>>532030214
I think you are completely off base on the skip. You can just compare the acceptance.
If you skip: you're tenpai on 6789p and 1z draws.
6/9p draws result on a wait on 7p (though 6p can improve easily)
8p is dead if you skip pon, so you'd be stuck on a east wait.
1z is a 1 tile wait on 8p intially, same as other, with similar improvements.
So your practical acceptance if you skip pon is 5 tiles - 3x 7p (tsumo), and 2x east (tanki). This is horrible 1-shanten even for sanma standards.
Comparatively, if you pon:
2p/5p have lots of ryanmen improvements, and result on a 4 tile tenpai directly.
6p is a sanmenchan
7p/9p are shanpons
8p is tsumo/ron.
1z is tanki (kabe, plus can improve)
Quickly doing math: We're comparing 5 tile 1-shanten to 14 tile 1-shanten. They're not even in the same ballpark in terms of speed.
Adding to this, with all these middle souzu cuts into a 8p cut, you can safely assume atleast 1 copy of 7p (likely 2) in Jyanshi 2 hand.
With such a big difference, I cannot understand a skip here.