Half Flush

Half Flush (honitsu in Japanese Riichi, hun yi se in Chinese, 'mixed one suit') is a hand made entirely from a single numbered suit combined with honor tiles, where both elements must be present. Every numbered tile comes from one suit only — say all dots — while winds and dragons may freely fill out melds and the pair. If the hand contains no honors at all it becomes the higher-scoring full flush instead, so the presence of at least one honor is what distinguishes the half flush.

It is a strong mid-to-high value pattern across variants. In Riichi, honitsu is worth 3 han closed and 2 han open after the kuisagari reduction, often combining with yakuha (value honor triplets) since the honors in the hand are frequently dragons or seat/round winds. In Hong Kong mahjong it is a solid faan bonus, and in Chinese MCR Half Flush scores 6 points. Because honors can form value triplets, a half-flush hand frequently carries extra yaku for free.

A completed example in characters plus honors: 2m3m4m, 7m8m9m, a pung of red dragon, a pung of East, and a pair of 5m — all numbered tiles are characters and the rest are honors. A common confusion is the full-flush boundary: players sometimes hope to 'upgrade' but must keep their numbered tiles strictly to one suit; mixing in a second numbered suit voids the flush entirely. Strategically, half flush is more flexible than full flush because the honor tiles give safe, valuable melds and the hand telegraphs slightly less, but like all flush hands it narrows your draw pool and is usually pursued from an existing single-suit lean.