Riichi Mahjong Game

[Anita Damelio]

In1924, a soldier named Saburo Hirayama brought the game to Japan.[1] In Tokyo, he started a mahjong club, parlor, and school.[1] In the years after, the game dramatically increased in popularity. In this process, the game itself was simplified from the Chinese version. Then later, additional rules were adopted to increase the complexity.[2]Mahjong, as of 2010, is the most popular table game in Japan.[3] As of 2008, there were approximately 7.6 million mahjong players and about 8,900 mahjong parlors in the country. The parlors did 300 billion yen in sales in 2008.[4] There are several manga and anime devoted to dramatic and comic situations involving mahjong (see Media).[5] Japanese video arcades have introduced mahjong arcade machines that can be connected to others over the Internet. There are also video game versions of strip mahjong.

In Japan, there are what are known as professional players, usually members of organizations that compete in internal leagues and external events with other professionals and the general public. There are over 1,700 professionals spread across a half-dozen organizations. There is no universal authority for riichi mahjong in Japan: professionals cannot dictate how mahjong parlors or amateur organizations and players operate, nor can they regulate each other since everything is left to the free market. Likewise, there is no global authority regulating riichi mahjong. Since 2018, there exists a league of select professionals (coming from the other professional mahjong organizations) named M.League which takes the game and presents it as a professional sport. Teams of professionals receive salary as players, compete in ranking and playoffs as teams, and wear team jerseys to enhance the image of mahjong as a sport.[6]

Japanese mahjong is usually played with 136 tiles.[7] The tiles are mixed and then arranged into four walls that are each two stacked tiles high and 17 tiles wide. 26 of the stacks are used to build the players' starting hands, 7 stacks are used to form a dead wall, and the remaining 35 stacks form the playing wall.

There are 34 different kinds of tiles, with four of each kind. Just like standard mahjong, there are three suits of tiles, pin (circles), sō (bamboo) and wan (characters), and unranked honor tiles (字牌 jihai). Honor tiles are further divided between wind tiles and dragon tiles. Some rules may have red number five tiles which work as dora that earn more han value. The flower and season tiles are omitted. Names for suit tiles follow the pattern of [number] + [suit], the numbers being Japanese pronunciations of the corresponding Chinese words.

Players can make a meld (open group) by calling for another player's discard. They reveal the meld on the table and then make their own discard. Calling for another player's discard makes the group and the hand open. When a winning tile of a closed hand is a discard, the group including that discard is also considered open, while the hand is still regarded as closed. The calls operate exactly the same as any variation of mahjong, except Japanese terminology is used.

Players can make an open sequential group, a sequence (3 consecutive tiles in the same suit), by calling out "chii" (吃 or チー) using a tile discarded by the left player, who is prior in order. Players place the meld face up on the table, usually on the right side of their hands, with the discard placed sideways at the leftmost position of the meld to indicate which tile was taken from the left's discard pile.

Players can make an open identical group, a triplet (3 identical tiles in the same suit, or 3 identical honor tiles) by calling out "pon" (碰 or ポン) using a tile discarded by any other player. Players place the meld face up on the table with one of those tiles placed sideways to indicate from whom the discard was taken.

Players can make a meld from 4 identical tiles in the same suit or 4 identical honor tiles. After calling a quad, the next adjacent dora indicator tile is flipped, and players need to draw a supplemental tile from the end of the dead wall. Depending on the rules, the number of tiles in the dead wall is kept at 14 by reserving the last available tile from the wall, or the number decreases at that time. There are three types of quads. Players call out "kan" (槓 or カン) for all of them.

Declaring riichi means declaring a ready hand, and is a kind of yaku. A player may declare ready if a player's hand needs only one tile to complete a legal hand (tenpai), and the player has not claimed another players' discards to make open melds. When declaring ready, a player can win on a discard even when the hand didn't have a yaku because ready itself is a yaku.[9] Upon declaring ready, the player must pay a deposit and may no longer change their hand except when forming certain closed quads.

As a possible house rule, a player can choose to reveal their hand to win more points if successful, which is called ōpun riichi (open riichi). In that case, the player shows only the tiles that are related to waits, or reveals all the tiles in the hand depending on the rules.[10] The declaration increases the yaku count allowing the player to score extra points.

At the start of a hand, the upper tile from the third stack of back end of the dead wall is flipped and becomes a dora indicator.[12] Then, its succeeding tile is recognized as dora. For example, if an indicator is a Green dragon (), Red dragons () are counted as dora by the sequence shown below, in which the Red dragon wraps around to the White dragon ().

The number of dora indicators increases in the following manner: Each time a player calls a quad, the next adjacent dora indicator tile is flipped, starting with the upper tile from the fourth stack from the back end. The indicator is flipped immediately after the quad is called, and after that the player draws a supplemental tile for their hand from the back end of the dead wall. The number of indicators increases in that direction, which becomes five if a single player calls four quads, and that is the largest possible number from the upper tiles in the third to seventh stacks of the dead wall (see four quads).

Among the modern mahjong variants, the Japanese scoring system is unique. Two variables are considered: the han value and fu value. A hand winner acquires points based on these values, which correspond to a points-value table. If the han value is five or more, then the fu value is still counted but no longer necessary.

In many mahjong variants, discards are simply placed in the middle of the table in a disorganized fashion. However, with the Japanese variant, tiles are neatly placed in order of discard in front of each player. In turn, each player accumulates a discard pile, with each hand. Typically, discards are placed in rows of 6 tiles as per customary rule. In addition, open calls for chii, pon, and kan have discard specific rules, by which they must indicate the source and type of discarded tile. This way, a record is maintained for all discarded tiles corresponding to each player. Likewise, game strategy depends on the state of the discards and the players' hands.

A game ends when a player's score becomes negative (below zero), or in some rare local rules, at zero points or less. Some rules may allow continued gameplay with a player having a negative point value.

Some rule sets allow for the last dealer to decide whether to continue playing extra hands in the final round or stop. A runaway victory (agari-yame, あがりやめ, "win and stop") is when the last dealer decides to exercise this option after winning a hand, for instance when they are the top player at the time.[19] In some cases, a stop may be allowed simply for playing a hand and ending with a ready hand (tenpai-yame, 聴牌やめ), or in very rare cases, allow the last dealer to end the game regardless of position.

If the score of the top player is less than 30,000 points after the last hand of the last round, the game continues into the West round (西場) in some rules. This situation is called shānyū (西入; entering West). The prevailing wind becomes West. A North round (北場) may come next in the same way. Depending on the rules, it can be followed by an East round again or instead White dragon, Green dragon, Red dragon and East rounds.[19] Any extra round ends as soon as one player has 30,000 points or more.

In an optional rule called yakitori (焼き鳥), if one did not win a hand in a match, that player pays a penalty. At the start of a match, each player has a marker called yakitori māku (mark) (焼き鳥マーク) on the table, and a player flips their own after winning a hand.[20] Chips or coins are also used as substitutes, and they are often removed instead of being flipped.

Japanese mahjong is a comparative point game. Unlike betting variations of mahjong, decisions are made compared to other players instead of a strict expected value basis. As mahjong is a game dependent on psychology and game theory, experienced players may deviate from optimal decision-making in order to bluff or mislead opponents.

Tile efficiency, also known as tile acceptance theory, is a concept to estimate which tile is best to discard. The goal is to move to a completed hand as fast as possible, aided by maximizing the number of available tiles that improve the hand

Unlike some other mahjong variants, in Japanese Mahjong the player who deals in pays the full point value of the winning player's hand. Defense revolves around avoiding dealing into a player with a tenpai hand.

The sacred discard rules (furiten) can be used to identify safe tiles known as genbutsu (現物). Both the contents and order of tiles in a player's discard pile can be further used to identify tiles that are either statistically unlikely or impossible to be one of their winning tiles.

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