Why Zung Jung?

There are at least 50 regional variants or styles of mahjong. Most of these only differ in their scoring systems. Each one of them plays very differently from the others. For any group of players, one rule set must be chosen, so everyone learns and plays the same game. Ideally, it would be a style that embodies fairness, is easy enough to learn in one session, yet have enough opportunities for strategy that it can be played competitively.

If one looks back at the history of mahjong, Chinese Classical is the style imported into the United States in the 1920's with the first mahjong sets. In Chinese Classical, chows or sequences count for zero points. One only gets points for pungs and kong ("kong" is Chinese, and its plural is also "kong"), and a small number of points for your waiting tile, and a bonus for going out. Each player also got this score double a certain number of times based on the patterns in your hand. The person who goes out gets paid by everyone, then the other players also settle between themselves. East gets paid double or pays double, and stays East as long as he wins a hand. This is too Byzantine for competitions where winning is lately worth more in prestige than a few (or many) coins in your pocket.

This makes for an exciting game when you are gambling for coins, but it is overly complex. Beginners take quite a while to pick up scoring. In addition, the game was simplified for the American audience from the game as played in China. This meant that at the same time that beginners were having difficulty learning the rules, the advanced players were tiring of those same rules. Players were soon making their own patterns, and people in different cities couldn't play each other. This path continued in the U.S. to give us American style "mah-jongg" governed by the National Mah-Jongg League. It is a very different game. Today, Chinese Classical isn't one exact set of scoring patterns. Every book and every playing group can have their own pattern list. Even with the complex scoring, Chinese Classical has its fans.

Perhaps around the same time as Chinese Classical, or perhaps a good bit later (history isn't very clear regarding outlawed Chinese gambling games), the style we now call Hong Kong Old Style developed. This style does away with points and gives patterns fan. Only the one who goes out gets paid. The fan are then converted to payouts using an exponential formula. There is also often a hefty minimum score.

There are two new problems with this style. First, the hefty minimum score combined with the limited number of scoring patterns frequently makes game play a matter of choosing one of a very few options and going for bust, drastically reducing the number of smart choices a player can make. Second, the exponential formula can now reward small patterns with large scores: A pattern that is easy to obtain and worth one fan by itself suddenly doubles your large score when added to other patterns. Combining multiple small patterns can make for a big payout, even though the total combination is easier to make than other patterns that each scores more fan. This unbalances the risk versus reward by making easy patterns more worthwhile than hard patterns.

Hong Kong Old Style also varies from book to book.

The oldest of the modern styles is from Japan, and is called Riichi, or Reach mahjong. It is wildly popular in Japan, to the point of having two professional leagues, each with multiple divisions with their own small changes in the rules. There are somewhere around 60,000 mahjong parlors across the country where people play, and expensive automated tables to make sure hands progress quickly and the house gets their fee.

Riichi also has issues which make it seem unfair to the modern player. It keeps the points (called fu) and doubles from Chinese Classical, an outdated scoring system. Further, the system is much more complex. To illustrate: To get your payout, add up your fu, round up to the nearest 10, add 20 for going out, double as needed for your scoring patterns plus two doubles for going out, but then once the number of doubles reaches 5, there are 5 limits where you get a fixed number of points (5, 7, 8, 11, and 13). Double the payment to/from East. Oh, and at the end of the game, there's an additional bonus or penalty based on how you placed at the end of the game. This adds nothing to the fun of the game and is laughably complex. The exponential scoring is also unbalanced here, just like in Hong Kong Old Style.

East retaining the deal also can be seen as unfair because it is much more valuable for East to go out on any hand at all just because he retains the double payments. While everyone gets a chance to be East (actually, that usually happens twice), it makes an imbalance in every single hand.

Yet another problem with riichi is that the patterns that are scored are grossly out of line with their difficulty. This means that some of them should never be attempted. Another issue is that some easy patterns are not scaled: You can get one double for two identical sequences, but if you get a third (an unusual feat), you get no more points. If you get a fourth, you get two doubles, but according to my math, this is the single rarest pattern to get in mahjong.

Riichi is also played slightly differently from place to place within Japan, but seasoned players adapt quickly to these minor differences. It also has some large differences in game play, but those are not problems in my mind.

Alan Kwan was a riichi player, noted all the difficulties with the style, and developed Zung Jung. He went back to Chinese Classical and studied it. To fix the issue of a complex scoring system, he did away with fu and adopted the riichi patterns with some changes. To remove the exponential scoring problem, he converted each pattern's doubles to a number of points which simply add to each other: You can score each pattern that your hand qualifies for exactly once, with one exception. To fix the East imbalance, the deal moves with every hand. Since Mr. Kwan is a statistician, the scores for each pattern more accurately reflect the difficulty in attaining them.

Shortly after Zung Jung was started, the Chinese government decided to endorse mahjong as a mind sport. They wanted to have a national championship, but while the game was outlawed for gambling, it went underground. Naturally, the game fractured to the point where people playing in different regions had different rules.

MCR (Mahjong Competition Rules, or Chinese Official) uses a simple additive scoring system. It also moves the deal with each hand. Unfortunately, the ways the patterns can combine is not always clear. There have been conferences to iron out the details, but the results are not published to the public. A more serious problem is that the scores assigned to patterns are sometimes in disagreement with the chances of making the hand, so the risk/reward imbalance is back (but somewhat mitigated). Another issue is the barrier to new players is the number of scoring patterns: 81. This takes quite a while to learn. Further, in competition, a player is expected to know the number assigned to each scoring pattern in addition to its score.

There is also a pretty hefty minimum score, so it encourages hands that score more. A player who throws a winning tile pays more than the other two, but no more than if the winner had drawn the tile himself. A large self-draw bonus (50% to over 250% for large hands) makes it worthwhile to make big hands and try very hard to win from the wall.

Zung Jung aims to be a modernization of Chinese Classical style, and one of its goals is to be a well balanced game. There is no minimum score, but you can't hope to win a game if you go out with no points. On the other hand, if you attempt a hand with a very high score, someone else is likely to go out before you can complete that hand. It also strikes a balance with having enough ways to score to retain interest, but not so many to be scary. To compare a couple numbers, Zung Jung has 45 ways to score points; Chinese Classical also has around 40 (every source is a little different); Riichi has nearly 40 scoring patterns, a handful of those score differently whether your hand is concealed, plus 16 ways to get "mini-points"; and as I mentioned MCR has 81 scoring patterns.

I choose to teach and play Zung Jung for several reasons. First, it has a nice number of scoring patterns (unlike MCR). Second, the points for those patterns align more closely with the odds of getting those points (unlike any other style). Third, there is one source for the rules (unlike Riichi and Chinese Classical). Lastly, it is designed and maintained by one person who is a mahjong scholar and knows statistics, not a committee or generations of people tweaking rules as they like. Of course, this is just my opinion, but I hope I'm not alone.

Chris