Chinese casino style

Assessment

Confidence

catalogued listed in a variant catalogue with tile counts and hand sizes, but no rules text verified

Evidence

partial sources agree on some points but disagree or say nothing on others

Cross-comparison

What each source was read to say, set side by side. The numbers are the sources above.

• [1] fewer than 20 special hands; no chows; discards briefly shown then placed face down in orderly rows; drawn hands result in a goulash. Reported by Ian Stanley on the ReachMahjong forum, June 2009
• [5] PROVENANCE: the entry did not exist in the 28 August 2008 capture of the catalogue, where the variant list ends at Fujian Style. It was added between that capture and the end of 2009, consistent with a report made in June 2009
• [6] PROVENANCE: the 28 December 2009 capture carries the entry word for word as the page serves it today. In seventeen years nothing was added, corrected or withdrawn, so the node rests on exactly what one person wrote once
• [7] THE REPORT CANNOT BE READ. reachmahjong.com now returns a DreamHost 'Site not found' placeholder, and the Internet Archive's captures of the forum's Other Rules board — where a non-Japanese ruleset would have been discussed — answer 'You do not have the required permissions to read topics within this forum'. The board's shell is archived and none of its posts are. No copy of the June 2009 post was found anywhere else
• [2] CASINO MAHJONG WITH THE FORCE OF LAW. Article 3: the wall is four double rows of 17 stacks, and sixteen games make a session, the banker holding the bank while he keeps winning. Article 5: a chow may be claimed only by the player to the discarder's right, and a pung or kong from any other player beats it; in the simplified form neither chow nor pung may be claimed at all and a discard can only be taken to win. Article 6 lists the fan, all triplets (toi-toi) among the 1-fan hands and thirteen orphans, full flush and the big three dragons at doubled fan. Article 8 sets the commission by stake band, from $10 on a $25/$50 stake to $4,000 on a $10,000/$20,000 one. Article 10 makes a player who feeds a big hand carry the other two losers' payments as well as his own
• [3] the 1989 regulation, superseded in 1991. One form only: the simplified 112-tile game does not appear in it. Its article 7 was amended within the year by Portaria 161/89/M
• [8] THE CHAIN, from the official register: Portaria 133/88/M of 22 August 1988 approved the provisional mahjong regulation; 52/89/M replaced it with the definitive one; 135/91/M replaced that in turn. The register carries no text link for the 1988 provisional regulation, so it is on record without being readable. Alongside them run the portarias for a different game, Mahjong — Pai Kao: 100/89/M provisional, 65/90/M definitive, 125/91/M amending
• [9] the regulator's current list of casino games names Mahjong against Portaria 135/91/M, Mahjong Baccarat against 15/96/M and Mahjong Paikao against 100/89/M. The 1991 rules are live regulation, not a historical curiosity
• [10] DISAMBIGUATION: Mah Jong Pai Gow, in older Macau casinos, is played with 20 dot tiles two at a time against a rotating player-banker, the dealer taking 5 per cent of winning wagers. It is a pai gow game dealt from mahjong tiles, not mahjong, and its rules were obtained in Portuguese — that is, from the portarias above
• [4] a British casino group's published account of the mahjong it spreads at three of its venues. Pong, kong AND chow are all named as melds, and the page states plainly that house rules vary by venue
• [11] mahjong is run at fourteen named British casinos, and the group says the rules each four play by may differ. Casino mahjong is a live commercial offering with no single ruleset behind the name

Reading it

The sources agree that casino mahjong is whatever the casino's rules say. It doesn't descend from any one game. Every one of them describes money play whose rules are set by the venue or its regulator, and in which the house takes a cut of each won hand: Macau's regulation fixes the commission by stake band, the banked tile game beside it takes 5 per cent, and the British casinos that run mahjong say outright that the rules vary from table to table. Where they divide, they divide because they are describing different houses, which is not a disagreement: Macau's law gives 136 tiles, no flowers, chows allowed but claimable only by the player to the discarder's right, and the winner alone paid; the British pages describe a 144-tile game with chows; and this node describes a 144-tile table with no chows where everyone scores. All three can be true at once, and the first two are firmly sourced. What stays unsupported is this node's own table. It rests on one report from June 2009 that can no longer be read by anyone: reachmahjong.com serves a hosting placeholder and the archive's captures of the board answer with a permissions wall. Nothing places it either — the entry never says which country the casino was in, so 'Chinese' comes only from the chart's label, and no published casino ruleset found here matches its no-chow, everyone-scores shape. As with Malaysian 3-player, the node names one of several documented forms and the chart carries it as though it were the whole category. The Macau law does settle a neighbour outright: its simplified form is Macau simplificado, tile for tile as catalogued.