Yaku

//ˈjɑː.kuː//

"Yaku" in a Sentence (9 examples)

There are certain combinations of hands called “Yaku,” which, if held by a player, either among his tricks or in his hand, entitle him to certain payments from the other players.

It's a lot of fun for me as I'm just getting to know all the combinations (of three cards each) for yaku, which means the other fellow must subtract 50 from his score.

Yakus determine whether you can make a mahjong.

I'm still learning all the yaku though!

Of course, since the hand is open, it doesn't earn the 1-han yaku for a true Pinfu hand.

The wisteria ribbon is used in two yaku sets. This is allowed because a player may use the same card to score from more than one yaku category.

The particular hanafuda game they're playing here is called Koi-Koi, and Banba just called the name of the game to keep going for another yaku card combination beyond whatever yaku she already formed.

To earn a high score and therefore complete yaku with a high rate, we expect that inputting features regarding these yaku into the networks will improve average scores.

If the player did not keep the winning tile apart from the rest of the hand (if other players cannot see which was the winning tile), the lowest yaku and fu which can be calculated from that hand are applied.

Data sourced from Wiktionary, WordNet, CMU, and other open linguistic databases. Updated March 2026.