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The Power Play Taking Over a Nation
When Amanda Wolsey moved to Pittsburgh, she left behind everything familiar: her Fort Worth hometown, her friends, and her job teaching fifth grade at Tanglewood Elementary School. She was navigating a new city where she knew no one. One day, a coworker invited her to join a mahjong group that had already been playing together for a year.
Unlike her coworker, who had grown up playing mahjong with her Jewish grandmother, Amanda had never heard of the game. She almost decided not to go.
“I thought I was going to show up and play bunco,” she laughed. “I was highly uninterested.”
She went anyway, thinking it would be a good way to meet people. By the end of the night, she was hooked, not just on the game itself but on what it created around the table – a community. That one reluctant “yes” would go on to shape the next 15 years of her life, two businesses, and a national mobile application that is changing how American women play the game of mahjong and compete on a worldwide stage.
photo credit: AMR Authority
The Hobby Taking Over the Country
Mahjong is growing in popularity all over the United States. Yelp data shows that searches for mahjong clubs are up nearly 4,500% from last year. Searches for coaches are up 800%. Between 2023 and 2024, searches for mahjong events on Eventbrite jumped 365% nationwide, and the number of actual events went up 179%. The North American Mahjong set market was valued at $185 million in 2024, with analysts projecting it to grow at a rate of 6.2% annually through 2033.
Amanda explained that mahjong is more than a game; it’s really about finding community. A review published in The Journal of Prevention of Alzheimer’s Disease in 2024 found that mahjong players had a stronger sense of social connection, which may help slow the progression of dementia symptoms.
So, What Is Mahjong, Exactly?
Think of mahjong as a mix between Scrabble and gin rummy. Each player has 144 tiles. These are small, domino-like pieces covered in symbols and imagery. Each player draws a hand of 13 or 14 tiles. The goal is to build complete patterns based on the National Mah Jongg League card, an annual guide that defines the season’s winning combinations. Think of it like assembling outfits, where each matching set is one complete look, and you are racing to finish your whole wardrobe before anyone else does. The first player to complete their hand calls “Mahjong!” and wins.
But the game is far more than its rules.
“It excites all your senses – the weight of the tiles in your hand, the sound they make when shuffled across the table, the visual beauty of the pieces themselves,” Amanda explains.
That last part has changed dramatically in recent years. Many companies have reimagined tiles as art objects, creating hundreds of beautiful tile lines. There are floating pool tiles, hand-painted sets, and limited-edition artist collaborations. What was once a fairly standard game piece has become something people genuinely want to look at.
“You play with your eyes first,” Amanda said.
The game of mahjong dates back to the early years of the 19th century in China and arrived in America in the 1920s. In 1937, four wealthy Jewish women gathered four hundred women at the Essex House Hotel in New York City and founded the National Mah Jongg League, formalizing the rules that most American players follow today. That is the version Amanda Wolsey and her business partner, Bethany Factor, teach, play, and have built their entire operation around.
“We are purists,” Bethany said. “We stick to the rules.”
photo credit: AMR Authority
From Pittsburgh to Fort Worth
Amanda grew up in Fort Worth, graduated from the University of Texas, and came home after college. Her husband, also a Fort Worth native and UT grad, was asked to relocate to Pittsburgh for a new project. They moved, leaving their community behind.
Amanda started playing mahjong every Thursday night. She played at happy hour lunches. She and her husband played together. By the time that the Wolseys moved back to Fort Worth in 2012, Amanda was completely in love with a game that almost nobody in Texas had heard of, she said.
She tried to find people to play with and hosted games with neighbors. She taught anyone willing to sit long enough to learn, but no one seemed to love the game quite like she did. It was not until the COVID pandemic that real interest in the game was sparked, and when it did, it came fast. Friends started reaching out and asking her to teach them. One friend finally gave her an ultimatum: “Let us pay someone from Dallas to come teach us, or let us pay you.”
Amanda started teaching people to play mahjong. She built a coaching practice. She designed her own line of tiles and custom tablecloths for gameplay. She was doing it all out of her home until the weight of it told her it was time for something permanent.
That was where Bethany came in.
photo credit: AMR Authority
The Other Half
Bethany Factor spent 15 years on an oil and gas trading floor, in one of the most male-dominated environments in one of the most male-dominated industries on the planet. Women make up only 15% of the oil and gas workforce, and that number shrinks fast the higher you climb. Bethany climbed and succeeded, earning promotion after promotion in a world built on fast decisions, high stakes, and a lot of yelling. She carries that energy into everything she does, including the tennis court, where her 4.0 USTA ranking puts her in the top quarter of all adult players in the country. She can only be described as a force of nature, full of grit and determination.
Bethany learned mahjong the way a lot of women do. Her friends were playing, and she did not want to be left out. She sat down, quickly picked up the rules, and never stopped playing.
Where Amanda brings the teaching, the creativity, and deep institutional knowledge of the game to the partnership, Bethany has the business acumen, the accounting expertise, the marketing insight, and the operational thinking necessary to build a business. They connected through a mutual friend who told them they needed to talk. Both women had been thinking the same thing: Fort Worth needed a real place to play mahjong. The dynamic duo had all the right tiles between them to build an incredible business.
“Let’s just go for it,” they said, and that was that.
In 2024, Amanda and Bethany opened The Mahj Clubhouse near Camp Bowie. It was the first dedicated mahjong club in the country, they explained. Running a business based on a game was a little scary at first. Would they make rent? Would enough people show up?
“My pride’s not gonna get hurt,” Amanda said. “My bank account might.”
The club grew faster than either of them expected. Classes filled up. Game nights built waiting lists. The community Amanda had always believed mahjong could create was creating itself right there off Camp Bowie.
“It’s intentional socialization,” Amanda said.
“[Mahjong is] the new book club for moms,” Bethany added.
Research supports the community that Amanda and Bethany have built. Studies show that face-to-face mahjong play fosters conversation, observation, and shared experience, with researchers documenting cases where people who once struggled to form social connections exchanged numbers, met outside scheduled sessions, and developed lasting friendships.
photo credit: AMR Authority
The Idea Born at a Bar
After years of running the Clubhouse while each of them raised four kids, ranging in age from 18 down to five, between them, they started hosting tournaments across Texas and eventually across the nation. At every event, the same problem kept recurring: women who wanted to compete had no reliable way to know whether they were playing against someone at their level.
Bethany recognized this problem from her tennis career. Her USTA ranking always mattered because it guaranteed a real match: someone who would push her, not blow her out or get crushed. Mahjong had no equivalent. After a teaching session one evening, sitting at a bar with Amanda, she said her idea out loud.
Why don’t we build a ranking system for mahjong?
“That’s it,” Amanda said. “That’s our next thing.”
photo credit: AMR Authority
Building the AMR Authority
The American Mahjong Ranking Authority, or AMR Authority, is an app that gives every mahjong player a skill-based ranking and lets them find competitive games wherever they are. Think USTA for tennis or Duper for pickleball, applied to mahjong. It uses an ELO ranking model, the same framework used by both of those sports, and rankings update once a year on April 1st, the official release date of the new National Mah Jongg League card.
The app tracks three types of games, each weighted differently.
- Casual games played with blanks and extra jokers, easier variations not using official NMJL rules, are weighted the lowest.
- Standard NMJL games played by the official rulebook sit in the middle.
- Tournament games, with their strict rules and negative scoring (yes, you can finish a round in the red), carry the most weight in the rankings.
To keep things honest, scores are not self-reported. After a match is submitted, two other players at the table must confirm the score within 60 minutes. The whole thing gets settled at the table, while everyone still remembers what happened.
Developer and Bartender
Every app needs a developer. The developer behind Amanda and Bethany’s app? A bartender at Colonial Country Club who was studying computer science. Amanda struck up a conversation with the young man, discovered what he was studying, and asked if he could build what she and Bethany envisioned. Fortunately, he said yes.
Since beta launching on Apple in September 2025 and holding its official launch in April 2026, the AMR Authority has already grown to nearly 500 users, and a points reward system is currently being coded so players can earn perks like complimentary drink service at tournaments.
To understand why the app matters, consider what competitive mahjong looked like before the app existed, when Amanda and Bethany played in a Las Vegas tournament. Scores were written by hand, entered into Scantrons, and fed through a machine by hand for 284 players.
“There was just a need to formalize the game,” Bethany said. “Bring it up to speed.”
What Comes Next
The women’s vision goes well beyond Fort Worth. Amanda and Bethany see a tournament structure that works like a bracket, with city winners, then state winners, and finally a national championship. Three events are already on the calendar:
- A day tournament at Sidesaddle Saloon in the Stockyards on June 27th;
- a tournament at the Venetian in Scottsdale, Arizona;
- and their third annual event at Possum Kingdom Lake.
“Each business idea led us to this,” Bethany said. “We see it going worldwide.”
Mahjong is already trending in that direction with or without them. Celebrities including Julia Roberts and Meghan Markle have publicly embraced the game, and luxury hotels around the world are now hosting mahjong nights. But in Fort Worth, two women who almost didn’t show up for their first games are doing something nobody else has done. They are building the competitive framework for American Mahjong for the 21st century.
The ranking system that Amanda and Bethany created is live, and if their track record proves anything, these women are just getting started.
