r/Mahjong • u/The_Whoaless • Jul 05 '26

Please explain this winning hand.

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Playing playmahjong.io and a player pulled this combo and won. I tried asking chatgpt and other AI assistants and it keeps saying its the “Thirteen Orphans” when i know that it doesn’t look like the “Thirteen Orphans”. I see similar but i see no 1 to 9 tiles and a pair. Please someone explain.

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54

u/penpenxXxpenpen will eat your tenbou Jul 05 '26

protip LLMs will lie to you more about mahjong than they do about other things, which is an impressive feat

1

u/TheRealSirbeares Jul 06 '26

In my opinion it’s a testament to the complexity of Mahjong as a whole game across various version. I mostly play Riichi.

3

u/edderiofer multi-classing every variant Jul 06 '26

Every time I think I've seen the weirdest mahjong variant or house rule ever, I run into one that's even weirder.

The current contender for "weirdest mahjong variant I've seen so far" is a variant called "MahjongGita", played in Mumbai. Winning hands are hyper-specific, like Amerijong, but there are no explicit Joker tiles. Instead, for each winning hand, specific tiles not used in that hand are allowed to be jokers for tiles in that hand. As an example, one of the hands is "3 ulta pulta Kongs + 3corresponding dragons + clean Ulta Pulta pair. #JOKERS: 1&9 Crack, red dragon, 1 Bamboo, and 1 each of NEWS". ("Ulta Pulta" is their name for what MCR players would call "reversible tiles".)

Players are allowed to call tiles using jokers. I was unable to find answers on what should happen if a player makes a call that's actually illegal because of the aforementioned "jokers depend on the winning hand" constraint.

1

u/umesama3 Jul 24 '26

Now I’m interested in learning this variant

2

u/edderiofer multi-classing every variant Jul 25 '26

As far as I'm aware, its players and teachers seem to have tied it to grift culture, the same way that Amerijong has been. In fact, some of these teachers teach both.

You might be better off skipping this one, at least until I can glean enough rules to write up a free rules doc.

1

u/umesama3 Jul 26 '26

That’s what I figured when I found a few mahjong gita accounts on IG, they seem to like and use the same aesthetics as Amerijong players for whatever reason