By convention all players should participate in shuffling using both hands moving the pieces around the table rigorously and loudly for a lengthy period. Wikidot.com Privacy Policy.

Before we get into how to play Mahjong, you’ll need to be familiar with the game pieces. Hong Kong Mahjong is essentially a payment system of doubling and redoubling where winning from the wall adds great value to the final payment and where the dealer is highly rewarded or penalised if they win or lose. For these reasons Hong Kong mahjong is a suitable variation for the introduction of game rules and play and is the focus of this article. Regular players usually place their stacks in a slightly diagonal position (about 20 to 30 degrees anti-clockwise); the right end of their stack is pushed slightly further in to the centre of the table to meet almost the middle of the stack of the player on the right. There are a lot of websites where the COMPLETE rules of Chinese mah-jongg are described. If a player has 3 faan then his hand is worth one base point.
Sets often include counters (to keep score), dice (to decide how to deal), and a marker to show who the dealer is and which round is being played. A winner receives the scoring limit from each player without any doubling. Old Hong Kong Mahjong is played with a standard set of 144 Mahjong tiles (though cards may be used). Japanese mahjong, especially in a gambling environment, may optionally use four yakitori markers to indicate which players have not won a hand yet and has to pay a penalty. Wind position is significant in that it affects the scoring of the game. Tiles may get flipped up during this process and players should flip them facing down as soon as possible to avoid identifying the location of the revealed tiles. These tiles have no numerical sequence like the simples (for example the bamboo pieces number 1 to 9). In Hong Kong Mahjong the most common point set is three but can be higher or lower depending on house rules. When a hand is one tile short of winning (for example: Some variations of Mahjong, most notably Japanese and Korean ones, allow a player to declare In some variations, a situation in which all four players declare a If only the dead wall remains (or if no dead wall exists and the wall is depleted) and no one has won, the hand is drawn (流局 In Japanese Mahjong, rules allow abortive draws to be declared while tiles are still available. Another variation is that the Joker tile may Rules governing discarding Joker tiles also exist; some variations permit the Joker tile to take on the identity of any tile, and others only permit the Joker tile to take on the identity of the previously discarded tile (or the absence of a tile, if it is the first discard). If this does not complete a legal hand, the dealer then discards a piece (throwing it into the middle of the wall with no particular order in mind). In theory the table should avoid cheating (by stacking the deck and or using loaded dice). The losers pay the winning player points based on several criteria and depending on whether the game is for fun or for money. There is the Chinese rules version, British rules version and American rules version, to name just a few. Some examples of scoring include: The winning hand is made of four Most players play with a table minimum, meaning a winning hand must score a minimum number of points (which can be seen in the scoring section). Again, he/she counts off starting with him/herself.If the number is odd, for example, the indicated player draws the face down wind tile closest to the odd-numbered tile (in this case South). A Mahjong set with Winds in play will usually include a separate prevailing wind marker (typically a die marked with the Wind characters in a holder).
Beginner's usually practice the game process without keeping score until they have mastered the concept of the game.