Hidden Chuuren Poutou Trick
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Hidden Chuuren Poutou Trick | ||||||||
Trick information
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The Hidden Chuuren Poutou Trick is a Trick in the Ten manga series. It is played by Takashi Ten against Hiroyuki Igawa and Sawada in chapters 9-10, as the final Trick in the Mahjong Match for the Ramen Shop.
Context
As the game enters the 5th and final hanchan, Ten and Hiroyuki have each won twice, meaning that this game will decide the winner. Having fallen for Ten's Tenhou Chuuren Poutou Trick before, Hiroyuki is wary that he might try it again at the end of this match. To prevent that, he puts two measures in place:
- He asks Sawada to put his men watching over the breakers in the electrical room, to prevent Ten from having an accomplice kill the lights.
- He proposes to Sawada that, when shuffling the tiles, they purposely put some of the 1 and 9 tiles into their own walls. Since Ten needs three of each of these, all in the same suit, for a chuuren poutou, this way they can prevent him from forming the hand and hiding it within his wall. Hiroyuki believes that, because of Ten's pride in his signature move, he will refuse to win with a different tenhou hand.
Summary
In the South 3 round, Ten calls pon on the 1- and 9-man, forming two open triplets. While Hiroyuki concludes that this is to make it seem like he is going for a terminal-based hand while actually aiming for a toitoi (all triplets) with middle tiles, the bluff is actually a disguise for Ten's real objective: get three of the 1-man and 9-man close to him, so he can get to them before Hiroyuki and Sawada when building the walls for the next round.
Then, knowing that Sawada would have placed men guarding the electrical room, Ten has his accomplice instead sneak into the empty room next door, break the wall and cut the wiring directly in order to kill the lights. After giving Ten enough time to make his move, the accomplice reconnects the wires to bring the lights back and escapes before Sawada's men figure out what's going on.
While the lights are off, Ten pulls from inside his jacket a wire frame containing a chuuren poutou hand that he had prepared beforehand, dropping the tiles in front of him and then replacing them in the frame with his existing hand, which he hides back inside his jacket. After the lights come back on and Sawada tries to object and ask for a re-deal, Ten asks him to say explicitly whether he is accusing Ten of cheating without proof. This serves to make Sawada and Hiroyuki doubt whether Ten has actually made the switch or is just bluffing to get the upper hand.
Before this, Ten had been purposely eating rice cakes in order to get flour on his hands. Hiroyuki, oblivious to the hidden wire frame and still believing that Ten would have switched his hand with the wall, notices that the wall in front of Ten has no flour on it, leading him to conclude that Ten could not have made the switch. Confident that Ten is bluffing, he tells Sawada to let Ten open his hand. With this, Ten reveals his tenhou chuuren poutou and wins the game.
