How Many Hands Should You Chase?
One, two or three, depending on which experienced player you ask. The disagreement is more useful than any of the numbers.
You finish the Charleston holding thirteen tiles that could go two or three ways. The advice you will be given is a number — and which number depends entirely on who is giving it.
This is not a rules question, so there is no rulebook to settle it. What there is instead is a set of experienced players who have reached different conclusions, and the shape of their disagreement tells you more than picking one of them would.
What each side is actually buying
Both positions are paying for something real, which is why the argument does not resolve.
| Chasing more hands | Chasing one | |
|---|---|---|
| You gain | More tiles are useful to you, so fewer draws are wasted | Every decision is obvious, and you discard without agonising |
| You pay | You keep tiles for hands you will abandon, and you commit late | A bad Charleston can leave you with nothing to switch to |
Notice that the cost of flexibility is paid in tiles and the cost of focus is paid in variance. Which one hurts more depends on things nobody can tell you from here — how well you hold several patterns in your head at once, and how the Charleston went.
The case for focus is not that flexibility is bad in principle. It is that keeping three hands alive costs memory, and if you are spending your attention on remembering what you are chasing, you are not spending it on what the other three are doing.
Which is a real trade and not a beginner-versus-expert distinction.
The part everybody agrees on
The number is disputed. What sits underneath it is not, and it survives independent checking across several teachers:
- Keep pairs. A joker cannot fill a pair, so pairs are the scarce thing. A hand that needs one is a hand you cannot rescue with jokers.
- Do not pass a hand away. Look at what your three tiles add up to for the person receiving them, not just at what you are shedding.
- Exposing too early is the commonest beginner error. Widely agreed, and independent of how many hands you are keeping open.
Those three do more for you than resolving the number would.
How to hold this in practice
Since we are not going to hand you a number: the useful question during the Charleston is not "how many hands am I on" but "what would have to arrive for each of these to die". A hand whose death is one discard away is not really a second option.
Which hand to commit to, and when, is judgement — the part of this game that needs a table and a season rather than an article. We are reporting who says what, not settling it, and anybody who tells you the number is settled has not read the others.
Where this comes from
The three positions are attributed as stated: the two-or-three mainstream is the common line across teaching sites, "you can’t play everything" is Linda Fisher’s, and the focus-over-flexibility case is Missy Mahjong’s. None of them is an authority the way the rulebook is for rules, and we have not picked between them.
The three points of genuine agreement survived checking across multiple independent teachers. The rule they rest on — that a joker may never sit in a pair — is confirmed by the American Mah-Jongg Association’s rulebook and Tom Sloper’s rules FAQ.