\>lae is now translating \>all I'm doing is timing and releasing I love it when people enable my laziness. Next episode is the last, and then there'll be a movie after that. We're (probably) not going to do the movie. So, we're translating everything now, I guess. Circles/bamboo/characters for the suits, east/south/west/north for the winds, and "dragons" (asdfasdfadafasdadf) for the elements. Have I mentioned that literally the only reason the dragons are called dragons is that that's the name used by the first guy who translated mahjong rules from Chinese into English? Anyway. Spoiler ahead. Fujita gets a hand that looks like 88m222234s23456p, which can be broken down into (88m) (222s) (234s) (23p) (456p), waiting for 1pin and 4pin, or into (88m) (222s) (234s) (234p) (56p), waiting for 4pin and 7pin. Notably, this hand has no yaku if someone discards a 1pin, and she can't ron off that. The furiten rule also prevents her from winning if someone discards an 1pin and someone else discards a 4pin or 7pin in the same set of turns, even though that would qualify for the 1-han tan'yao yaku. If she'd called riichi, then at least she would get the 1-han riichi yaku, but she didn't. She probably figured out that Saki was staring at the rinshan tile (the last tile on the dead wall, which is drawn when you call kan) and wanted to prevent her from taking it, so she waited for the 5sou she got on her next draw, called kan with the 2sou quadruplet, and then drew 8man as the replacement tile from the dead wall. This leaves her hand as (2222s) 888m345s23456p. (Note that in most rulesets, once you have declared riichi, you cannot call a kan that changes your hand structure, so it's good that she didn't.) Instead of calling kan, she could've discarded either 2sou or 5sou to remain in tenpai, but 25s were both dangerous tiles at that point in time. If you wanted to maximise tile efficiency, you'd get rid of the 8man to wait on 147p as before, and maybe call riichi so you can win off the 1pin. But 8man was also the rinshan tile Saki was going to use, so she had to discard something else. In this situation, you could discard 2p to wait on 36p, 3p to wait on 2p, 5p to wait on 6p, and 6p to wait on 25p; no other discard preserves tenpai. 25p is a better wait than just 2p, so even though she was targetting Nodoka, the extra 5p wait served as insurance. Also note that 2356p are all safe against the dealer riichi, so she had quite a few options here. The so-called "digital" style of mahjong is to prioritise tile efficiency, which generally leads to more frequent wins with somewhat cheaper hands, as opposed to the old-school playing style where the balance is tilted towards flashy, expensive hands. Stuff like getting rid of unpaired honour tiles ASAP is typically considered digital, whereas stuff like getting rid of a whole triplet in order to score a yaku (e.g. tan'yao, chanta, etc.) typically isn't. Of course, situational concerns contribute a lot to the play style; if you're dead last in the last round, you don't want to just scrape together a cheap 1000-point hand and end the game there, even if that's what tile efficiency would tell you to do. Another important aspect of the old-school style is superstition—namely, the concept of flow. The idea is that good tiles will naturally go to a player who has the flow, whatever the hell that means. You can adjust the flow by making calls or something. In real life, it's 99% bullshit, but this is a work of fiction and many characters actually have superpowers. We've already seen part of the titular character's: Saki has a much higher chance of getting rinshan kaihou than normal and triplets seem to magically accumulate in her hands. (Spoiler alert: and that's not all! The full extent of her ability has never been explicitly mentioned, but you can infer a lot from the matches shown in the qualifiers and the nationals.)