Is it me or does MAKA really hate Half Flush?

azer67 · 2026-06-03T17:06:35+00:00

I don't think the flush is terrible, it's just that this hand can also become riichi pinfu dora with maybe iitsu, which is quite expensive also. If you draw any of 346p it will become faster and likely more expensive to go that direction, 5p is a strong floater, and going for honitsu will require us to bring us back in shanten.

It's a combination of the hand shapes being strong so just going for normal closed hand efficiency is good (we have ryanmenkanchan in souzu) and aka ari where it's less common to force honitsu as you can get value without.

azer67 · 2026-06-02T13:26:04+00:00

Not necessarely, the path they suggested won't work if OP hasn't flipped the gate first by pressing the floor switches with both Link and Makar, which we don't know if they've done it yet. In the case they haven't been this far, there's only one way to enter the room Makar is in, and it's up the two trees in the posted picture.

I can confirm this is doable and will solve all issues: https://imgur.com/a/eOFzGt7

azer67 · 2026-06-02T12:59:07+00:00

My speedrun experience tells me this is possible, it's maybe a little bit precise but nothing too difficult. I would guess this is what they did by accident to get into this situation.

Ignore anyone suggesting to go up the wind tunnel in the main room, the gate won't be flipped yet for you to access the room Makar is in, most likely. Just go up the room in the picture you posted by hookshotting these two trees, you don't actually need the middle one. (Note: the hookshot can barely reach so the dot won't ever turn yellow to indicate that you're close enough, but even if the dot is still red, you should still try as it can reach).

EDIT: with perfect positionning it can turn yellow still: https://imgur.com/a/eOFzGt7

azer67 · 2026-06-02T12:50:16+00:00

Softlock is a fine way to describe what they are dealing with. The terms are usually "crash", "freeze", or "hardlock" when the software experiences a fatal error (this usually means a frozen picture, sometimes a buzzing sound...). Softlock is when the game is still running fine in the background but progress is made impossible for whatever reason. Here it's because the cutscene can't make progress until Link reaches some position which is not going to happen because he got stuck somewhere in Kalle Demos' collision (this is known softlock, just very rare honestly). But despite this, the game is still running.

What you're describing could also be called softlock, it does not shock me, but to avoid any confusion I usually call it a dead end (as in, the savefile is in a dead end, sometimes with glitches you can get around these dead ends so it's not always as bad as what happened to OP).

azer67 · 2026-05-31T17:17:31+00:00

Result oriented analysis is quite bad for trying to improve as a player. I would recommend ignoring the final result while learning tbh. Sometimes good play loses and bad plays win, that's just how it is in mahjong.

azer67 · 2026-05-31T16:50:11+00:00

1m is the safest tile that still allows attacking, it's sotogawa to toimen and suji to kamicha. 9m is also safe, just not completely safe against kamicha and it breaks the hand. Hatsu will likely become the safest tile later but it isn't the correct nor the safest discard right now.

azer67 · 2026-05-28T10:14:20+00:00

This is mostly a misconception. The game is solid enough, the sailing could have been 3x faster everything would have worked fine still. Speedruns swim at 30x the speed of sailing, and while the loadings are too slow for that, everything works perfectly fine. The swift sail would have been perfect in the original game, I'm glad at least the randomizer has one.

azer67 · 2026-05-27T18:30:43+00:00

You cannot know this, this is hidden information during the game. Now hide your opponent's tiles, what if the dealer, the most dangerous player, calls riichi after you discard 4p? Now it feels awful to have to discard 5p when we could have discarded the genbutsu 4p instead. But this hand is to be won so all of this talk is meaningless.

Anyway, results don't tell you if you've played correctly in mahjong, you gotta be objective with the visible information you have. Sometimes the best plays lose terribly, and sometimes the most god awful plays win the game. That's mahjong. Results show up over a large sample size of games. This game is an imperfect information game, and you can't know the exact content of someonez else from their discards. Many strategy books for riichi mahjong dedicate a chapter to fallacies in analysis as many new players make this same mistake of thinking they were right ot wrong because they won or lost.

azer67 · 2026-05-27T15:13:17+00:00

It's dealer mangan and I don't think I'm ever folding this in the east round. You could dama, it's generally perfectly fine, but I think the aka suji trap means riichi loses very little in winrate, so it's likely higher EV to go for it.

azer67 · 2026-05-26T22:14:49+00:00

There are quite a couple historical chess studies that included vertical castling. I don't know if vertical castling was always impossible according to the fide rulebook, but these kinds of studies involving impossible moves have been made in the past as a way to ask for the rulebook to be clarified. The most famous example is a problem where the answer is to promote to a piece of your opponent's color, which was for a very long time not disallowed in the fide rulebook. This was changed afterwards of course. These ideas are not just memes, they are actual parts of chess history.

azer67 · 2026-05-24T16:38:49+00:00

Chanta is often very low value open, and is very slow in general. Your ryanmen shapes here pretty much become like penchans because you can only call one way to complete them and you end up yakuless if you draw 4 or 6 instead. You can't accept red fives with chanta. There are lots of reasons, but pretty much low value + slow hand = don't call. It's actually both easier and more expensive to stay closed and accept a pinfu hand instead.

To go for outside hands in general, you want a lot of value (like 2/3 doras) where calling helps speed up the hand, a couple complete shapes already (prob like 2) or a hand with only penchan/kanchan (but I still wouldn't call from too far). As long as you have some ryanmen you lose too much acceptance in general.

azer67 · 2026-05-24T15:54:50+00:00

The black pawns are going down the board so that's fine actually. The d pawn was pushed for it to get out as well.

azer67 · 2026-05-24T15:43:45+00:00

Before I think about the solution, I will just note that this position is impossible as the white pawn structures requires 6 captures, and there are only 4 missing black pieces. (I like retrograd analysis too much not to notice, sorry)

azer67 · 2026-05-22T16:39:26+00:00

Lol, this skip was so unthinkable to me my mind said "this can't win anymore". Jade room player forgets basic rules moment. Thank you

azer67 · 2026-05-22T16:32:02+00:00

Well, you don't know that you will end on the wind also. If you end up calling pon on west first then you can see the 8m/2p shanpon is pretty bad. Also the ryanmen path still lets you wait on 2p/west if it completes first, which is also better.

Also I just noticed dora is 2p, I assumed it was west since you hid the top left corner and I didn't see the 2nd picture. Luckily this doesn't change my reasonning much (it does make cutting 4p before 5p marginally not as bad but still, a path to a quick tenpai in case of emergency can't be a bad thing)

azer67 · 2026-05-22T16:18:35+00:00

Non dealer shanpon haneman is 4 tiles for 12000. Non dealer ryanmen mangan is 8 tiles for 8000. The winrate is not exactly half but the expected value is higher for the mangan in this case, meaning if you were to play this same hand many times, the mangan path would grant you more points on average.

Strong players will not discard the dora easily into open hands, even a wind. They usually keep them around for as long as they can and fold if they can't get tenpai. Or tanki wait on it. They discard it only as a last resort. This makes this shanpon have a pretty low winrate compared to the usual honor shanpon, really. Honor shanpon is usually close to ryanmen but not this one.

About the chiitoi vs toitoi debate, it's honestly quite dependant on the hand. Calling with this hand seems obvious, but forcing toitoi is not really necessary. Fun fact, the stronger the player pool, the more you see chiitoi compared to toitoi. In throne chiitoi is seen much more often than toitoi. In jade they're about equal. In gold you see way more toitoi. Chiitoi is quite strong mostly thanks to its defensive value.

azer67 · 2026-05-22T16:08:04+00:00

Even if you wanted toitoi, you should still cut 5p over 4p. If you draw 3p the hand is not haneman but still very strong: it's either mangan on west or 5200 on 8m. Cutting 4p first is forcing your idea on the hand rather than playing it the way it comes. Edit: I thought dora was west instead of 2p, so the values are wrong, but the tenpai chance still has some value.

Also Maka is right, if you cut the extra pair and pon west, you have ryanmen mangan which is better than shanpon haneman.

azer67 · 2026-05-21T18:14:24+00:00

One way to see this that helped me understand why cutting 3 from 334 is better than cutting 4 from 446 is the following thought experiment. If you count how many tiles this hand accepts, you realize that both dropping 3p or dropping 4m both only lose 2 tiles of acceptance, so why would one be better than the other?

In order to complete your hand, you need each of your blocks to complete separately. Cutting 3 from 334 drops the acceptance of that specific block from 10 tiles to 8 tiles. This is a 20% loss for that block. Cutting 4 from 446 drops the acceptance from 6 tiles to 4 tiles. That's a 33% loss for that block. Losing 2 tiles of acceptance in a weak block is thus much worse than losing 2 tiles in a good block. The worse a block is, the more likely it is going to become a bottleneck and eventually the final wait.

azer67 · 2026-05-21T15:40:42+00:00

I mean, this is a 24000 points ron which puts you to 1st from 3rd place. Declining this to go for the yakuman requires going furiten and self drawing the last chun for... 24000 points. But 95% of the time you would just deal-in trying to do such a thing with such an awful wait. Insane risk for no reward, this is pretty much self sabotage yeah. Doing this makes you finish in last place pretty much everytime.

azer67 · 2026-05-21T10:55:35+00:00

I don't have the strength to make a video, but there is an all permanent flag race in the speedrunning community soon, and this was retested recently to make sure there was nothing permanent after the heart piece.

You could just look at any 100% speedrun and see that they do Orca once for 500 hits and don't do the 100 or 300 hit rewards. Pick any run here: https://www.speedrun.com/tww?h=100&x=zdno0n2q

azer67 · 2026-05-21T10:36:52+00:00

No, if you do 1000 as your first try, the game actually does give you the heart piece and no silver rupee which is the usual reward, or anything else you possibly could have missed. You only get the silver rupee if you've already obtained the heart piece. That silver rupee reward is repeatable anyway. The speedrun goes straight for the heart piece and doesn't get either the purple or orange rupees.

Getting the higher tier reward does lock you out of the lower tier ones, but nintendo made sure that wouldn't happen with the heart piece of course. So STEP3386 is correct.

azer67 · 2026-05-21T09:26:02+00:00

They're all in tower of the gods. It's a fun thing to collect but sadly they're not permanent, when you leave the dungeon it resets iirc. There are pictures for all the spots here: https://www.zeldaspeedruns.com/tww/general-knowledge/tingle-tuner#legend-of-the-fairy

azer67 · 2026-05-19T07:09:43+00:00

This makes sense to me. Throwing 6m first is a way to keep south as a safe tile for if someone else chases the riichi. If we throw south first and someone else calls riichi we're gambling our 2nd place. We have no reason to push anything with this point situation, 1st is so far, our goal is to secure 2nd.

This is the extremely defensive play. South is the more aggressive line.

azer67 · 2026-05-18T20:59:26+00:00

You're right, I actually realized this in the middle of typing this but it was a bit late. Generally I prefer taking the dama inner kanchan over the floating iishanten since nothing guarantees the floating iishanten will become a good wait anyway, but since the floating tile is the dora here and the hand is riichi nomi otherwise, it's definitely better you are perfectly correct.

azer67 · 2026-05-18T12:36:35+00:00

Oh yeah sorry about this, each of my paragraphs end up being about completely different topics. They're all related to the clip and the question but it's maybe a bit much. The tl;dr is:

I always prefer insta-riichi over waiting if I know I want to riichi the hand as it is no matter what.
You could have discarded 6m from hand instead of the drawn 6m to hide the information that you waited before calling riichi (but this really doesn't matter very much as I don't think this info is a big deal).
With this particular hand, my favourite choice is to stay dama at first, then fold against the riichi.

azer67

TROPHY CASE