Zung Jung was invented by Alan Kwan in 1997, and has since become big enough to be the style of choice for the World Series of Mahjong! They've hosted four Zung Jung tournaments (though under the name 'World Series of Mahjong' instead of 'Zung Jung', presumably for copyright reasons), in 2007, 2008, 2010, and 2013, and are going to be hosting another one this year in 2015! What's most notable about these tournaments are the high amounts of prize money you can earn! Though it costs approximately
Zung Jung is apparently a Confucian doctrine that means 'the middle way', and Alan Kwan chose the name for his style of mahjong because it was designed to be a compromise between the mahjong styles with countless complicated yaku based on aesthetics (such as Mahjong Competition Rules or Hong Kong New Style), and the mahjong styles focused on simplicity and simply making the fastest reasonable win you can (such as Chinese Classical and Hong Kong Old Style). So let's see how it tries to accomplish this.
First of all, let's note that there is one major difference between Alan Kwan's Zung Jung, and World Series of Mahjong style rules (and this may be the only real difference between the two). Basic Zung Jung always allows chicken wins. As long as you have any four melds and a pair, you're permitted to declare a win worth one point on the virtue of winning before anyone else (this is because Zung Jung was designed to be easy for beginners to pick up and learn immediately; because Alan Kwan intentionally encourages players to create multiple open melds in his game, contrary to almost every other mahjong style where opening your hand is a bad strategy in general; and because he notes that players likely won't attempt chicken wins very often, since a single valuable hand can overturn multiple chicken wins). The World Series of Mahjong rules insist that you must have at least one yaku to declare a win (because they, probably correctly, realized that if one player gets ahead of the others, she can keep making fast, worthless hands before anyone else so that they can never catch up to her, which would positively ruin the tournament).
Unfortunately, for all of Zung Jung's successes, it has some significant flaws. Most notably, since this was a game designed for beginners to play and win, the vast majority of the game is dependent on luck: If a single player at the table is going for a chicken win, it becomes almost impossible to score any reasonable amount of points unless you aren't dealt an incredible opening hand.
But let's look at some of the design choices that went into the game to understand the successes in Alan Kwan's philosophy.
- There are no dealer keeps, regardless of who wins or if the hand ends in a draw. Games are always 16 hands long (Though World Series of Mahjong games are 8 hands long instead, to better suit the tournament format).
- There is no such thing as a 'round wind'. Only your seat wind is relevant for scoring.
- A dead wall of 14 tiles is used.
- No bonus tiles are used.
- Discarded tiles are placed in ordered rows of six in front of each player, identically to Japanese Riichi mahjong's ponds. Despite there being no furiten rule, you are still required to rotate your claimed tiles in a manner identical to that of Japanese Riichi mahjong.
- If you make a concealed gong, you reveal the middle two tiles so that the other players know which tile was used in the gong.
- If you self-pick your win, everyone pays you the value of your hand.
- If you win off of a player's discard and your hand was worth 25 points or fewer, everyone pays you the value of your hand.
- If you win off of a discarded tile with a hand worth more than 25 points, multiply the value of your hand by three. The two other players who did not discard your winning tile pay you 25 points, and the player who did discard your winning tile pays you the remainder of this amount.
- If Player A discards any of your winning tiles and you choose not to win off of it, and then Player B discards any of your winning tiles in the same turn (without you getting a chance to draw in between) and you declare a win, it is treated as a win off of Player A instead (but with the tile that Player B discarded, in case that makes your hand more or less valuable).
- This also means if you discard a tile that you could use to win, and then win off of another player's discard in the same turn, it is treated as a win by self-pick with that tile.
- If your hand uses two or more yaku to score over 320 points, it is treated as a hand worth 320 points (essentially, this is a counted limit hand in Zung Jung).
- Alternatively, some yaku are inherently worth more than 320 points. If you can score more than 320 points with a single yaku, your hand scores whatever its most valuable yaku is worth. For example, if your hand was All Honors (worth 320 points) and Big Four Winds (worth 400 points), its total value would be 400 points.
- Each category of scoring contains one or more series, and each series of scoring contains one or more yaku. You cannot score multiple yaku in the same series.
- For example, under the category 'pungs and gongs', one series is explicitly defined as 'gongs'. If your hand has three gongs in it, it does not score the yaku 'One Gong' and 'Two Gongs' and 'Three Gongs': It only scores the most valuable yaku (which is Three Gongs).
- A Seven Pairs hand does not need to be made of seven distinct pairs. As long as you have not declared a concealed gong, you may treat four identical tiles as two separate pairs.
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