Limit hand

A limit hand is any winning hand whose value reaches the maximum payout a given ruleset allows, capping what the losers must pay regardless of how the raw points are calculated. The concept exists because some hand combinations are so strong that without a ceiling the scores would balloon, so rulesets define a 'limit' and treat the rarest hands as automatically worth that full amount.

The exact threshold and terminology vary by tradition. In Hong Kong mahjong, scoring is counted in faan (doubles), and reaching the table's faan limit — commonly set at a house value like 10 faan — pays the maximum, with the grandest patterns such as thirteen orphans or the great winds simply declared limit hands. In Japanese Riichi the tiered ceiling appears as mangan, haneman, baiman, sanbaiman, and the yakuman at the very top; yakuman hands like Kokushi Musou (thirteen orphans), Suuankou (four concealed triplets), and Daisangen (big three dragons) are fixed-score limit hands worth a flat large payout (32000 for a non-dealer) rather than being computed from han and fu. Taiwanese 16-tile mahjong and Chinese variants set their own caps in tai or fan.

The practical effect is that once a hand qualifies as a limit hand, extra scoring elements stop mattering — you cannot exceed the ceiling, so a yakuman with additional yaku still pays one yakuman in most rules. A common confusion is assuming a limit hand must be a single named pattern; in many rules an accumulation of ordinary doubles can also reach the limit. For example, in Riichi a closed hand piling up riichi, tsumo, pinfu, and dora can climb into mangan-and-above limit territory without any single yakuman pattern being present.