Some simple Mahjongg strategy tipsOne of the most basic strategy concepts in Mahjongg is the idea of trying to avoid having long rows of tiles. Ideally, you would like to have every tile free on the board, but since any row as only two free tiles then the longer it is, the more unfree (or trapped) tiles there will be in total. For instance, take a look at the following layout:  In this case, the player has either been unable to, or has neglected the long central rows of tiles. Additionally, he or she has not reduceed the size of the central columns at all! It is likely that this game will be lost, even if there were several shuffles available. Compare that layout with this one:  In this case, there is a much higher chance that the board can be completed because the player has managed to reduce the number of long rows to only one (instead of four in the previous example). Similarly, instead of having four tall columns of tiles, we see that in this case there is only one. Notice as well that in the first example, since the player was not reducing the long rows of tiles, it must have been that the rows which actually were being reduced, were the shorter ones. The result is plain to see: Of the twenty selectable tiles available, four of them will not reveal any new tiles when they are removed. In the second example there are twenty three selectable tiles, and all of them will reveal new tiles when they are removed. Usually a newcommer to Mahjongg will search for free pairs and just remove any two matching tiles as soon as they are found. An expert player however, will not automatically click out a found pair. Instead he or she will search for the third or fourth matching tiles first. The advantage of doing this is to try to keep as many options open as possible. However, there is another advantage to holding off removing a matching pair immediately. Suppose you find all four of a group. If that happens, then you know for certain that by removing all four, you do not reduce your chances of completing the puzzle! That means it is always best to look for sets of four tiles instead of sets of two first, and only after removing those sets of four, should you consider which remaining pairs to remove. An extension of the above idea is the concept of trying to remove pairs of tiles where you know the locations of all four of that group. That is, even if fewer than four of the tile group can be removed, just knowing the locations of all of them makes tiles in that group more desirable to remove than some other group where you can only see two or three of them. For instance, if you can see only three of a group, it is possible that by removing two of them, you leave the third one on top of a tile in the same group! Look at the following layout from the puzzle section of Mahjongg Variations:  We can see here that even though one of the circled tiles is blocked, it is fairly safe for us to remove any two of them. It is likely that we will be able to uncover the fourth one eventually, and we know for certain that we won't have a column containing two identical tiles (which can never be removed). Click Here to visit the Mahjongg Variations Page |
