Better than pickleball? It's mahjong or bust in this community

Martin Shum had an ulterior motive.

He started a mahjong club at the Grove, a gated Camarillo community for people 55 and older. His goal was to find players who would quench his wife’s thirst for the game and free up his own schedule.

His wife, Helen, liked to play mahjong a few times a week in three, sometimes four-hour marathons. Shum learned to play the Chinese tile game when he was 10 in Hong Kong. He likes it just fine but not quite as much as his wife does.

It worked.

The group started with a dozen members about 18 months ago and now has eight times that number in a still-rising craze that some players compare to pickleball. Club members lay out game mats on Tuesdays and Thursdays in the community’s upscale clubhouse. They build walls of tiles, “shuffle” by knocking everything down in a clatter that sounds like a pool hall and play for most of the afternoon.

They tease, laugh and sometimes cuss — always with a smile, well, almost always.

Shum, who is 75, pinch hits when someone doesn’t show. It’s fun but the retired electrical engineer doesn’t complain when the four-person tables are full. He has plenty of other things to do like playing his electric guitar or tinkering with computer programs including one that helps him organize the mahjong club.

“I go home and I go to my man cave and do my thing,” he said.

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Bring your quarters

Mahjong emerged in China during the Qing dynasty in the 19th century and lives on in different forms, including an American variation that is much different than the Taiwan game played by Shum's club.

Here, the dealer is determined by a roll of the dice. Each player ends up with 16 tiles decorated by symbols and characters that include dragons, flowers and the wind. They add and discard tiles in a quest to gather three consecutive tiles in the same suit in a run called a “chow” or three of a kind in a “pong.”

A combination of five "chows" or "pongs" and one pair equals mahjong.

“It’s like gin rummy on steroids,” said Sharon Nishimori, who is 64, started playing less than two years ago and had a front-row seat as the game's popularity spread across the Grove. "It kept growing. Everyone wanted to play."

Now Nishimori organizes clubhouse games Tuesdays and also plays Thursdays, Fridays and Sunday.

She taught her three kids the game's basics on Thanksgiving. She’s planning a small game party several days before Christmas. “Merry mahjong,” she called it.

The game reminds her of her mother, an avid player who died six years ago of breast cancer. Nishimori ticked off other mahjong attributes like making friends, intricate gameplay and a format that allows people to play with others at the same skill level. Then she held up a small coin purse and smiled.

“We gamble a little bit,” she said in a mock whisper.

They do. Players who get mahjong win 25 cents plus 5 cents a point. A healthy payout for a hand is 65 cents.

'Like pickleball indoors'

Many of the players are retired business owners and engineers. One regular is a retired surgeon. Another worked in marketing for the Los Angeles Times. Some still work, including Nancy Schwartz who sells diamonds and other high-end jewelry at Kirk Jewelers in Westlake Village.

Schwartz, 67, moved to the Grove about a year ago but started learning the game several months earlier. She carries a laminated cheat sheet to keep up with a complicated scoring system that can bring rewards based on who dealt the hand and where each player sits at the table.

Schwartz loves the game. She also saw it as an entryway into a new neighborhood.

“I wanted to get to know people,” she said. “I wanted to be social.”

Regulars encourage their friends at the Grove to join the club. For a tournament just before the Chinese New Year in February, players will dress up in traditional costumes.

“It’s amazing how it’s taken over the development,” said Andrea Goldstein, who is 80 and plays every Thursday. “It’s like pickleball indoors.”

Newcomers are taught the basics at a corner table by instructor Raymond Mark who grew up with Martin Shum in Hong Kong and learned to play as a boy. He tells them that if they can count to nine, they can play within 45 minutes.

Many of the members are teaching family members how to play. Helen Shum, who helped start the club, taught her 10-year-old grandson.

“I wanted to make sure the game gets passed on,” she said.

No 12-step program needed

Alan Stokes is a gamesman. He’s an 11-handicap golfer, an accomplished chess player and plays pickleball. All he knew about mahjong is that it came from China and has been played for centuries. He wasn’t sure what to make of it or if he’d like it.

Now, he can’t stop playing. He obsesses over the cerebral nature of the game and the strategy of building an intricate hand that will score points but can be spoiled by another player intent only on getting mahjong as quickly as possible.

He looks for games to join and pushes himself to play against more experienced players. He never gets bored. If he's addicted, he's not complaining.

“There’s a joke that there should be a Mahjong Anonymous,” he said.

Membership to the mahjong club is limited to residents of the Grove. Many public games of different variations are offered across Ventura County by groups, including the Moorpark Active Adult Center, Conejo Recreation and Park District in Thousand Oaks, Pleasant Valley Recreation and Park District in Camarillo, Ventura Parks and Recreation and HELP of Ojai.

Tom Kisken covers health care and other news for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tom.kisken@vcstar.com or 805-437-0255.

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This article originally appeared on Ventura County Star: Mahjong craze surges in Camarillo retirement community