Full Flush

Full Flush (chinitsu in Japanese Riichi, qing yi se in Chinese, 'pure one suit') is a hand in which every single tile belongs to one of the three numbered suits — all characters, all bamboo, or all dots — with no honor tiles whatsoever. The melds may be any mix of sequences and triplets; the only requirement is absolute suit purity across all fourteen tiles.

It is one of the highest-value standard patterns everywhere it appears. In Riichi, chinitsu is worth 6 han closed and 5 han open (the kuisagari reduction), often pushing a hand straight into mangan or higher. In Hong Kong mahjong it is a large faan bonus, frequently a limit or near-limit hand, and in Chinese MCR Full Flush scores 24 points. Because the hand uses only one suit, it pairs naturally with sequence-rich pinfu shapes, with all-pungs, and it is the suit-pure cousin of the honor-inclusive half flush.

A completed example entirely in bamboo: 1s2s3s, 4s5s6s, 7s8s9s, a pung of 9s, and a pair of 2s. The single-suit concentration makes the hand powerful but also conspicuous and slow — discarding everything outside your chosen suit telegraphs your intention, and you draw from a narrower pool of useful tiles, so opponents read full-flush attempts early and play defensively. A frequent confusion is the boundary with half flush: the moment even one honor tile (a wind or dragon) enters the hand, it is no longer a full flush but a half flush, which scores less. Strategically, full flush is usually committed to only when a player already holds a strong cluster in one suit, since pivoting late is costly.