Honroutou

Honroutou 「混老頭」 is a yaku scored when every tile in the hand is either a terminal or an honor tile. The hand must contain at least one honor and one terminal to score honroutou; an all honor hand would be tsuuiisou, while an all terminal hand would be chinroutou.

Honroutou
Type Yaku
Kanji 混老頭
English Terminals and honors
Value 2 han (consider as 4 han)
Speed Slow
Difficulty Hard

Tile pattern

               Agari:   or  

Formation

Because every tile must be a terminal or honor, sequences are not allowed, since a sequence always contains non-terminal tiles. Naturally, a large amount of honors/terminals are required to even consider this yaku. A majority of honroutou hands are open, using pon to complete a triplet-based hand.

Compatibility

^ Ippatsu requires riichi to be of any use.

RCH DRI IPP SMO TAN PFU IPK ITT YAK SDJ SDO TOI SNA SNK CHA JUN RPK SSG HRO HON CHN CHI RIN HAI HOU CHK
HRO                                                  

Honroutou is not compatible with any yaku which require a sequence, which accounts for most of the incompatibilities (including chankan, which must always win on a sequence wait). Tanyao is incompatible because it requires no terminals or honours, and honroutou requires only those tiles. Chanta is incompatible because it is implied by honroutou. Finally, if honroutou is combined with junchan, the entire hand must be terminals, which gives the chinroutou yakuman.

Value

It is impossible to score this yaku without at least either toitoi or chiitoitsu. Therefore, every hand that scores honroutou is worth at least 4 han.

In toitoi form, honroutou is always worth a mangan at minimum. The lowest scoring hand would have 36 fu (20 fu for winning; 4 open terminal triplets, worth 4 fu each), which is then rounded up to 40 fu. A 4 han 40 fu hand scores mangan. Such a hand is shown below:

               Ron:   

The lowest scoring honroutou is a chiitoitsu won by ron without riichi or dora:

              Ron:  

This hand scores 4 han and 25 fu for 6400 (9600) points.

External links

Honroutou in Japanese Wikipedia