OVERVIEW:  The point of ⇒ How to ⇒ A suggestion ⇒ Gaps ⇒ Re-arranging your hand ⇒ Disguising your re-arrangements

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The point of

Naturally you would expect players to organise their tiles to make it easier to see what they have, what they value most, what they plan to collect and what they wish to discard. This allows them to react more quickly to discards and to discard their own tiles deftly (in the hope that others may not notice what has happened!).

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How to

It can be useful to place tiles from the same suit together so that you can see at a glance how many of each that you have. Likewise keeping honour tiles together is useful as is ordering them according to value.

If you are aiming for a clean hand, it is useful to place the tiles in this suit in a position that distinguishes them from the other suits.

If you are aiming to collect a special hand then tiles need to be organised accordingly. Knitting, in particular, needs a different organisation. See “Saving for Triple Knitting”.

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A suggestion

Keep honour tiles to the left of the rack, organised so that the more valuable ones (Dragons, your own Wind and prevailing Wind) are to the right and the ones you may want to discard are on the left. So desirability increases from left to right.

Keep the tiles of the suit you want to collect next to the honour tiles with any Major tiles to the left.

Place the other tiles together in their suits, but to the right of the suit you prefer (again with any Major tiles to the left). Place the least desirable suit on the far right. So when you need to discard you take the tile in the far-most right position, or possibly in the farmost left position.

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Gaps

Try to avoid having gaps between your tiles as this lets people know how advanced your hand is.

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Re-arranging your hand

As the game progresses and your aims possibly change you may need to re-arrange your tiles. This is particularly true if you move between a normal MJ and a special hand.

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Disguising your re-arrangements

If you use a system for positioning tiles in your rack that you want to discard, don’t move the tile immediately if you have deduced it is not worth saving because of a discard from another player (as it may give an opponent, who has guessed your arrangement strategy, an advantage).

Likewise, if your aims change as a result of some action which is obvious to other players try to avoid re-arranging your tiles immediately as this may give others a clue about your intentions.

 

Next ⇒

 

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