2.1 What is tile efficiency?

Tile efficiency means developing your hand to maximise your chance of making a winning hand. Here, we focus mainly on speed and ignore hand value (Tai).

Why it matters

Mahjong is luck-based only in the short term, whereas strategy wins in the long term. Better tile efficiency means more wins for you and fewer opportunities for opponents to win.

However,

Maximising tile efficiency is not always the best strategy:

• In Singaporean Mahjong, you're playing for money, not win rate.
• Discarding the most efficient tile for your hand may feed your opponent's big winning hand.
• Aiming for a higher Tai hand is often an important consideration in the early game.

Still, tile efficiency is a core skill in Mahjong strategy. The next few pages explains more!

• Next: Advancing your hand
• Back to home page

References:

• Tile efficiency on riichi.wiki (under CC BY-NC-SA 4.0 License)
• Chapter 3 of Riichi Book 1 by Daina Chiba (under CC BY-NC 3.0 License)