Mahjong Strategy: Game Making 3 / How to create Bonus Game

This article is on Game Making: controlling opponents. What is “Bonus Game” and how to create that situation.

Hi all, thank you for checking this website ! Please see the situation below.

At T1, the player on the left dealt in large value hand (this time 9,600) of the player on the right. We often see this situation, and I call this “Bonus Game” because game EV (Tenhou point) is increased for 6 dan and 8-10 dan.

For 6 dan, you will get 75/30/0/-120 (1st/2nd/3rd/4th) points in 1 game. So at the beginning, roughly your EV (Tenhou point) is 75×25%+30×25%+0x25%+(-120)x25%= -3.75: negative. But in this case, your probability to be 1st and 4th decreased, so EV (Tenhou point) is like 75×10%+30×40%+0x40%+(-120)x10%= 7.5, got much better ! (10%/40%/40%/10% is just an example to show the effect. Actually not such drastic change)

Then how to create this situation ? At T1, when 2-3 players showed intention to win, I don’t pursue thin value, and tend to fold more frequently. In this case,

Still 10 Suji is alive and I think I can discard 5m (not r5m, of course) here, whose hitting probability is 22-23% to maximize round EV. But I didn’t to create “Bonus Game”.

(Just FYI, when you have 3,900 Ryanmen Tenpai at 11th turn, EV is 1,100 when discarding 0% hitting tile, and EV is 400 when discarding 10% hitting tile. So EV of discarding 25% hitting tile is better than that of Betaori: giving up winning and discarding safe tiles. Please see the link below if you want to understand how to judge) https://riichi-mahjong.com/2020/01/28/mahjong-strategy-push-or-fold-4-maximizing-game-ev/

You may think this is only applicable for Tenhou, but this way of thinking can be applicable to any format, I believe. Always we should try to find small edges and pile them up to get big win !

I hope this will be of some help to you!

You can also read the other articles on game making from the links below.

Riichi to proceed the round: https://riichi-mahjong.com/2020/01/03/riichi-to-proceed-the-round/

What we should do at 1st place: https://riichi-mahjong.com/2020/01/18/mahjong-strategy-game-making-what-we-should-do-at-1st-place/

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