>>89202255When someone gets Riichi... If you are three tiles away, just fold on the spot. He's ready to win, you are ready to lose. Just fold. Sssssure if you have good, fat hand which you might complete in two tiles - you can risk it. Be aware though your greedy ass might be punished for it. People at this rank have good idea how to make decent hand, that riichi is probably 3 Han or worse, so you can lose 8k points - or WORSE. That means, there's now 16k points of difference between you and that guy... Or WORSE.
Look at his discards, because of furiten rule, his discards are 100% safe. If other guys tested waters with different tiles and he didn't call, those are safe too. Honour tiles are usually safer than 1-9 tiles (use your judgement though).
Try to divide your hand into blocks - you need 5 of them (4 triplets/sequences and a pair). What kind of waits you get for every block? If you have ready pair - leave it, do not call Pon on your last pair. If you have 1,2 and wait for 3 - that's edge wait, it's mostly trash. 4 and 6 and wait for 5 - mid wait, kinda trash but marginally better (you can get for example 2, you can discard 6 and now you wait for 1 and 4). You should aim to have optimal waits, so you don't have to open your hand. You should avoid opening your hand unless it's really fat, and you have a lot of Dora's - you want to score quickly then. Opening your hand is not worth it usually, that single dragon yaku sucks compared to riichi + pinfu + ura Dora. You want to win big hands, and avoid feeding Ron's to other people.
