I\'m not sure if it increases or decreases it, but discarding the tiles *early* might make it easier for one of your opponents to go out with a fast hand. With that hand, I\'d hold onto the honor tiles but more to keep safe tiles in my hand since I\'ll probably wind up folding.

I\'m 80% sure its 3 or around 3. There\'s a book that has the data on this but I don\'t have access to it right now.

gartheee wrote:It depends. Some parlors especially the higher rate ones will have you make some sort of deposit to ensure that you\'re not trying the old, I\'ll-pay-you-later trick.

I\'ve heard the underground high-rate places do this quite often. The oka (bonus for 1st place) is collected before the game.

How long does it take you to play a game? Fukumoto (the author) was saying that it took him over 2.5 hours to play a whole hanchan.

Ura-dora certainly adds variance. Instead of having to aim your hand at a certain yaku in order to get a guaranteed 3900 pts, for example, you can instead riichi and hope you get lucky. Another way of explaining it I\'ve heard is that strict rules don\'t allow instances where you can\'t tell how muc...

Red 5s throw more luck into the game and generally make it easier for beginners. A lot of focus is taken away from aiming for specific yakus and jun-chan and chanta are practically worhtless. Instead, riiching any good wait you have as fast as you can is generally the best strategy. HotelFSR--A lot ...

Welcome, Alban! My advice for beginners is to not steal at all and reach everything. You wind up learning better play in the long run. Oh btw Shirluban, I do know of the Furiben :D at least I have 50% extreme newbieness cleared XD Cheers Well, if you\'re going to call it "Furiben" then you might not...

Haha, good call MArtin.

You can not make money off of Mahjong. Period. There are exceptions to this (most of them are male) but it\'s best to ignore them. Anyone who tells you they make their income from Mahjong is probably not telling you the whole truth and could probably be making much more if they stopped playing Mahjo...

People are saying that riichi would stop the other players from throwing your winning tile, but that assumes that they wouldn\'t just ignore the riichi. It\'s the last round, so why would the 2 other players besides the person in first play defense? There\'s no reason for the person in last to fold....

Anyone else in? Email my cell benkun at ezweb dot ne dot jp

Wow. I\'ve never even seen the naki no ryu anime. Thanks!

No reason not to reach.

I have many DVDs that have Mahjong material on them. I\'d like to share them with you folks, but don\'t have the technical knowledge. If you do, PM/e-mail me.

I\'d like to make a list of all the Mahjong manga/anime out on the net that\'s been subbed or scanlated into English.

So far I know about

ANIME

Akagi
Legendary Gambler Tetsuya (part?)

MANGA

Akagi (part?)
Saki (all?)
Mahjong Princess Obaka Miko (1 chapter)