Making decisions on melding doesn’t just start when you make your initial meld. The decisions start to appear as soon as you see your rack. This is when you can tell almost immediately how your play should be and what you need to do to win the hand.
If you start out with a relatively strong rack, such as eight or more melded tiles and the rest in combinations, you have a good chance of going out early in the hand. In this case, it may be to your advantage when it comes to points, if no one melded before you completed your rack. Part of the play of the game is to influence the other players to do exactly what you want them to do.
With such a hand you would not want to meld on the table. Once a pattern of play has been established with your opponents, there is a strong tendency to remain in that particular pattern. If you have not been melding, then your opponents will soon adopt the same strategy. An early meld will indicate that the player is in a strong position to go out soon, and the other players follow by melding to reduce their point count. This is something that you do not want because you want as many points as possible, so you want to hold back and try to complete the rack entirely before going down. This will encourage everyone else to hold back, and your score will be much higher.
The opposite end of this is the poor rack on the deal. In this case, you may need considerable time to help develop your rack and get the melds that you need. If no one melds, then you only have the discards and draws to work with. Against one opponent you will have 39 potential picks from the drawing pile plus whatever additional tiles become available through the discard piles. Remember that every time you pick a discard you give up once chance at the drawing pile.
At the same time, every time your opponent picks up one of your discards they are giving up a chance at the drawing pile. With this many picks, unless your opponent develops his rack very fast, you will have enough time to develop yours. Against two or three opponents, the number of picks available goes down dramatically. The only way to increase your chances at more tiles is to encourage open melding. Therefore, this is a situation that you want to make your initial meld as early as possible.
This doesn’t mean melding as many tiles on the table as you can. You should only meld enough to make your initial meld value of 25 points, or as close as possible using the minimum number of tiles. What you are really trying to do is to encourage other players to make open melds so that you can use their tiles for you to go out.икони