Terminal in every set

Chanta without honors: every set and the pair contains a terminal, honors excluded.

Value 3 han closed · 2 han open
How often rare
Mahjong hand: 1 of characters, 2 of characters, 3 of characters — 7 of characters, 8 of characters, 9 of characters — 1 of circles, 2 of circles, 3 of circles — 7 of bamboo, 8 of bamboo, 9 of bamboo — 9 of circles, 9 of circles
Every set and the pair contains a 1 or a 9 — and no honors at all.

The skeleton is strict: sequences of 1-2-3 or 7-8-9, triplets of 1s or 9s, a terminal pair, and not a single honor tile. In practice the chance shows up when your starting hand crowds both ends of the suits and sits empty in the middle. You'll be discarding 4s, 5s, and 6s early, which is itself a tell — observant opponents will read it and start guarding their terminals.

Junchan repays the patience by stacking well. The same 1-2-3 and 7-8-9 blocks feed sanshoku doujun , and doubled sequences in a closed hand add iipeikou or even ryanpeikou. Stacked that way, the hand reaches haneman and beyond.

Two traps deserve respect. First, a single honor anywhere in the hand — even as the pair — drops you to chanta and costs a han. Second, check every tile of your final wait: a 2-3 shape wins on 1 or 4, but the 4 makes a 2-3-4 set with no terminal in it, and junchan disappears. With no other yaku, that side of the wait cannot win at all. Aim the last shape so every winning tile keeps the pattern alive.

Key points

Related yaku

← All yaku · New here? Learn why every hand needs a yaku or check what this hand pays with the score calculator.