Inside the I Love Mahj Exercise Room: The Ten-Minute Practice Routine I Give My Students
Five drills, ten minutes a day, and a real way to get better between games.
You finish a game night knowing you made a few shaky calls, and you tell yourself the same thing every time: I just need to play more. Then a week goes by, you sit down again, and the next game feels exactly like the last one. If that loop sounds familiar, this post is for you.
Why "just play more" doesn't work
If you want to get better at mahjong, you do have to play. But a live game is five things happening at once. You're reading exposures, running the Charleston, tracking discards, managing jokers, and deciding which hand you're even playing. If one of those is shaky, the whole game feels shaky, and you can't tell which piece to work on.
Isolated practice fixes that. You pull one skill out, drill it until it's automatic, then put it back into your game. It's the difference between feeling stuck and watching yourself get faster, week over week.
The best place I've found to do that is the Exercise Room on I Love Mahj, a website where you can play American mahjong online and drill specific skills on purpose. It's what I use myself and what I hand every student who asks me how to practice between games.
What is the I Love Mahj Exercise Room?
It's five drills, and each one trains a different muscle:
Make a Hand. The site deals you a rack and you build a hand from the card. It's the fastest way I know to burn the 2026 patterns into your brain, because you're not reading the hand, you're assembling it.
Charleston Practice. A full Charleston, run against the app, so you can watch yourself choose passes without four faces staring at you. This is where most players improve the fastest.
What hand is that? The site shows you an exposure and asks which hand that player is going for. Reading exposures on sight is the skill that separates good players from great ones at a live table.
Mahjle. Wordle, but for mahjong hands. You get a partial hand and figure out which line it belongs to. A perfect five-minute daily warmup.
Heavenly Hands. The drill for the rare stuff, the hands you might go a full year without seeing in a live game. You meet them here on purpose, so when one shows up at your table you don't freeze.
How to run the ten-minute rotation
You don't need to do all five drills every day. That's the whole point. Ten minutes, one or two drills, on rotation. Build hands one morning, read exposures the next, run a Charleston the morning after. By the time you sit down at a real table, every piece of your game has been warmed up on its own.
If you only do one thing this week, open Make a Hand and play it for ten minutes with the 2026 card in front of you. That's the fastest way to start trusting your hand choices. And save Heavenly Hands for last in your rotation. It's the advanced shelf, and it's much more fun once the other drills feel steady.
And if you want this whole routine on paper, I wrote a free eight-page playbook that walks through every drill in detail, including how to run each one and my in-class challenges. Grab the Exercise Room Playbook here.
The trick that got me out of my one-section rut
Here's the habit I pair with my own drilling. Print your card, and every time you win a hand in a live game, put a small dot next to it. Then, when you sit down to practice, make yourself pick from the hands that don't have dots yet.
I do this with my own card. It turned "I only play Consecutive Run" into "I can play any section" in about six weeks. The dots don't lie. They show you exactly where your comfort zone ends, and the Exercise Room is where you push past it with nothing on the line.
How to try I Love Mahj free
Everything in this post lives on I Love Mahj. The site normally comes with a two-week free trial, but my link gets you three weeks free, with no credit card needed upfront. After that it's $6 a month or $60 a year, and you can cancel anytime. Full transparency: that's my partner link, so joining through it supports what I do here at no extra cost to you. I share it because this is genuinely the tool I practice on.
Start your three free weeks on I Love Mahj here.
And once you're in, come find my I Love Mahj Group. I run weekly live plays there, with me calling the round as we go. Drills get the patterns into your head. Live plays put them to work. I'd love to have you at the table.
Lara