Mahjiku › Questions › What is a limit hand in mahjong?
For the table game: four players, real tiles, Hong Kong style — not the solitaire puzzle.
A limit is the ceiling a table puts on what a single hand can pay. Hands big enough to reach it are said to ride the limit — they all settle at that same top price no matter how much further they would have counted.
Left uncapped, mahjong scoring runs away from itself: the rarest hands are worth many times an ordinary win, and on a doubling curve the gap becomes absurd. So most tables set a limit — a maximum a hand may count to. Reach it and you are paid the ceiling; count past it and you are still paid the ceiling.
Two details decide how it behaves, and they are worth getting right:
The legacy additive reference sheet ships with no ceiling at all — it is additive, so what a hand counts to is what it pays, and a big hand is genuinely expensive. Tables that want a cap set one in House Rules; tables that like the drama leave it off.
Which hands actually get there? The ones every player learns the names of first — Thirteen Orphans, Nine Gates, Big Three Dragons, Four Kongs, All Green. On the legacy additive reference sheet those five run from 18 to 27, so at a table with a cap anywhere in the usual range, every one of them rides it.
Unless another sheet is named, examples use the legacy additive reference sheet. Fresh installs select Half Spicy, whose hand values and payments differ. Check the sheet selected for your table.
South self-draws Thirteen Orphans, one of each terminal and honour with East paired:
On the capped sheet every hand that reaches 10 pays the same, which is exactly what "riding the limit" means.
Last updated: 2026-10-24 · editorially reviewed 2026-10-10. Every Hong Kong number on this page is computed from Mahjiku's rule sheets when the page is built.
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