Wait

A wait is the set of tiles that turns your hand from one tile short (tenpai) into a complete winning hand of four sets and a pair. Identifying your wait precisely matters because it determines how many tiles you can still draw or claim, and in Japanese Riichi it also affects whether you are in furiten and how much fu your hand scores.

Waits come in named shapes. A two-sided wait such as 4p-5p accepts either 3p or 6p, giving up to eight tiles and the best odds. Narrower shapes accept only one rank: an edge wait (1-2 needing 3, or 8-9 needing 7), a closed or middle wait (3-?-5 needing 4), and a pair wait (a lone tile needing its match) each accept a single value, at most four physical tiles. A hand can also hold a multi-sided wait, for example 2s-3s-4s-5s, which accepts both 2s and 5s.

Knowing your wait guides discards. Players often sacrifice a few points to shift from a weak one-sided wait to a wider two-sided one, improving the chance of actually completing the hand. In Riichi the wait shape adds fu: closed, edge, and pair waits each grant 2 fu, while open two-sided and multi-sided waits grant none, so a single-tile wait can quietly bump a hand into a higher score bracket.

Waits exist in every mahjong variant, since every ruleset builds toward sets plus a pair, but only Riichi formalizes them with fu and furiten consequences. In Chinese, Hong Kong, and Taiwanese play the concept is identical in spirit, used mainly to judge how live a tenpai hand is and whether to push or fold.