Nobody Deals in American Mahjong
East is called the dealer and does not deal. Three of the four teaching sources we checked get this wrong.
On this page
If you have played cards, the word "dealer" carries a job description with it: one person handles everyone's cards and hands them out. In American mahjong the title survives and the job does not.
This matters more than a piece of trivia, because the wrong mental model produces the wrong table. People wait to be handed tiles. Somebody starts distributing them. And the whole thing gets slower and slightly wrong.
What actually happens
Everyone builds their own wall. East breaks theirs. Then every player reaches in and takes their own tiles, four at a time, three times round, and finally the extras — East takes two more, everyone else one.
East ends on fourteen and opens by discarding. Everyone else is on thirteen.
You'll hear East described as DINO — "Dealer In Name Only". The word dealer is correct. The dealing is not.
Dice pick East, not the wind tiles
The second half of the same confusion. Because the set contains four wind tiles, people assume the winds decide who sits where and who starts.
They don't. Everyone rolls two dice once, and the highest total is East, re-rolling ties. At a home game the host usually just takes it. The wind tiles are ordinary tiles that appear in hands, and nothing more.
It exists to stop cheating. If you knew you were about to be East and knew where the wall would break, you could stack desirable tiles — jokers, above all — where you were going to take them from. Rolling dice makes the break point unpredictable, the same job cutting a deck does in cards.
Only East has a name
The other three seats are described by position: to East's right, across, to East's left. The League names only East.
You will meet material that assigns South, West and North to the other seats, mostly from vendors and from teachers who came across from the Chinese game. It isn't a catastrophe — everyone knows what you mean — but the official framing is positional, and the two conventions sit alongside each other rather than one being simply wrong.
How to spot the error elsewhere
Once you know this, you can grade a teaching source in about thirty seconds. We checked eight while building this site, and the phrase "the dealer deals the tiles" — or a diagram showing one person distributing to the other three — appears in three of them, including sources that are otherwise careful.
It's a useful canary. A source that has this wrong has usually imported its mental model from cards or from another mahjong variant rather than reading the American rules.
When you have read it all: the rules workbook, 105 questions with an answer key that cites the rule behind every answer, $19.
Where this comes from
Dice choosing East, each player taking their own tiles, and the 14/13 split are confirmed independently by the American Mah-Jongg Association's rulebook, Tom Sloper's rules FAQ and I Love Mahj. Sloper cites the League's own rulebook for the dice requirement and gives cheating prevention as the reason.
Seat naming is the one part where sources genuinely differ: the League names only East, while some vendor teaching material assigns all four winds. We follow the League and note the disagreement rather than pretending it is settled.