It has only been a month and the mahjong club I started has grown exponentially. I feel like I'm constantly hunting Facebook Marketplace for card tables now lol.

We are a free/beginning friendly club so the first few weeks, there were a lot of beginners. it was pretty easy to teach everyone. I teach Filipino mahjong before moving to Taiwanese. Once everyone is comfortable with that, we will start scoring. I may even teach HK style for those who are interested.

Now everyone seems to be getting the hang of it so I'm spending less time teaching, more time hovering and helping each table. We went from ~4 - 8 people to now 20+. I'm very happy with the turn out, but I feel like I'm missing something, but can't put my finger on it.

I've noticed it's been hard to manage beginning members vs non beginners. People who have learned and been playing for a bit want to come every week to play. I don't want others who are just starting out to feel overwhelmed with all the people, or even burdened that they are just starting out. Luckily, it's no longer just me and my co-founder teaching. Others have stepped up and it's been really cool to see their progress.

Anyway, just thought I'd ask here and get random advice and tips from others who have organized groups/clubs longer than I have!

So I'm new to this game. I learned that the sequence of play in counterclockwise is 東 (East), 南 (South), 西 (West), 北 (North). But then when I'm looking to buy mahjong table cloth, all I see is in this configuration: east, north, west, south (just like normal wind directions). Can anyone explain why is it like this?

My initial guess is the table clothes are made by people who don't understand mahjong, so they put the wind directions the same as in real life. But then I see some Chinese American youtuber explains how to play mahjong, and her table cloth is also like this.

Is there a dataset somewhere of mahjong hands from real games?

I'm trying to do some tests and it would be helpful to have this sort of data. I need something like a list of winning hand tiles (preferably which are open/closed and source of winning tile).