Puyo’s Guide to Calling Tiles – Part 6

Continuing our translations of Puyo’s blog posts, we have part 6 of his series about calling tiles.

This article will talk about how to decide between calling pon or chii, when both options are available.

Generally, it is more advantageous to call chii. For example:

When the player to your left discards , chii is obviously better here. The reason is that being tenpai for is much better than being tenpai for , since three of the will be used for the pon in your hand.

Or if your left player discards with riichi, and you have safe discards to fold with, you can consider calling chii to break his ippatsu. To do this, we also use chii, because afterwards you have two safe discards. It is a basic technique to break ippatsu with chii.

There are, however, some situations where pon is better:

If your left player plays , you can be in tenpai with either chii or pon. But here, pon is better. This is because by keeping in your hand, you can accept . Also, if you get , you have the option to declare kan on .

That’s it for now, in part 7 we will talk about calling kan.