Cheating at Mah Jong

I played Mah Jong for money (12 cents a hand...) with some of my adult students the other day. One guy who wasn't playing, "Crespo", whose english is the best in the class, was watching everone's hands. In the middle of one hand he started giving me some strange advice. Turns out that he was trying to help me with the info he'd seen in others hands, and relying on his fast english to hope the others didn't understand. I jokingly said not to tell me anymore, and played the rest of the hand not using my guilty knowledge. Later when the stakes were 1$ a hand, he did it again.

I didn't know whether to play it light or heavy. Sentences starting "If you did that in the US..." don't fly here. People are like, "so what?" I tried to conjure up images of tables turned over, guns being drawn, or being jumped in an alley... but he didn't get it.

He didn't mind being called a cheater apparently.

Mah Jong's not that hard. But it has tons of rules.

You have a bunch of cards and try to get 3 of a kind or 3 in a row, all of the same suit. You end up with 2 cards, which must be a pair, either 2, 5, or 8. You can pick the previous player's discard if you can play it right away, and you can pick up anyone's discard if it gets you a 3 of a kind.

Strategy consists mostly of deciding which card to throw away when you have a bunch of possible overlapping runs, and planning how to end up with the right kind of pair.

Discards are face up on the table, so that effects what to throw away. I suppose you could watch people's discards and try to figure out what they're going for, but with 13 cards each and fast play it's pretty hard.

At the end you pay up, and that's weird too- you have to pay them if you give them their winning card. If they draw the winner themself, everyone has to pay.

Luck plays a major part - I came out 12 cents ahead after 3 hours...

All in all I like it. It's pretty fast moving, there is enough strategy to keep it interesting, possibilities for expansion (card counting) are limitless, and the cards themselves are these cool plastic rectangular prisms.

In comparison, here are the rules of hearts

Hearts
Basic rules
4players x 13 cards
play proceeds in tricks
1st card played is trump
hearts 1 pt, Q of spades 13 pts, pts bad

Special rules
2 of clubs leads
no points on the first trick
no leading hearts until points have been played
get all 26 points scoring is reversed

That's it!