This is the true mahjong, real life mahjong for 4 players. You see a part of our club MCR (Mahjong Competition Rules) tournament: one session at one table. There were 4 tables, and we played 4 sessions by the “Round Robin“ seating. You can hear other people in the room playing and talking.
We played on Saturday, February the 10th, 2024, in a cafe in the historical center of Saint-Petersburg, Russia. The first session started at 10:00 AM, and the last session finished at 7:00 PM. We had 2 breaks by 20 minutes and a lunch between 2nd and 3rd sessions for 50 minutes. And we play with “red zone“: since 2020 it is allowed to finish the current deal after session timer stops at 0:00 (“red zone“ starts). Not just terminate the current deal, but play it to the end and record its results, and it is the last deal in this session (some people managed to play only 13 deals in one session). All results (tournament points and game points) were included in the common rating of Russian Mahjong Federation.
It’s very hard to translate everything we said from Russian to English. I considered it unnecessary, the main goal of this video is to show you the decent speed of an MCR game. I didn’t show players’ hands because some players didn’t want to reveal their “secret tactics“. So you can see only winning hands and their points. Remember that in MCR the value of the hand is the player’s personal responsibility, other people cannot count points for the winner (except “chicken hand“, when you can cancel it with some small fan presented), but when a fan was named, it’s allowed to discuss it.
About our table: the mahjong set has #38 tiles (tile height 38 mm, the minimal size for MCR), and all other tables had similar sets. All players are from Russia (except one Chinese player, who sat at another table), and all play MCR for several years. Some players were ready to play the fifth session.
We use paper protocols, it’s just convenient. At this table I ran all recordings, and Alla was doubling them in “Mahjong Scoring MCR“ Android app. Paper protocols allow you to make remarks, to consult fan table quickly (on the other side of each sheet), they are documents, after all.
I also added some nominations for our club tournaments: special hands that earn small prizes for players who collected them. One of them is “Favorable winds“ (2 pungs/kongs of winds and a pair of the third wind, it’s a fan from “Zung Jung“ mahjong, but it is absent in MCR, so you need to collect it within some valid hand, like “all pungs“, or “half-flush“, or “outside hand“), another is “walking mechanism“ (two “double pungs“ on the hand, can be collected within “all pungs“, obviously), there is also “northern peacock“ (a kong of Northern winds and a kong of “1 Bamboos“) and some others, 6 in total; sometimes I replace this or that nomination with another one. All of them can be taken several times within one tournament.
Useful links:
MCR rules at EMA -
MCR Practicum (ready hands problems), the latest version (link to a Google Drive folder) -
On any questions please contact me via e-mail @
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0:00 - preface
1:46 - 1st deal
8:17 - 2nd deal
15:31 - 3rd deal
23:05 - 4th deal
27:45 - 5th deal
35:54 - 6th feal
41:42 - 7th deal
48:40 - 8th deal
56:08 - 9th deal
1:03:30 - 10th deal
1:11:20 - 11th deal
1:20:23 - 12th deal
1:28:18 - 13th deal
1:34:36 - 14th deal
1:41:37 - 15th deal
1:49:18 - 16th deal
1:53:48 - final score and conclusion