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There are some players, especially when they are ready, who actually "braille" a tile to see if it is the tile they need to go out. "Brailling" is feeling a tile's texture to figure out what it is before looking at it.

Is this pretty much a tradition in any form of MJ, except that I've only seen this in Japanese to some extent (even in some of the video games too).

Have you actually done it, and is "brailling" here to stay in MJ?

How legal is "Brailling" during a tournament?

I call it "thumb reading".
With some training it's not very hard for bamboos and dots, but cracks and honors are really a challenge!

The interest in thumb reading, is that you can read a tile when it's still in the middle of the table. So you save time and your opponents can never know how long you spend thinking about what to do with this tile.

Thumb reading is perfectly legal in tournaments. Why would it be otherwise?

Goldeneye wrote:How legal is "Brailling" during a tournament?

The only tile you can thumb-read is your own tile, while you're taking it from the wall.
The tile is yours regardless of how you read it.
How legal is it to eyeball your own tile, while you're taking it from the wall?

In Japanese it's called Mōpai (盲牌) which means "blind tile".

It could be inappropriate if you started drawing before the player to your left had finished their turn, if you used sleight-of-hand to read the next tile on the wall as you took yours (that's one of the many cheats in the Akko de Pon video-game) or if you used it to aid in loading your wall after the shuffle. And of course this is the reason why players wear a glove when playing Washizu Mahjong, drawing from inside the table or from a bag.

Here's a novel application: http://youtu.be/FKSIR658-d4 (With his affinity for cardboard boxes, I think this guy must be a fan of Maru. )

As long as you don't steal everyone's time by feeling the tile for a long time trying to figure it out without watching it, it's okay. But to waste everyone's time by attempting to thumb read every single tile is just bad manners.

On TV matches players are supposed to show every tile they draw, so they can't do it, but you can see how they sometimes forget out of custom and discard it only to pick it up again, put in on top of their hand, then discard it once more. There was a lot of that in the Saikyousen 2011 Tetsujin Pro Daihyou Ketteisen broadcast.

I'd rather have we stopped doing things like thumb-reading and drawing ahead （盲牌と先ヅモはしないようにしましょう）.