Mahjong Hand Checker
Tap the tiles in your hand and find out what it is waiting for — how far it is from ready, and which tiles would complete it.
Tap your tiles
Tap a tile to add it. Tap a tile in your hand to remove it.
Your hand
0 tiles selected
—
How to use the hand checker
Tap the tiles that are in your hand. The checker updates as you go — there is no submit button, and the result appears the moment the hand is complete enough to read.
You get three things back. Your shanten: how many tiles you still need to swap. If the hand is ready, the exact tiles that would complete it. And for hands that are not ready yet, the tiles that would bring you one step closer.
The "how many are left" figure counts only the tiles visible in your own hand. It does not subtract what other players have discarded or melded, because the checker cannot see the table. Treat it as an upper bound rather than an exact count of what remains in the wall.
Shanten, tenpai and useful tiles
A mahjong hand is not a pile of tiles, it is a set of blocks: four groups of three plus a pair. Shanten measures how far the hand is from that shape, counting the swaps still needed. A hand at shanten 4 is a long way out; a hand at shanten 1 needs a single useful tile. The number is not a prediction of who wins, it is a reading of how close the shape is.
When shanten reaches 0 the hand is tenpai — ready. That is the point where the question changes from "what do I keep" to "what am I waiting for". A wait can be wide or narrow: a hand waiting on three kinds of tile can be completed by twelve tiles, while a single-tile wait may be down to two or three live copies. Two tenpai hands can look equally ready and be worth very different amounts, which is why a checker shows the waiting tiles rather than only the shanten.
Frequently asked questions
- What does shanten mean?
- Shanten is the number of tile swaps you still need before the hand is ready to win. A hand with a shanten of 2 needs two useful tiles before it can win; a shanten of 0 means it is ready and any winning tile completes it.
- Why does my hand not show a result?
- A hand can only be read at certain sizes. Enter 13 tiles for a concealed hand, or 10, 7 or 4 when part of the hand is already exposed. Any other number of tiles cannot form a legal hand, so the checker waits.
- Does this use the tiles that have been discarded?
- No. The checker only sees the tiles you enter, so the remaining counts are based on your hand alone. On a real table some of those tiles will already be gone.
- Which mahjong rules does this follow?
- This version follows Hong Kong mahjong. The shapes it looks for — runs, triplets, pairs, seven pairs and thirteen orphans — are shared with most mahjong variants, so the result is a useful guide for almost any table.
- Is my hand sent anywhere?
- No. The checker runs entirely in your browser. Nothing you enter leaves your device and nothing is stored.
Related tools
- Mahjong Score CalculatorIn development
- Mahjong Tile IdentifierIn development