If you’ve seen the headlines — mahjong clubs up thousands of percent, sold-out socials, NPR segments — and thought “great, time to finally learn riichi,” I have to slow you down for one paragraph. Most of that boom is real, but most of it is not about your game. The mahjong filling those headlines is American mahjong, a related but genuinely different game, and if you walk into the average new U.S. mahjong club expecting the rules you learned from Mahjong Soul or Akagi, you’ll be handed a card of approved hands and a rack of tiles with jokers in it.
That’s the bad news, and it takes exactly one paragraph. The good news takes the rest of this article: riichi in the U.S. is small, but as of July 2026 it is measurably growing, it just hosted its first professional tour on American soil, and there is now a national association whose whole job is helping you find a table. Let’s separate the two stories properly, with actual numbers.
Quick note on where I’m writing from: I live in Japan, where riichi is simply “mahjong.” I started playing in college, put in my share of all-night parlor sessions, and these days mostly play on Mahjong Soul. For the U.S. scene itself I’m working from published data and official sources, not firsthand visits; I’ll flag exactly which is which as we go.
The boom you’ve read about
The number you’ve most likely encountered is Yelp’s: searches for mahjong clubs up roughly 4,500% year over year. It’s a striking figure, and it kept circulating through early 2026: NPR ran a piece on mahjong as community-building in January, and Boston’s WBUR covered the surge in April. The growth is real. New clubs, new nights at bars and community centers, waitlists for beginner lessons.
Here’s the part the headline numbers don’t tell you: none of that data distinguishes which mahjong. And when you read the actual coverage, the game at the center of it is overwhelmingly American mahjong — the National Mah Jongg League style, played with jokers, racks, and an annually updated card of valid hands. It has deep roots in the U.S., particularly in Jewish-American and Chinese-American communities, and its current revival skews toward in-person social play.
American mahjong is a fine game having a well-deserved moment. But it is not riichi. Different tile count, different scoring, different everything past the basic act of drawing and discarding — our riichi vs American mahjong breakdown goes through every difference in detail if you want to know exactly what you’d be walking into at each. A “mahjong club” listing near you is, statistically, very unlikely to be playing the Japanese game. The next section puts an actual number on “very unlikely.”
So when you see “mahjong boom” cited as evidence that riichi is taking over America, treat it the way you’d treat “football is huge in the U.S.” as evidence for soccer. Same word, mostly different sport.
Where riichi actually stands
The most honest dataset I’ve found is the “State of American Mahjong 2026” report from Bam Good Time, which catalogued 1,026 mahjong clubs across the U.S. Of the 904 club descriptions that specify a style, 237 explicitly describe American mahjong. Riichi appears in exactly 6.
Six. Out of more than nine hundred style-identified clubs.
I want to be careful with that number in both directions. It undercounts riichi somewhat: the count is based on club descriptions, and plenty of riichi activity happens in university anime clubs, Discord-organized meetups, and board game cafés that never register as a “mahjong club” anywhere. The American Riichi Association’s own network (more on them below) already spans more than the report captures. But even generously adjusted, the conclusion holds: riichi is a single-digit-percentage niche inside the U.S. mahjong boom, not the boom itself.
Now the part that makes this article worth writing rather than depressing. The same report notes where riichi clubs are appearing: college towns and cities like Seattle, Boston, and Austin, growing in overlap with anime and gaming communities. That tracks with everything about how the game travels in the West. People don’t inherit riichi from their grandmothers here; they arrive through Akagi, through Saki, through Mahjong Soul’s gacha-flavored client, through the corner of the internet where Japanese pop culture and competitive gaming meet. It’s a young, online-native, tournament-curious demographic — small in absolute numbers, but the kind of community that organizes fast.
So the honest picture as of July 2026: riichi in the U.S. is roughly where a niche competitive hobby is right before infrastructure catches up to interest. Which brings us to the thing that happened in June.
The pro game arrives
In June 2026, M.LEAGUE (Japan’s professional mahjong league) and World Riichi held the first professional riichi tour on U.S. soil. For anyone who follows the Japanese pro scene, this is the headline event of the year for American riichi, full stop.
The lineup, per the official announcements: a press conference on June 26 at the HyperX Arena in Las Vegas (inside the Luxor), main event days on June 27–28, then a move east for a June 29 meet-and-greet in New York and a June 30 exhibition at Sparrow’s Nest Studio. Inven Global’s coverage called New York the center of the U.S. riichi boom, which matches the club map above.
The guest list was not a token delegation. It included Kotaro Uchikawa, the 2025 world champion, Hiroshi Yamai, the 2014 world champion, and M.LEAGUE professionals Sayaka Okada, Mari Takamiya, Yoshihiro Matsumoto, Sho Shiratori, Megumu Aikawa, and Yuumi Uotani. The Las Vegas main event ran a format built for access rather than spectacle: 10 guest pros seated against a field of 180 players across ten hanchan (full games). In other words, ordinary American players buying a ticket — entries were announced from $450 — got to sit at a table with world champions and league pros. There is no equivalent of that in most competitive games.
Full transparency on what I can and can’t confirm, writing this in mid-July 2026: the event happened — World Riichi’s official YouTube channel has “Las Vegas: Day 1” and “Day 2” videos up. What I have not been able to find is detailed English-language reporting on the results: who won the exhibition sessions, final standings, attendance figures, press reaction. If you’re searching for “who won the M.LEAGUE Vegas event,” as of this writing I can’t tell you, and I’d be suspicious of any article that claims to without a source.
Just as significant as the matches was what got announced around them: a new World Riichi Publishing division, and an international professional accord with four Japanese pro organizations — JPML, NPM, Mahjong Union, and RMU. Read plainly, that’s the Japanese professional establishment formally deciding the West is worth building bridges to, not just visiting.
One event doesn’t make a scene. But six clubs in a national survey plus a pro tour with world champions plus a publishing arm and an international accord, all in the same twelve months, is what the very early stage of a scene looks like.
Finding a table near you
Here’s the practical section, because “riichi mahjong club near me” is probably what brought you here.
Your first stop should be the American Riichi Association (ARA) at nariichi.org. Formed as a national umbrella organization, it brings together representatives from more than 20 clubs and leagues, holds monthly meetings, and is already doing the unglamorous federation work, including planning around player selection for the 2028 World Riichi Championship. If a riichi club exists near you, ARA’s network is the most likely place it’s listed.
The established clubs cluster where you’d expect:
- New York — the deepest scene in the country, anchored by Riichi Nomi NYC and the US Professional Mahjong League (USPML). If the U.S. riichi boom has a capital, it’s here.
- Chicago and Washington, D.C. — both with active clubs, and both hosted opens in 2026 (more below).
- The West Coast — the Pacific Mahjong League (PML) in the Bay Area, plus the Seattle scene noted in the club data.
- College clubs — UC Berkeley and RIT run university riichi clubs, and given the anime-community overlap, your local university is worth checking even if nothing shows up on a map.
Overall the ARA network stretches from Seattle to Atlanta, which sounds impressive until you remember the absolute numbers involved. Realistically: if you live in or near a major coastal city or a college town, you have a decent shot at a physical table. If you’re rural or mid-country, you may be the person who starts the club. That is genuinely how most of the existing ones began.
And if you want competitive play, 2026 already has a real, if compact, tournament calendar behind it: the Oklahoma Riichi Open and DC Open both ran in March, and the PML Invitational in May seated a 32-player field on Amos REXX automatic tables — the same class of self-shuffling equipment used in Japanese parlors. A 32-player invitational is not the World Series of Poker. It’s also not nothing; three years ago a U.S. tournament on automatic tables would have been hard to imagine outside a convention hall.
If there’s no club near you
For most readers, the honest answer to “where do I play riichi in America” is still: online first, table later. That’s not a consolation prize — it’s how nearly everyone in the Western scene actually trains, including the people now running the clubs above.
Two directions from here:
- Play online. The three serious clients are Mahjong Soul, Tenhou, and Riichi City, and they serve noticeably different players. I’ve broken down the real differences (matchmaking, rules presentation, monetization, which one to start on) in our Mahjong Soul vs Tenhou vs Riichi City comparison.
- Get a physical set. If you have even two or three interested friends, a real set changes the hobby completely, and buying one in the U.S. has a specific trap: most cheap “mahjong sets” on Amazon are American mahjong sets that can’t play riichi at all. Our guide to the best riichi mahjong sets covers what a complete riichi set must include and which listings actually qualify.
There’s also a case for optimism in the structure of the thing. Every scene the size of six-clubs-and-growing depends on exactly the pipeline that’s now visible: anime brings people in, online clients train them for free, and organizations like ARA catch the ones who want to play in person. All three stages of that pipeline got stronger in the past year.
The bottom line, as of July 2026
- The widely reported U.S. mahjong boom is real but mostly American mahjong. The 4,500% Yelp figure doesn’t distinguish styles, and the coverage behind it centers on the NMJL game.
- Riichi is a small niche within that boom — 6 style-identified clubs out of 904 in the best available national survey — but it’s growing in college towns and anime-adjacent communities.
- June 2026 brought the first M.LEAGUE × World Riichi U.S. pro tour, with world champions playing against 180 ticketed amateurs in Las Vegas and an exhibition in New York. The event is confirmed on official video; detailed results coverage hasn’t surfaced yet.
- ARA (nariichi.org) is your starting point for finding a club, with established scenes in NYC, Chicago, D.C., the Bay Area, and Seattle, plus a real 2026 tournament calendar.
- No club nearby? Online play is the scene’s real front door — start with our platform comparison, and get a proper riichi set when you’re ready to bring friends in.
The boom in the headlines isn’t quite your boom. But for the first time, the small game inside it has pros flying over, a federation forming, and a map with real dots on it. That’s a better starting position than riichi in America has ever had.