All Triplets (Dui Dui Hu): Hong Kong Mahjong's Reliable 3-Faan Hand
Of all the scoring hands in Hong Kong Mahjong, All Triplets (對對和, pronounced dui dui wu in Cantonese) stands out as one of the most satisfying to pull off at the table. There is something deeply pleasing about a hand that contains nothing but pungs: four groups of three identical tiles, plus a pair to seal the win.
At 3 faan on its own, Dui Dui Hu is not the flashiest hand in the rulebook, but it stacks beautifully with other bonuses and comes up often enough to be a genuine part of any serious player’s toolkit. Here is everything you need to know about building, scoring, and defending against it.
What Exactly Is All Triplets?
A winning hand in Hong Kong Mahjong is made up of four sets (melds) and one pair. In most hands, some of those sets are sequences (三張連續數字牌, three consecutive numbered tiles, also called chows). All Triplets flips that entirely: every set must be a pung (碰, three identical tiles) or a kong (槓, four identical tiles). The pair can be any tile.
A basic example of a qualifying hand:
- Pung of 1-bamboo
- Pung of 5-circles
- Pung of West Wind (西)
- Pung of Red Dragon (中)
- Pair of 9-characters
That hand has no sequences at all, nothing but pungs, and it qualifies for Dui Dui Hu.
Kongs count as pungs for this purpose. If you declare one or more kongs and build the rest of your hand from pungs, you still qualify for All Triplets. In fact, the Four Kongs hand (四槓, eighteen arhats) is a limit-hand version of this principle taken to its extreme.
How Much Is It Worth?
All Triplets is worth 3 faan. That puts it squarely in the middle tier of Hong Kong Mahjong hands. It scores more than a Common Hand (平和, 1 faan) or Concealed Hand (門前清, 1 faan), but well below the limit hands that cap out at 13 faan.
Where Dui Dui Hu really shines is in combination with other bonuses. Because the hand tends to include honor tiles (winds and dragons), pungs of those tiles add faan directly on top of the base:
| Bonus component | Faan added |
|---|---|
| Dui Dui Hu base | 3 |
| Pung of seat wind | 1 |
| Pung of round wind | 1 |
| Pung of any dragon | 1 each |
| Self-draw win | 1 |
| Each flower or season tile | 1 each |
A common real-world scenario: 3 faan for Dui Dui Hu, plus 1 for a Red Dragon pung, plus 1 for your seat wind pung, equals 5 faan before counting any flowers. That is already a solid payout, and easy to reach.
Combine Dui Dui Hu with Full Flush (清一色, 7 faan), where every tile is in one suit with all pungs, and you are looking at 10 faan, well into high-payout territory. See our Mixed One Suit vs Full Flush guide for more on how those hand types interact with each other.
How to Build an All Triplets Hand
Start With Your Pairs
The simplest path to Dui Dui Hu begins when you notice you are holding three or more pairs early in the round. At that point you face a fork in the road:
- Chase Seven Pairs (七對子), which requires exactly seven distinct pairs and is worth a flat 4 faan in most Hong Kong rulesets.
- Chase Dui Dui Hu, which requires converting most of those pairs into pungs by calling on opponents’ discards.
The key difference is that Seven Pairs must be entirely concealed, meaning you cannot call opponents’ discards to form pairs. Dui Dui Hu has no such restriction. You can call a pung (碰) on any discard to snap up your triplets, making All Triplets much easier to complete quickly and much harder for opponents to deny you once you are on a roll.
Calling Pungs Aggressively
Unlike sequences, which require two tiles you already hold plus one specific tile from an opponent, a pung call only requires that you are already holding a pair. The moment any opponent discards the tile you have a pair of, you call 碰 and lock in a pung. This makes Dui Dui Hu extremely opportunistic.
The downside is that every pung call you make is visible to everyone. Opponents will quickly read your hand and start withholding tiles that would complete your remaining pungs. This is why experienced players sometimes hold off on calling the first couple of pungs, waiting until they can chain two or three calls in quick succession and leave opponents with less time to adapt their discards.
Honor Tiles Are Your Best Building Blocks
Wind and dragon tiles are naturally strong candidates for Dui Dui Hu because they have no sequence potential whatsoever. They can only ever form pungs or pairs. If you are holding a pair of Red Dragon (中) and your seat wind (say, East / 東), you are already sitting on 5 faan worth of future points:
- Dui Dui Hu: 3 faan (once complete)
- Dragon pung: 1 faan
- Seat wind pung: 1 faan
Fill out the remaining two sets with any other pungs and you are in a comfortable position. If one of those sets happens to be the round wind, add another faan on top.
For a deeper look at how dragon tiles interact with scoring across different hands, check out our Dragon Tiles in Mahjong guide.
Defending Against Dui Dui Hu
When an opponent starts calling pungs left and right in the first few rounds, the Dui Dui Hu alarm should fire in your head. Because they are calling on discards, their melds are fully visible on the table, and that visibility actually works in your favor as a defender:
Count what is already locked. If an opponent shows three pungs, they need only one more pung and a pair to win. That is two target tiles, and you can often work out what they are based on what has been discarded already.
Avoid their suit or honor tiles. If the three visible pungs are all bamboo, any bamboo tile becomes dangerous in the late game. Similarly, if the opponent has already claimed the East and South winds as pungs, do not throw the West or North until you are sure they are safe.
Play defensively near the end of the wall. Dui Dui Hu hands come together fastest when the player can snap up discards rapidly in the early and middle game. Once the wall is short, your opponents have fewer tiles to draw, so the window to win narrows, but so does yours to safely discard.
Stacking Dui Dui Hu Toward a Big Round
All Triplets is a genuine base to build on rather than a hand to coast to. Some of the biggest rounds you will ever see involve Dui Dui Hu as the foundation:
- All Triplets + Full Flush: 10 faan. Four pungs all in one suit is extremely difficult to build since you have to be willing to discard any off-suit tiles early and commit fully to one suit.
- All Triplets + Three Dragons: If you pung all three dragon tiles (中發白: Red, Green, White Dragon), that alone adds 3 faan plus the 3 faan for Dui Dui Hu, landing at 6 faan before anything else. Punging both seat wind and round wind on top of that pushes toward 8 faan, which is already approaching limit territory in many house rules.
- All Triplets + All Honors (字一色): A hand made entirely of wind and dragon pungs with no suit tiles at all. In most rulesets this is a limit hand in its own right, separate from Dui Dui Hu.
Our Complete Faan Guide breaks down every combination and what they pay, which is useful reading if you are planning a high-value strategy.
How TileBuddy Handles Dui Dui Hu
When you log a Dui Dui Hu win in TileBuddy, the app automatically identifies the hand from your input and calculates the full faan total, including honor pungs, flower tiles, and win conditions stacked on top. No mental arithmetic at the table, and no arguments about whether the seat wind pung was already counted in the base faan.
If you prefer to learn faan counting manually first, work through the scoring step by step with our how to score Hong Kong Mahjong guide before relying on the app.
Whether you are chasing a clean 3-faan win or stacking Dui Dui Hu into a 10-faan monster, All Triplets rewards decisive pung calls, smart use of honor tiles, and sharp awareness of what opponents are building. Let TileBuddy handle the arithmetic so you can focus on the tiles. Download it free on the App Store.