Why Doesn’t Zung Jung Encourage Hand-Building?

Hand-Building Mahjong: Origins and Improvements discussed the emergence and development of the hand-building philosophy, and why Zung Jung is a more suitable starting point for developing an ideal hand-building ruleset. This article examines why Zung Jung is not yet that ideal and how it could be improved.

The problem with Zung Jung

Many players have tried Zung Jung and identified its problem: it calls itself hand-building mahjong, yet small patterns such as Concealed Hand, All Chows, and All Simples dominate. Six or seven out of ten wins are small five- or ten-point hands. This is even with a five-point minimum; if basic hands are allowed, Chicken Hand and other small hands account for seventy or eighty percent. In my count of thirteen hands from the high-level semifinals and final of the 2015 World Series of Mahjong, four featured the medium-value patterns Pure Straight or Mixed Triple Chow. The other nine were merely five- or ten-point hands based on concealment, All Chows, or All Simples.

Players who reach those stages of the World Series are experienced, and the strategies they adopt for Zung Jung are the best competitive strategies. In mahjong, points come only from winning: first secure a win, then look for an opportunity to win bigger. Initial hands are entirely random, and only a minority offer a clear main route to a large hand. The best strategy is therefore to attempt a large hand when the opportunity appears, and otherwise race for the simplest small hand that just reaches the winning threshold. This strategy actually applies across mahjong rulesets. However small the win, it brings a gain rather than a loss and can cut off someone else's large-hand attempt. The observed seventy-percent small-hand share counts completed wins. Among the other three players, some may have been pursuing small hands more slowly, while others may have had large hands interrupted. Since Zung Jung's minimum can be met by concealment, All Chows, or All Simples, their dominance is natural.

Can a ruleset dominated by these patterns really be hand-building mahjong? Such a game is bound to be rather dull. In this respect, Zung Jung feels very similar to Japanese classical mahjong, where the same patterns also dominate. According to A Historical Perspective on Zung Jung Mahjong, modern Japanese Riichi developed from classical Japanese mahjong by adding dora, riichi, furiten, open-hand value reductions, and other rules. Classical Japanese mahjong required a yaku and used full-discarder payment, but:

The scores for concealment, All Simples, and All Chows were disproportionate to the hand's beauty and difficulty, contradicting the hand-building philosophy and upsetting the balance between scoring patterns. They became a scoring distortion in Japanese classical mahjong. The result was another game of racing to win, monotonous and unable to satisfy enthusiasts' appetite for hand-building.

Zung Jung was adapted from Riichi by removing modern features such as dora and riichi that did not fit its hand-building philosophy. Yet instead of encouraging more hand-building, it returned to something resembling Japanese classical mahjong—another monotonous ruleset.

Zung Jung was compiled according to the hand-building philosophy proposed in that historical account. Why would rules designed around hand-building fail to encourage it? This is an interesting question.

Why Zung Jung does not encourage hand-building

Compared with Japanese classical mahjong, Zung Jung did modernize several aspects. Classical Japanese rules used minipoint scoring with a fixed base; Zung Jung switched to pattern-based scoring and removed that base. It added several pattern series, such as Pure Double Chow and Mixed Triple Chow, and reassessed all pattern values. The overrewarded small patterns of concealment, All Chows, and All Simples received the lowest value of five points, falling from about half the value of a main-route pattern to one sixth or one eighth. A more scientifically reasonable competitive payment system replaced full-discarder payment with dealer doubling. Yet none of these improvements changed the dominance of small-hand racing. Adding new buildable patterns was the only change that helped hand-building, but Zung Jung selected patterns strictly and added few. Switching from minipoints to pattern scoring, changing payments, and assigning reasonable values—none of these reforms changed the game's essential tendency to race for a win, nor did they encourage hand-building.

Zung Jung's designer, Alan Kwan, disagrees. In the discussion of winning requirements in his historical account, he responds to the criticism that “without a minimum winning score, Zung Jung becomes a game of racing to win, with little competitive depth”:

Most popular rulesets struggle to escape the tendency to race for a win because of fixed base points, overrewards, imbalanced pattern values, and other factors. They need minimum-score restrictions to avoid becoming entirely about racing. Zung Jung deliberately removes the base points and overrewards that encourage racing. It is hand-building mahjong rather than racing mahjong, and can therefore do without a minimum winning score.

In this account, those features cause racing. Zung Jung's reforms are therefore to remove the fixed base; remove overrewarded patterns such as edge, closed, and pair waits, self-draw, riichi, and dora, or give them the minimum five points, as with concealment, All Chows, and All Simples; and rebalance unreasonable pattern values. Once these incentives to race are removed, Zung Jung regards itself as hand-building mahjong. Yet because of the competitive strategy discussed above, removing them still leaves small concealment, All Chows, and All Simples hands making up seventy percent of wins.

The designer is not unaware of this. Rather, he considers a game with that seventy-percent share to be hand-building mahjong because his definition differs from the common understanding. Ordinarily, hand-building mahjong means rules that encourage players to construct beautiful, difficult, large hands rather than continually race to complete small ones. This definition covers both process and outcome: players work toward large hands during play, and large hands should consequently form the majority of completed wins. Such a game is ideal in its enjoyment and spectator appeal, in both the way it is played and the hands it produces.

Zung Jung defines the ideal as one in which “the score of a hand directly reflects its beauty and difficulty.” Its historical account repeatedly emphasizes this philosophy, for example:

“The scores for concealment, All Simples, and All Chows are disproportionate to their beauty and difficulty, contrary to the hand-building philosophy”; “[riichi] departs entirely from the philosophy that scoring patterns should be grounded in the hand's beauty and difficulty”; and “for hands combining patterns, additive scoring reflects their beauty and difficulty more accurately than multiplicative scoring.”

A closer look reveals that Zung Jung's definition places requirements only on hand valuation, not on the process or results of hand-building. For Kwan, rules qualify as hand-building if scores correspond to beauty and difficulty. How many completed wins are small or large, and whether players mostly race with small hands, are not objectives of the rules. In other words, the philosophy selects patterns and assigns values without requiring the resulting game actually to encourage large-hand construction. As Kwan puts it:

“Ideal hand-building mahjong does not require building a hand every round. It gives players strategic freedom to judge, from the tiles available and the situation, whether to build a hand or race for a win.”

Thus Zung Jung lets hand-building arise naturally rather than encouraging a large-hand attempt every time. Kwan recognizes the seventy-percent share of these small patterns; he sees it as a natural outcome of his conception of hand-building mahjong.

Judged by results, a ruleset in which seventy percent of wins are small hands of this kind can hardly be called hand-building. Judged by the process, players mostly pursue small, quick wins, which likewise falls short. This definition clearly differs substantially from the public's understanding and expectations, reducing both enjoyment and spectator appeal.

Other problems and possible improvements

Besides the central problem of small-pattern dominance, Zung Jung has other obstacles to wider adoption. There are too many finely divided scoring tiers; counting every applicable pattern within its category-based additive system creates unnecessary complexity; and its same-tile liability exemption conflicts with most players' habits. These are secondary issues that can be improved.

The central questions remain how to restrain racing and encourage hand-building. There are two approaches: first, add more categories of buildable patterns, particularly main-route patterns, so more initial hands offer something to build; second, raise the minimum winning score, making small-hand racing harder and giving beautiful large hands a chance. These are precisely the approaches Four Seas Mahjong explores and puts into practice.