Referee wrote: ↑Fri Jun 19, 2020 9:20 am
I will look those, thank you both. I'm finding myself pursuing ittsu too much, or maybe something like sanshoku... I need to learn more flexibility, I guess. (Maybe this should have gone in the Dojo...)
Good luck and feel free to ask if you have any thing you're unsure of.
I find that ittsu is quite a hard yaku to get, and generally not worth it unless you start with 6-7 of the required tiles. Main problem is you need to fill 2 penchan/kanchans as well as the middle ryanmen/kanchan, and if you open to fill it (which you probably will a decent amount of time), it's only worth the 1 han. On top of that, because of the range of tiles it uses it doesn't stack well with other yaku, and getting more than 1 dora can be hard (depending on your last block and pai) so getting value is difficult.
You can't stack it with simpler yaku like tanyao (since you need 1 and 9), or sanshoku (not enough blocks/tiles), and pinfu is hard to get since you're either risking not getting your iitsu if your wait is something like 12345 (waiting on a 36), or you just can't get pinfu since you need to fill in one of the two end block pen/kanchans. So your best bet is stacking it with honitsu and yakuhai, but even then, I find I add it as an after thought to those yaku, rather than starting with ittsu and adding the others on.
Not saying this is the best way, or necessarily a good way (I don't know honestly), but the way I look at my hands is I find one core yaku (pinfu, honitsu, yakuhai etc) and then try and pile as many other yaku/value on top of it that I can. If I have a seat wind... ok can I make this honitsu? or sanshoku? If I get to closed tenpai, will I likely have a good wait to riichi? The main reason I bring this up, is that I rarely, if ever, consider ittsu as one of those base yaku, just because of it's low value and it's difficulty in stacking with others. It's more one that I seek to add on to another base.
Sanshoku is another story, a relatively flexible yaku that can combine easily with others, you just need to be careful about your blocks and deciding whether you will open for it or not. Though if you ask Gemma, she'll tell you this is the only Yaku
While I don't remember exactly how I ended up at my existing playstyle (taking a 4 year gap in playing doesn't help) one thing I remember from my early days that helped me, was one of the podcasts that Jenn and Garthe used to do, where Garthe basically said "MenTanPin is the core of riichi mahjong" (not an exact quote, also for reference, MenTanPin = (Menzen/Closed)Riichi, Tanyao, Pinfu) and that you should recite it to yourself ten times before going to bed at night. Now obvious hyperbole aside, this stuck with me, and it's one of the core pillars of my play even to this day. Not to say I always go for it, but with this combination, you only need 1 dora, or another yaku like sanshoku or iipeikou, and you're already at mangan. (well 4/30 so 7700/11600 in cases where kiriage (rounding up) is not used, also tsumo doesn't count in this case, since it drops you to 4/20)
But as an idea I feel it gives a good base to work on. If you can't get all three, then you can still look at two (say MenPin or MenTan) and try and substitute other yaku/value in to make up for the missing one. It gives you a base to start on basically. And (while this was a roundabout way to get here...) Pinfu is a great yaku to focus on if you want to work on your efficiency, since efficient play will tend towards ryanmen blocks and waits anyways.
So maybe try playing a few games just focusing on Pinfu or trying to get MenTanPin as much as you can, just as a practice exercise, and see how you go. Not saying you have to change your playstyle permanently (if it even is a change), just for a few games and see if it helps with your efficiency.
Sorry, this ended up a lot longer than I intended
Hopefully there is something of use in there, and I wasn't just repeating stuff you already knew