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What is a wait, and which waits are strong?

Your wait is what you are still missing and how many ways it can be filled. Single and pair waits are the weak ones, because a joker cannot fill either. Anything waiting on a pung or larger can take a joker, which is why a hand built on pungs and kongs is worth more than a prettier hand built on pairs.

Answered by Prim. Last reviewed 2026-09-20.

Name your wait, every hand

A wait is simply the shape of what you still need: single, pair, double, triple, quad. Saying which one you are on is the difference between playing a hand and hoping at it, and it takes two seconds once you are in the habit.

It also changes what you do next. Everything below, whether to push, whether to expose, whether to fold, follows from the answer, and none of it can be decided by a player who has not asked the question.

Why single and pair waits are the weak ones

This is the whole logic and it is rarely said plainly: a joker cannot fill a single and cannot fill a pair. So if you are waiting on either, every joker in your hand is dead weight against that wait. You are down to the actual tiles and there are not many of them.

Anything waiting on a pung, kong or larger can take a joker. That is why a wait on a group slot is rated so much higher than a wait on one specific tile. It is not a small difference in degree, it is the difference between several ways to finish and one.

It runs backwards into which hand you pick

Here is the part most players never make use of. If group waits are strong and pair waits are weak, then the shape of the hand you choose at the start decides how good your endgame will be, long before you get there.

A hand made of two pungs and two kongs is close to guaranteed a strong wait, because whatever is left over can take a joker. A hand built on pairs can leave you one specific tile away with no joker recourse at all, holding two jokers you cannot use. Worth weighing at the moment you pick a direction, not just when you are counting your outs.

Weak wait plus a dangerous tile equals fold

The two ideas meet here. A single tile wait against a table with exposures showing is not a hand you push. You have one way to win and several ways to pay for somebody else's, and pushing a dangerous tile into that is the most expensive habit in this game.

The corollary is about exposing. Exposing while your wait is weak announces that you are committed at exactly the moment you are least able to finish, which invites everyone to play around you and turns any jokers in that exposure into a target. Strong wait, expose freely. Weak wait, keep quiet.