All posts in American Mahjong Charleston & Passing Strategy

Before a single tile gets discarded, every American Mahjong hand starts with the Charleston — a structured round of tile passing that doesn’t exist in most other Mahjong traditions. It’s one of the things that makes American Mahjong distinctly American, dating back to the 1930s,…

Knowing the mechanics of the Charleston — three tiles, fixed rotation, mandatory first round — only gets you halfway there. What actually separates a strong Charleston from a weak one is what you choose to pass and what you choose to hold onto, six times…

Of everything in the Charleston, the blind pass and courtesy pass cause the most confusion for new players — partly because they’re genuinely a little more complex than the standard three-tile passes, and partly because a lot of what gets said about them at the…