Home / Answers

Can I switch to a different hand after I have exposed?

Yes, as long as everything already face up on your rack fits the new hand. You may change your target line at any point in the game, and nobody needs to be told. What you may not change is the exposure itself: once you have discarded after making it, those tiles stay exactly as they are until the hand ends.

Answered by Prim. Last reviewed 2026-09-22.

The rule in one sentence

You may play toward any line on the current card, and change your mind as often as you like, so long as your exposures belong to the line you end up on. Before your first exposure nothing is committed at all. After it, the exposure narrows the card for you, but it does not choose your hand.

Say you called a third Five Crak and laid the pung on your rack. Every line that holds a pung of fives in one suit is still open to you. Whether one sits in the odd numbers, a run or elsewhere, it remains possible if its colors and the rest of your rack allow. A line with no fives in it has quietly left the table.

The exposure itself does not move

Changing your target is free. Changing the tiles on top of your rack is not. Until you discard on the turn you made the exposure, you may still adjust it: turn a pung into a kong, add or remove a Joker, rearrange the tiles around the one you called. The moment you discard, or complete a Joker exchange that turn, it is locked.

From then on nothing may be added to it and nothing taken away. You cannot call a later discard to grow your pung into a kong. The only change an exposure ever sees after that is another player trading a natural tile for one of its Jokers.

Concealed hands run one way only

A concealed hand may become an exposed hand whenever you choose. You simply call a discard and expose, and you are now playing an exposed line. The door does not swing back. Once a set is face up, every line marked C is closed to you for the rest of the hand.

If the table can see that you were playing a concealed line and then exposed, your hand may be called dead. If the set you exposed happens to fit an exposed line, you may play toward that line instead, and nothing is dead until it is provably dead.

When a switch goes wrong

The risk is not the switch. It is exposing a set that fits nothing you can finish. Exposures that match no line on the current card make a hand dead once another player calls it, and that player will be looking. Before you call, find the line the tiles will serve. Before you switch, check that your exposures come with you.

Switching is a sign of a good player, not a flighty one. The tiles decide where the hand is going. You are only obliged to follow them honestly.

New to the words? Expose · Pivot · Concealed hand · Dead hand