Red Fives Strategy

[HotelFSR]

Red fives.

What differences in strategy do they make, as opposed to a game with no red fives?

I feel like folding is more often a strong option in games with red fives, since you are likely to be up against bigger and more unpredictable hands. It\'s harder to tell for sure how much an opponent\'s hand is worth, even if it is partially revealed. You also have an easier time giving up when you have a smallish hand, especially when there are no red fives visible on the board, because you are aware that your hand value is that much more below average and your risk is that much higher. Bigger hands will come more readily to you later. The draw game ready payments are also smaller, relative to the average hand values, making folding more attractive once again.

There are also more opportunities to improve a hand before reaching, because you might still be able to replace normal fives with red ones, or engineer your waits to receive one. On the flip side, middle tiles become more dangerous when discarding defensively, especially dots if you are playing with 4 red fives. You\'ll also be more cautious about reaching with a small hand, given the threat of increased payout if you lose.

I\'ve noticed that while it seems that red fives simply inflate the values of all hands, in reality the effect is much more subtle. The size of point values is not simply increased, the distribution is changed. We have to bear in mind that the difference in payout between 4 and 5 han is very small, and that above 6 han +1 often has less effect. With red fives in the game, there are proportionally more mangans (or equivalent 4-han mangan size payments) without a commensurate increase in hands higher than mangan, because 5-han hands are simply rarer to begin with. The payout distribution is actually smoother, not just jacked up. More of a straight line between 1 and 4+. At least, that\'s what my Mahjong Fight Club stats seem to suggest. This would mean that there is actually less variance in the red fives game, making it the slightly more skillful version of the two, if true.

While at first I didn\'t like red fives much, I now find I like to play both with and without. In fact, I often prefer red fives. What are your thoughts on strategies and differences with red fives, and is all this making sense?

:woohoo:

[Poochy]

One additional difference: Red 5\'s reduce homogeneity. Say you have 4-dot 5-dot 6-dot 7-dot 8-dot, no pair, no chance of sanshoku, and none of those tiles is a dora.

Without red 5\'s, you can discard 4-dot for a 5-dot 8-dot wait, or discard 8-dot for a 4-dot 7-dot wait. This is basically a toss-up, and probably the only other thing that you can consider is how many of each tile have already been discarded.

With red 5\'s in play, that shifts the decision towards discarding 4-dot, since you\'ll stand a chance of nabbing a red 5pin for an extra yaku.


Additionally, having two red 5pin and one each of red 5sou and 5man (like in Mahjong Fight Club) further reduces homogeneity. For example, say you have 5-bam 6-bam 7-bam 8-bam 5-dot 6-dot 7-dot 8-dot, no pair, no chance of sanshoku, and none of those tiles is a dora.

If there\'s one red 5 in play in each suit, the decision is a toss-up between waiting for 5-bam 8-bam versus 5-dot 8-dot. But if you\'re playing under MFC rules and no red 5\'s have been discarded, that shifts the decision towards the 5-dot 8-dot wait, since there are two red 5pin tiles to further increase your chance of an additional yaku, as opposed to only one red 5sou.

In addition, if you\'re folding your hand and have a toss-up decision as to which tile is safer to discard, with red 5\'s in play, a non-5 will probably be marginally safer than a 5, since your opponents may be waiting on a 5 in hopes of getting a red 5.

This is why I like red 5\'s: They reduce the frequency of toss-up decisions. I dislike toss-ups since you basically have to guess one choice at random, and if a tile for the other wait comes up, you\'re screwed out of a win at no fault of your own.

[HotelFSR]

Right. When folding, if you\'re playing with two red 5 dots, it also becomes more dangerous to throw tiles around the 5 dots (which is pretty much the whole suit besides 1-2 and 8-9) rather than fives in other suits.

[Benjamin]

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 of your thinking is on point, but i think you come to the wrong conclusions. Red 5s do have the function of smoothing out the scoring system, but this takes *away* skill because it becomes less important to aim for a certain value of hand. Without 5s, you might slow your hand down to add a yaku or, conversely, drop sanshoku in order to make your hand win quickly bc you don\'t need the points. With red 5s in play, its generally a good idea to go for the quick win in *any* situation.

Poochy--I have a nitpicky comment for you. A 5-8 wait is marginally better than 4-7 so you would probably take that wait anyways. Your second example is dead on. I do, however, disagree that that decision would be a tossup. There are marginal ways of guessing which suit is better (eg the more tiles out of one suit in the first several discards, the more likely it is not being used by other players and thus in the wall). Putting red 5s in actually has the effect of *negating* subtle factors like this, which is why it tends to level the playing field.

[HotelFSR]

Hmm.... point taken...

I almost feel like red fives both add and take away from the game. Definitely, as you say, there is much less of a focus on building specific yakus. I do suspect the effect is quite complex though, and that it doesn\'t purely simplify the game.

You can only aim for a big hand to a certain extent, irrespective of whether or not there are red fives in play, just off the back of the starting tiles you are dealt. Both versions presumably have the same emphasis on men-tan-pin, whereas yakus like sanshoku, itsuu, iipeikou, etc. are rare (5%ish?) at the best of times- whether you aim for them or not.

With red fives perhaps there is more of a focus on folding because you can throw away bigger hands with increased confidence that something good will come along again (in later hands, based on the fact that the hand score distribution is smoothed out). However, without red fives the big hands are rarer right off the bat, given your starting tiles. Unless you start out with something really promising, I would have thought you are unlikely to shoot for the rarer patterns as opposed to a men-tan-pin either way. That\'s what I\'m assuming, at least.

So I\'m thinking that while red fives do take away from the subtlety of shooting for specific yaku, which is a big skill, they also do reduce variance in other ways because they make you less reliant on good starting tiles. You have greater freedom to attack or defend, rather than letting your starting hand determine that for you. Certainly, though, this is at the expense of other things as you say, but I\'m not quite sure that they just \"add luck\".

It\'s also hard to know what the strength of these various phenomena is statistically.

Ultimately I really wish I had real experience playing A-Rules (beyond a limited real-life group outside japan), which I can\'t do online. Playing without red fives is possible, and I often do, but that\'s undermined by the ura-dora and to some extent the ippatsu. What I\'d really love to see is a nice comparsion of player stats between A-Rules and B-Rules!

All I get to see online are B-Rules stats. Anyone got some A-Rules numbers? Unfortunately we will never see numbers for games with red fives but without ura-dora, so that we can tell them apart statistically.

[iandstanley]

I tend to find myself hanging onto a Red Five for a extra round or compared to any other tiles that are lining up to be discarded.
I have also noticed that when people see the extra cost of somebody going out on their discared then they start to be a bit more concerned about their mid-suits discards and that can not be a bad thing.

It can be quite irritating when somebody else going out on a careless discard particulary when it is obvious they are looking for 4-bam ... 7-bam say

- Ian