Poker is a family of games that exhibit imperfect information, where players do not have full knowledge of past events. Whereas many perfect-information games have been solved (e.g., Connect Four and checkers), no nontrivial imperfect-information game played competitively by humans has previously been solved.

Secondly, the broad set of hidden information of the tiles makes Mahjong a much more difficult imperfect-information game than previously studied ones, such as Texas hold'em poker. Thirdly, the playing rule of Mahjong is much more complicated because of the various actions involved.