Hiding your hand

Class fifteen. The strategy pillar in class seven was about concealment (show or hide) and I told you that choice mattered. Today I'm going to show you exactly HOW much it matters, in tai. The concealment rules are spread all across the engine, and when you add them up, they're some of the biggest bonuses in the game. A careful player can add forty tai to a hand just by keeping tiles in their own hand instead of claiming them off discards.

Start with the whole-hand rules. "Concealed Hand" fires if you've got ZERO exposed melds in front of you (nothing claimed from anyone) and you win off someone's discard. Five tai. "Self-Draw Concealed" is the same shape, but you drew your own winning tile from the wall. Ten tai. Twice the first one. The game is basically saying: keeping the whole hand private is good, and drawing your own winning tile is better. They stack with everything else. Your base, your flowers, your honour pongs, your family patterns. Everything.

Now the opposite extreme. Sometimes a player goes the OTHER way: claiming everything from discards, building the entire hand in the open, right in front of them. If every meld except the pair is exposed, and you win by discard, that's "Fully Exposed Hand (Discard)" and it pays FIFTEEN tai. More than Concealed Hand. If instead you self-draw with a fully exposed hand, it's "Fully Exposed Hand (Self-Draw)," ten tai. Notice the strange inversion. Fully exposed discard pays MORE than fully exposed self-draw. That's because finishing a fully exposed hand off a discard is actually harder. Everyone at the table can see exactly what you need and refuses to throw it. If you manage to finish anyway, the game gives you extra credit.

One small rule on top of the fully-exposed family. Under LRC rules, if you start "closing in" (meaning you expose every meld you have and explicitly declare you're one tile away from winning) the game used to give a bigger bonus. LRC caps it. "Close in Fully Exposed" pays five tai flat. Not ten or fifteen. This keeps fully-exposed hands from becoming overpowered relative to hidden ones. The rule exists so you remember: under our ruleset, closing in is a modest bonus, not an explosion.

Now the most important concealment rule of all, and the one with the steepest ladder in the game. "Concealed Pongs." This rule counts how many PONGS in your hand were hidden (built without claiming) rather than ponged off a discard. Two concealed pongs is five tai. Three is ten. Four is fifteen. And FIVE concealed pongs (the entire pong half of a five-pongs-plus-pair hand, all built silently) is EIGHTY tai. Eighty. It's the second-biggest everyday concealment bonus in the whole game, behind only Pure Suit. And it stacks. If you build five concealed pongs AND your whole hand happens to also be all pongs, you get All Pong for twenty-five on top of the eighty. This is one of those rules people write home about.

A smaller rule that has nothing to do with concealment, but lives near it in the engine: "Good Eye." Your pair (the two-tile eye at the centre of your hand) is worth an extra two tai if it's a pair of twos, a pair of fives, or a pair of eights. The middle numbers of each three-tile group. Not terminals (ones and nines). Not threes, fours, sixes, or sevens. Just two, five, and eight. Two tai. It's free (you either have it or you don't) and it's the rule most new players forget to count when they're doing their own scoring.

Two last rules that live in the "how did you win" category. "True Single Wait" fires when your ready hand was waiting on EXACTLY ONE specific tile to win. Not two. Not three. Just one. That kind of wait is hard and risky, and the game gives you two tai for pulling it off. "False Single Wait" is a weird cousin: your hand was waiting on a single tile, but the tile could've slotted into more than one meld. Say, a tile that completes either a sheung or a pair, depending on how the hand partitions. Still two tai. Both of these are quiet, small, two-tai bonuses you earn by being in a narrow winning position. They add up across many hands.

Let's build something ridiculous. You're going to finish a round with FIVE concealed pongs. Watch what happens when the ladder hits its top rung.

Count with me slowly, because the numbers are about to get big. Base five. Your hand was five pongs plus a pair: All Pong, twenty-five. Thirty. Every one of those five pongs was built in your hand without claiming: Concealed Pongs at the five-pong rung, EIGHTY tai. One-ten. Your hand was fully concealed and you self-drew: Self-Draw Concealed, ten. One-twenty. Self-Pick adds one. One-twenty-one. You had a pong of red dragons in there: Dragon Pong two. One-twenty-three. Your seat wind pong added two more. One-twenty-five. A flower on the side, one. One-twenty-six. Your pair is a pair of fives, Good Eye, two. One-twenty-eight. Around a hundred and thirty tai. And the biggest single number in that count wasn't the base, wasn't Pure Suit, wasn't anything fancy. It was eighty tai from one rule. Five concealed pongs. That's the ceiling of concealment scoring, and it's one of the most memorable wins in the game.

That's class fifteen. You know the two big concealment rules and their two exposed cousins. You know the Concealed Pongs ladder, including the eighty-tai top rung most players never build. You know Good Eye and the single-wait bonuses. Class sixteen: shape patterns. Step Up, Four in Ways, and the Full Step Up Hand. The rules that care about the geometry of your melds.