those tiles have a decent chance to deal-in, as well as the hand we will be dealing into will be worth 3900-7700 points. I’ll leave it to you to think in the hypothetical what you would do if we drew those tiles instead of 8m.

When doing discard reading, it is highly important to have a good mental model of how “normal efficiency” plays. If your normal efficiency plays suffer, you will make incorrect assumptions on how the opponent ought to have played and make wrong inferences.

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East 4-0

We got to a quick 1-shanten at turn 6.

You might be asking, “Syx, why are you showing this routine problem?”. It is indeed true that the best discard of 9s is uncontroversial. But, in this position, I unfortunately blundered and cut 7s. I am hoping the shame via posting this will convince me not to repeat this error.

Whenever you make a mistake caught during review, I believe it is insufficient to just remember the correct tile. One should reconstruct their thought process that lead to the mistake, and then analyse where the wrong logic came from.

Unfortunately, in this case, I didn’t even realise my blunder here during the game. (Often, for basic efficiency problems, I would tend to notice the error in 1-2 turns after my discard.) Likely, I just thought of this as an aryanmen + kanchan shape hand and thought 7s and 9s had equal efficiency. Then, I viewed the 8s as a nicer-looking final wait than the shanpon 2p and 7s. However, I missed the kuutsuki 1-shanten.

Here are two more similar problems to avoid making this blunder.

A few turns later, my shimocha, the oya, riichi-ed.

Here, we reached tenpai on a 57s kanchan. This is not too bad a wait as we’re waiting on oya’s nakasuji. However, our hand as no yaku, and we can’t capitalise on this fact to ron off the other two parties. Additionally, our kamicha just pushed a 4m, a katasuji. This might not be a sign that they’re attacking, but it is something to keep in mind.

The eternal crossroads, shall we riichi, dama or defend? If our wait was a ryanmen, we can oikake riichi with some comfort, even without pinfu. We also don’t hold many safe tiles, the safest tile we likely hold is 5s here, with katasuji on 8s and 2s being sotogawa, followed by suji 7m and musuji 9m. The ankou one-chance 8p is another consideration, but the proximity to dora makes the expected value of a deal-in higher.

Here, I made my biggest mistake of the hanchan. I riichi 2p. Unlike previously, I know why I made this misplay, as the time slowly ticked down, I had thought that I had a good wait to win on. Somehow, that became: “I have a good wait, and a good wait oikake riichi isn’t that bad. And I needed to riichi to win this riichi nomi hand.”

In retrospect, I should have thought more carefully about the option dama 2p. Sure, the upgrades are unlikely (6m for tanyao, 4s for pinfu and 8s for furiten pinfu) but with only 6 safe suji lines, pushing this 2p isn’t that bad. If we do intend to fold next turn, we have another 2p to fold with. The fact that 2p keeps our tenpai is what is confusing here. If we simply thought, we should fold, let us fold from the pairs of 1289 tiles as we often do, and here we got a bonus to keep our tenpai, the decision becomes clear.

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South 1-0

We dealt in East 4-0, but manage to win a hand in East 4-1. We now enter the South round with a decent lead. We managed to get into an 1-shanten on Turn 4

Our hand here has some value, but getting a boost from pinfu and tanyao would still be good, as we’re often not yet a mangan hand. Here, the key question is whether it is worth cutting a penchan to revert to 2-shanten. The most common case that we would consider reverting shanten is when we have a bad shape riichi nomi hand. We often try our best to avoid bad shape riichi nomi, but with two aka dora and an almost pinfu/tanyao hand, this doesn’t apply here.

To decide whether a hand is worth reverting in shanten, I often would try to visualise eventual tenpai hands. Here, let us visualise the four cases, cutting 0m or 6p and drawing 6s or 9s.

In Examples 1 and 2, cutting the penchan here will lead to +2 han. For Example 1, we even have a guaranteed good shape tenpai. Hence, if this is around Turn 6 or 7, we would likely cut 2m and not take the tenpai. For Example 2, it is more of a borderline decision, but I personally think riichi 0m would be slightly advantageous.

In both Examples 3 and 4, the boost in points is only +1 han (without tanyao). On both cases, I think on Turn 6, we would riichi them without hesitation.

Hence, during the match, I chose to not revert in shanten. However, allured by the shiny aka dora, I wrongly cut 6p here. I believe this is the worst decision. I should choose to cut 0m instead of 6p as a guaranteed good shape improvement is more important than points with 1 dora.

There is one last thing to discuss. The examples only show hypothetical tenpai hands reverting to 1-shanten. However, it is easier to revert the further away from tenpai we are. Our current hand is only 1-shanten, and thus it is easier to revert to 2-shanten. With 50% of the cases we would strongly consider reverting at tenpai, I should consider this hand strong enough to revert here and cut 2m.

Our analysis also suggests that if we have 11s instead of 22s, we shouldn’t revert. I analysed this situation with NAGA and various efficiency calculators, and it seems that they unanimously think 2m should be cut. I’ll confess that I don’t understand why. It seems that two strong isolated tiles can be thought of as stronger than a penchan.

In conclusion, I personally think that the situation I faced in South 1 is clear that 2m should be the correct choice. Perhaps if I get stronger, it would be clearer to me that 2m should be cut even without the tanyao boost.

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South 2-2

We unfortunately dealt into 3rd place, and now we find ourselves in this situation.

It’s late into the game. A moment of fatigue passes over me as I routinely tsumogiri 5z. But if you thought about this a bit longer, we already have 5 blocks. What offensive benefit does each the floating tile bring for me?

• 5z or 7z: A chance to form a yakuhai pair, and progress our hand towards a manzu honitsu.
• 8p: The best case is to draw 7p, forming overlapping ryanmen, and aim for a tanyao pinfu hand.

The benefit of 8p is slim and the sangenpai has higher defensive value as well. This didn’t really matter in this hand as we ended up against an oya riichi a few turns later.

Here, we’re thinking about oikake riichi. It’s unlikely we will give up tenpai. There are a few key factors to consider:

1. The tile we’re discarding is a musuji 7m, which is unlikely to spook our opponents.
2. We’re waiting on oya’s genbutsu 4m or suji 1m, with in total 5 tiles remaining.
3. Our scores are tight in South 2, and we’re fighting against oya.

Perhaps the tonpuusen regulars will easily identify as a situation that we do not oikake riichi even with a good wait tenpai. Certainly, my experimentation with NAGA suggests that in East 2, this oikake riichi is fine (although NAGA Kagashi will suggest to dama even in East 2).

Similarly, if oya’s 4m was replaced (even keeping the number of winning tiles the same), we should riichi here. However, by sneakily waiting on oya’s genbutsu, we can dama this hand, and hope to quickly win it and minimise variance by not entering the roulette wheel with oya.