The Intentional Chombo: A Valid Tactic?

Let’s talk about something possibly “controversial”. I’d wager that if you were to do this in a pro match and get caught, you would probably be kicked out. I’m talking about the intentional chombo.

In case you don’t know what a chombo is, a chombo is a severe penalty that is given as a result of a major violation. The unlucky soul who gets it has to pay out a relatively large amount of points to the other players: 8,000 points, worth a mangan (note that a dealer has to pay a dealer’s mangan worth 12,000 points). After he or she pays out, the round will get restarted. This means that if the offender chombo’d in East 4, the round will remain East 4.

(Violations that may result in a chombo include invalidly claiming a winning hand, calling a win on furiten, destroying part of the wall, etc.)

Now you may be asking, “Why the hell would I want to chombo intentionally? I lose points and the round doesn’t even move forward!”

To those who only play online, you need not worry about this. Popular clients such as Tenhou will not allow the player to chombo at all. However, if you play IRL and are interested, the answer to that is actually very simple.

Imagine you’re playing, and someone discarded idiotically, so now your opponent has this hand:

? NNN EEE SSS WWW

*for this game, we assume the “responsible one pays” rule is inactive.

Well, I have to say that you’re screwed. Daisushi (great four winds) with a single wait on an unknown tile? You better hope that you have enough safe tiles to discard, or else you will be playing blindly. There’s also a chance that the player will shift waits in order to confuse you. Not to mention, the possibility of a tsumo.

So what now? You can try to play fast and get a cheap hand, or maybe feed into someone else’s cheap hand. But playing offensively presents a huge risk of losing 32,000 to 48,000 points. So now we come to an impasse: Paying a mangan beats having to pay a yakuman!

“I can intentionally chombo to prevent this guy from winning this round!”

Now once again, I would like to say that doing this in tournaments would be considered unsportsmanlike play, and attempts to chombo intentionally should probably be reserved for games with friends. Even then it’s a downer to do. You probably can pass it off as a “brain fart” once in a while, but do it too much, and it gets suspicious.

Not to mention, most people would probably just continue to discard safely and hope that the player won’t win that hand.

But hey that’s just my opinion. At least you probably haven’t attempted a false double riichi…

Chombo-王

@nevertenpai