Big Four Winds (大四喜)

What is Big Four Winds?

Big Four Winds (大四喜), pronounced daai sei hei, is a limit-hand category Hong Kong Mahjong winning hand requiring pungs (or kongs) of all four wind tiles — East (東), South (南), West (西), and North (北). It is one of the rarest patterns in HK Mahjong, scored at 15 faan in TileBuddy and capped at the 384-unit limit-hand maximum payout.

How to score Big Four Winds

The hand consists of four wind pungs or kongs as the four melds, plus a pair of any tile. The four wind types together account for 16 tiles in the deck (four of each wind), so collecting three of all four winds requires either substantial wall draws or aggressive claims from discards. The pair can be any tile — suited or honor.

Example hand

Faan value: 15 (limit hand)

Big Four Winds scores 15 faan but pays the 384-base-unit limit cap, the same as any 13+ faan hand. It absorbs and supersedes all individual wind-pung scoring (Round Wind, Seat Wind), which are not counted separately.

Common combinations

Big Four Winds is a limit hand and does not stack with other faan-based scoring on most tables — the limit cap is paid regardless of additional patterns. However, the structural composition often technically includes:

• All Triplets (對對胡) — Big Four Winds is automatically also All Triplets, since all four melds are pungs.
• Self-Pick (自摸) — applies to payment direction (all three losers pay full) but doesn’t increase the cap.
• Concealed Hand (門前清) — same as above; a fully concealed Big Four Winds is structurally rare given the difficulty of self-drawing 12 wind tiles.

Big Four Winds upgrades Small Four Winds (小四喜, 6 faan) — the two are mutually exclusive. A hand with three wind pungs plus a wind pair scores Small Four Winds; converting that pair into a fourth wind pung promotes it to Big Four Winds.

Strategic note

Big Four Winds is one of the most ambitious target hands in HK Mahjong because it requires the player to commit to honor pungs across all four winds simultaneously — leaving no flexibility for suit purity, sequences, or alternative strategies. Most successful Big Four Winds attempts come from hands that already scored Small Four Winds in development and got lucky on the fourth wind tile late in the round.