Why the compass looks backwards
Look at a mahjong table from above and the seats read East, South, West, North going counter-clockwise — so South sits to East's right and North to East's left. On a map that looks wrong, but the order follows the direction of play, not geography. The order of the wind tiles, east-south-west-north, is simply the order in which the seats take their turns.
The East player is the dealer. East starts each hand with fourteen tiles, discards first, and in most styles both wins and loses more than the others. When the dealer loses a hand, the deal passes to the next seat, and everyone's seat wind shifts along with it.
Seat wind and round wind
Each player has a seat wind matching their position. The game also has a prevailing (or round) wind, which starts as East and moves on after all four players have dealt. A full traditional game has four rounds — East, South, West and North — although Japanese games usually stop after East and South, and many casual tables play a single round.
These two winds matter for scoring. In Chinese and Japanese styles a triplet of your own seat wind or of the round wind earns extra value, and a triplet that is both — East when you are East in the East round — counts twice. American Mah Jongg ignores this system; its winds are simply tiles used in card hands.
Choosing seats and the first dealer
Traditional tables decide seats with a small ritual: the four wind tiles are shuffled face down, each player draws one, and the person who draws East chooses a seat; the others sit according to their tiles. Dice are then rolled to decide who deals first, and further dice decide where the wall is broken.
Many clubs and online games skip the ceremony and assign seats randomly. In American play, East is often simply whoever offers to go first. However it is done, the point is fairness: no one should be able to pick the "lucky" chair.
Keeping the deal
In Chinese, Hong Kong and Japanese styles the dealer usually keeps the deal after winning, and often after a drawn hand in which they were ready. A strong dealer can stay in the East seat for several hands in a row, adding a counter each time to show the repeats. In Japanese mahjong these repeat counters (honba) add a small bonus to the next win.
Because the dealer's wins and losses are amplified, many tactics revolve around the dealer seat: pushing hard to keep it, or playing defensively to end someone else's run. It is one of the first strategic ideas that separates players who know the rules from players who understand the game.
