This section of the website is relatively short, in comparison. It will cover the types of questions asked in the first parts of the Saikouisen Pro Exam. The first few sections of the exam are knowledge questions, covering rules, yaku, current top players, Saikouisen as an organization, and so on. Rules For rules, the current…

Scoring a hand quickly and correctly requires you to count each type of fu, the applicable yaku and han thereof, and then converting the han and fu into the actual score. This guide is not necessarily the best method to score hands in person – it does things out of the normal order to cut…

Determining your wait amongst a large number of tiles in the same suit is one of the most difficult and time-consuming parts of the exam. It requires you to quickly look at the same tiles in the same hand in a number of different ways. While these information here is effective overall, it will include…

Evaluating a hand to see what tiles get to you tenpai helps get through the dangerous “iishanten hell” state in as few turns as possible. While it becomes a rote exercise to look at a hand after drawing a tiles to determine if you can discard into tenpai, knowing the list of tiles in advance…

This section covers choosing the discard or discards from a tenpai hand that give you the largest wait to win. This entails checking possible waits given a number of slightly different hand makeups. You should be familiar with an earlier Exam guide, Tenpai Acceptance, before you continue, as this guide uses the framework from that…

This section covers choosing the discard or discards from a tenpai hand that give you the largest wait to win. This entails checking possible waits given a number of slightly different hand makeups. You should be familiar with an earlier Exam guide, Wait Determination, before you continue, as this guide uses the framework from that…

Knowing what score you need – both with self-draw and from other players – to move up in placement gives you the requirements needed to build effective hands in the late game. On the exam, you will be given situations where you have to look at the game state and scores to determine the minimum…

The second part of the test is 1-2 essay questions, with a time limit of 50 minutes. Usually, you are given a board state, and asked questions about that state. Sometimes it will be open-ended, sometimes there will be specific focus points you are to comment on. These are the guidelines given: This is an…

Rather than put a comprehensive list, here are two SPM (Saikouisen Pro Mahjong) players’ etiquette video, including Kenji, one of the first Americans to pass the Pro Exam, and was also instrumental in opening the West up to the Pro organizations (yay Kenji!). Also included are videos showing discarding techniques to avoid fumbling tiles or…

This is a page with links to all applications on-site, including ones restricted to one-on-one coaching, for ease of bookmarking. Adding Fu: Practice adding common fu numbers together. Count Drill: Practice quickly counting fu and han in easier hands. Flush Drill: Practice 4-tile and 7-tile waits. Fu Drill: Practice fu amounts for various tile shapes….