Basic Waits (2)

If you understand irregular multi-sided waits, the knowledge helps not only when you tenpai with Honitsu or Chinitsu, but also by giving you a wider variety of attacking options in many situations.

Irregular Two-Sided Waits

Shape	Winning tiles	Number of winning tiles
		7

This is about the only irregular two-sided wait that really matters. There are other shapes too, but they appear so rarely that there is no real need to memorize them.

Irregular Three-Sided Waits

Shape	Winning tiles	Number of winning tiles
		5
		5
		6
		7
		9
		9
		10
		11

These are about all the irregular three-sided waits you are likely to see often in actual play.

The top two are hard to call good waits. In many cases, it is more advantageous to lock in iipeikou instead.

I found the following problem on an online message board, and here the answer should be an instant dora discard with no hesitation.

(Example 1) Tsumo Dora

In the souzu block, any draw except reaches tenpai.

And except for drawing , the resulting waits are all good. If you draw or , the hand becomes a huge Tanyao Pinfu Ryanpeikou Dora Dora hand.

There really should be no answer other than cutting the dora, yet more people chose to cut instead (cutting is no different). It is a result that is honestly hard to believe.

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Here are a few cases where knowing irregular acceptance patterns gives you a real advantage in practice.

(Example 2) Tsumo Chi

The hand was already tenpai on a wait from through , and then Chun turned into a concealed triplet.

There is a line where you take a shanpon wait and aim for tsumo sanankou, but here the correct answer is to cut and switch to the wait.

If you carelessly cut , your number of winning tiles does not increase.

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(Example 3) TsumoChiPon

It is easy to mindlessly tsumogiri here, but even though both choices are three-sided waits, cutting to make the wait is better. That is because the hand rounds up to 5200 points.

Waits with Four or More Winning Tile Types

Here I will only give examples. There are still many more, so it is worth trying to find them on your own.

Shape	Winning tiles	Number of winning tiles
		9
		9
		14
		14
		13
		17
		19

No matter how complicated a multi-sided wait becomes, the basic idea remains:

do you interpret three identical tiles as a concealed triplet, or as a pair plus one extra tile?

Almost every complex wait can be handled with that way of thinking.

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Original Japanese page: http://beginners.biz/kihon/kihon12.html

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