Winning Hands

Here are the main categories of winning hands! The majority (over 99%) of the winning hands fall into the categories below.





It is possible that your winning hand can be under more than one of the categories above. When that happens, the scoring points for all the categories involved add up! This is rare and it means more WINNINGS! =)

One point to note is that different groups of people playing Mahjong may accept some other kinds of winning hands as well. An example is winning the game with seven pairs of tiles. Hence, do remember to clarify with your Mahjong friends whether certain winning hands are acceptable before the match. This will avoid misunderstanding and conflict after the game started. However, the categories of the winning hands as shown above form the majority of all possible winning hands!

Refer to them when in doubt! =)

Summary: Majority of winning hand includes Chicken Hand, Common Hand, all Triplets (PONG) hand, Mixed One-Suit Hand, Pure One-Suit Hand and all Honour Tiles Hand 

Improve Your Chance of Winning Mahjong!

Here are a few tips to improve your chance of winning mahjong!

1. Exchange Tiles to increase the probability of winning.

For example, if your hand needs 5 to win, as shown below:

During your turn, you managed to draw a 7. Your hand is shown below:

Now, the question is, which tile to discard to maximise the chance of winning? Should you discard 7 and wait to 5 to game? In this case, drawing a 7 is a huge bonus as it can significantly increase your chance to win! This is provided that you discard the right tile. By discarding 4, you will have a much higher chance of winning!

After discarding 4, your will be left with the following hand,

It is now possible to win by having any of the three following tiles:

The possible winning scenarios are shown below:

 2) When you are waiting for the final tile, try to choose the tile that your opponents are more likely to discard! 1 and 9 tends to be discarded quite easily as they are less useful in forming a sequence group of three.

Summary: To improve your winning chance, discard the tile that will result in you waiting for the highest number of possible tiles and ideally these tiles should also what your opponent are likely to discard!