What the Charleston is actually doing

There is a moment in every American mahjong night, somewhere around the second pass, when the table goes quiet. People stop chatting. They look at their tiles, then at the three they are about to give away. The Charleston has begun in earnest.

It is easy to treat the Charleston as throat-clearing. It is anything but. The Charleston is the first and most important act of strategy in the American game -- the only phase of the night where every player is making a decision about what other players will receive.

The first right pass is the one most often wasted. Players reflexively offload winds and dragons they don't yet know they need. Resist this. Pass the tiles you know you cannot use, but only after a glance at the card.

The across pass is where information leaks both ways. What you give tells the opposite player what you are not building. What you receive tells you what they did not want. Both of those are real signals if you bother to read them.

The optional courtesy pass at the end is a small, civilized thing -- a way to say, after all of that, we're still playing the same game.

If your table has been treating the Charleston as a warm-up, change that next Tuesday. The hands that get won early in the year are won here.