American Mahjong Scoring: Who Pays What, and Why

The card sets the value

Each line on the card carries a point value, printed alongside it, and that value is the base for every payment. A line is worth what the current card prints for it, and the card changes every April.

You are not scoring your tiles the way you would in Chinese mahjong, where you count sets and multipliers. In the American game you are being paid for the difficulty of the specific line you completed, which the League has already priced for you.

Who pays the winner

When you win, all three opponents pay you. Under League rules, if you drew the winning tile yourself, everyone pays double the hand's value. If you won by calling someone's discard, the player who threw that tile pays double and the other two pay the base value.

That doubling rule is why a careful player watches the table late in a hand. Throwing the winning tile costs you twice what you would pay if another player threw it.

The jokerless double

League rules double every payment again when the winning hand has no jokers in it, except a hand from the Singles and Pairs section, which can never hold one. The doubles stack. A jokerless hand won off a discard costs the discarder four times its value and the other two double, and a jokerless self-pick costs all three opponents four times its value.

The winner has to announce the hand as jokerless when declaring, or the double does not apply. Any bonus beyond these is a table's own addition, so settle it before the first hand, not during the one where someone earns one.

Wall games and dead hands

If the wall runs out with nobody declaring mahjong, that is a wall game and no money changes hands. Under League rules the deal then passes to the right, as it does after every hand.

A dead hand is one that can no longer legally win, for example because a player exposed a set that does not match any card line, or exposed in a way the card forbids. A dead hand stops picking and discarding for the rest of the hand, and still pays the winner.

Scoring at a tournament

Tournaments keep score in points, and nobody pays anybody. Under the standardised rules used for Mah Jongg Master Points events, each hand's value comes from the current card. Picking your own winning tile adds ten points, and a hand with no jokers adds twenty, with no such bonus on the Singles and Pairs group. Neither bonus doubles anything.

The player who throws the winning tile loses points from their own score. It is ten points when the winner had no exposures or one, twenty when the winner had two, and twenty five when the winner had three. There is a separate twenty five point penalty for misnaming a discard that then gives an opponent mahjong.

A wall game adds ten points to the score of every player whose hand is still live, and a player whose hand is dead loses ten instead. A game that is not finished when time is called scores zero for everyone at the table.

Playing for money, or not

A table can play for small change or for nothing at all and score on paper. The stakes exist to make the decisions matter, not to move wealth around.

If you are joining an established group, ask what they play for before your first night and bring the right change.