There's nothing I dislike more than the moment in the Charleston when everyone's ready to pass and they're all staring at you, waiting for you to pick your three tiles. You can feel your heartbeat in your ears.
Or maybe that's just me.
I teach this in nearly every strategy session I run, because it's the single thing that took that feeling away for me, and it has nothing to do with being better at mahjong. It's just how I lay out my rack.
Why picking three tiles is so much harder than it should be
Picking the first three sometimes isn’t the problem - it’s what happens immediately after the first pass.
You look at your rack and pick three tiles to pass. Fine. You pass them, three come back, and two of those you want to keep and one you want to pass. So now you're starting over. You've got one tile you're sure about and you need to find two more to go with it, from scratch, while three people wait on you. Then it happens again. And again. Six or seven times in a row.
That's a brand new decision every single pass, which is why it feels frantic. It isn't your speed. It's that you're being asked to solve it from nothing, over and over.
Sort once, then execute
After the deal, I lay my tiles out in three groups. All the tiles I want to keep on the left-hand side. The ones I maybe want to keep in the middle. And the ones I know for sure I want to pass on the right-hand side.
Keep, maybe, pass.
I make that one decision up front, and then I don't have to make it again. When three tiles come back to me, I don't start over. I just funnel them into the groups I already built and pass from the right-hand side.
The other thing it does, which I didn't expect when I started doing it, is that it lets me see all my passable tiles together in one place. So if I don't want to hand somebody a pair of something, I can actually see that, instead of trying to work it out in my head with everybody watching.
And it's fast. That's most of the point. I'm not holding anybody up.
The tiles in these pictures are the Gemma set from Oh My Mahjong and they’re one of my favorite sets for beginners. That one’s an affiliate link, so if you buy a set through it I make a small commission and it costs you nothing extra and you can use LARASMAHJONGEDIT for 10% off.
What goes in each group
A quick word on "section," since I'm about to use it a lot. The card is grouped into sections, 2468 and 13579 and consecutive run and so on, and early in a hand you're trying to work out which section your tiles are leaning toward rather than which exact line you're going to play.
Keep. Tiles that fit whichever section you're leaning toward. Pairs you can build on. Flowers, jokers, and probably soaps or other dragons.
Maybe. Singles that could go either way, and anything that fits your backup section. Say you're torn between consecutive run and 13579, and you've got a stray 2. It's no use at all in 13579, but it could matter in a run, so it sits in the middle while you make up your mind.
Pass. Lone winds you don't need. Tiles from a section you've already ruled out. The ones you can afford to lose.
Sort them that way first, before you commit to a direction, and then let whatever comes back to you shape where you go.
The permission part
There is no wrong pass.
The only thing you're not allowed to pass during the Charleston is a joker. That's it. Every other pass is legal. So let go of the stress of trying to make the perfect pass, and just try to make your best pass.
I know the rules people repeat. Never pass a flower. Never pass a dragon. Never break up a pair. There's real thinking behind all of those, and I follow them most of the time. But they're preferences, not rules, and if you've been handed a genuinely good hand and the alternative is wrecking it, nobody's going to put you in mahjong jail for passing a flower.
It also helps to remember there are 99 tiles left in the wall after the Charleston ends. That's a lot of tiles. We're not trying to win the game during the Charleston. We're just trying to build the best possible hand we can.
What to do when nothing feels passable
This comes up constantly, and it's the whole reason I sort the way I do.
You have to pass, and everything on your rack feels like it's doing something. The answer is your second-best tile. Your worst tile isn't really a pass at all, you were never going to use it and you're just shuffling it along. So it's the one in between.
In practice that often means a tile you have multiples of. If you're going for a hand that needs a pung or a kong of something and you're holding two of them already, pass one. There's a decent chance it comes back around, or you pick it up off a discard, or a joker covers it.
And if you're holding a pair you've realized you don't need, break it up early. Pass one of them the moment you know, so you're never stuck later having to hand two of the same tile to the same person in a single pass.
Try it on your next hand
You don't have to change anything about how you play to try this. Next hand, take a minute after the deal and push your tiles into the three groups before the passing starts, and see whether it comes faster.
It's still the part of the game where everyone stares at you. I just have my answer ready before they do.
Later this week I'm publishing a full Charleston for paid subscribers. One real rack, all seven passes, every tile in and out, and what I was thinking at each one, including the passes I hated making.
And if you just want more racks to look at, I'm on Instagram at @larasmahjongedit.
Lara