My hand is not coming in. How do I stop someone else from winning?
Once an honest count says your own hand cannot win, work against the player who is closest. Throw the tiles their kind of hand needs early, before anyone can call them; hold the tiles they need late, once they are plainly close; and now and then call a discard they wanted, so long as the set you expose fits a real hand on the card. None of this is right while you can still win.
Answered by Prim. Last reviewed 2026-11-09.
First, be certain the hand is gone
Everything on this page is for one situation only: your own hand has no realistic way in. Count it honestly. How many tiles do you still need, how many of each are still unseen, and how much wall is left? If the answer is that you are waiting on a miracle, the hand that remains to be played is somebody else's, and you have a say in whose.
This is not spite. Over an evening, a patient player beats a stronger one partly by refusing to feed the leader. Every hand you keep from the leader is a hand you did not pay for.
Spend their tiles early, while it costs nothing
The cheapest move comes first, before you even know who the threat is. Tiles that only one kind of hand wants, Winds when you are not playing Winds, the year's tiles when you are not on a year hand, are leaving your rack anyway. Let them go in the first few turns, while nobody is yet able to call them. A family of tiles emptied early never comes together for anybody.
The same thinking works on a single player. Read what they are collecting from their exposures and their discards. If you hold tiles their hand lives on and you will not use them, decide early. Thrown early, a tile is cheap. Thrown late, it may be the very tile that finishes them.
Late in the hand, hold what they need
As the wall shortens, the order turns around. Once a player has exposures on the rack and is plainly close, the tiles their hand needs become the tiles you keep. A tile in your rack is a tile they cannot take from your discard. Better still, find a way to use those tiles yourself, so you are not merely holding them but building with them, and never feel the pull to let one go.
Your discards matter just as much now. A tile already lying uncalled in the discards is safer to throw than one nobody has seen. When the player before you throws a tile you also hold and nobody calls it, yours is probably safe to throw behind it.
Calling to block, and what it costs
The loud move is the call. If a discard is a tile the leader's hand is built on, you may call it yourself and expose a set, and that tile leaves the table for good. A call also takes the turn, so anyone sitting between the discarder and you loses theirs. If the leader sits in that gap, your call has cost them a draw as well.
It is fair play, and it is expensive. An exposure commits you, and the rules require every exposure to fit a hand on the current card. A set that fits no line at all is an incorrect exposure, and your hand can be called dead for it. So call to block only when the set belongs to a line you could still play, and only when the tile truly matters to the leader. A block that saves nobody is simply a lost turn.
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