I happened on Kong Gaming by someone spamming the chatbox in MahjongTime. In the competition amongst the servers for getting players no means seem to be regarded as improper. They offered free roll tournaments with real money to win in mahjong. So why not?

A program has to be downloaded and installed; an account with password has to be created. The site offers all kinds of games and now even slotmachines. They look a bit out of date, and probably are. There are two version of mahjong: ‘Hong Kong’ and ‘1 on 1’ and it can be played in two separate sections: ‘Real money’ and ‘Play money’. Apart from the free roll tournaments I have hardly ever played for lack of players. The speed is quite good and the interface is easy to comprehend but it all looks a bit clumsy. In the tournaments, after a player has lost his chips, the game goes on with three or even two players without substitution by robots.

After gaining some real money in the free roll tournaments, not that hard to do for when playing robots the system proved to be not at all random, I wanted to get out. Too much work in a not so nice environment for a few dollars. Turning the gained dollars to cash was not that easy. First I had to make a deposit to make me a real player. To do that I needed to open an account with Moneybookers and forward money. Then I was told that I needed ‘Kongpoints’. You can only get those by playing cash games.

And I needed a lot of kongpoints. For it wasn’t clear how many kongpoints I needed I made several withdrawals which were refused. Finally I worked out that for every dollar you want to cash you need 5 kongpoints. And since there was no one to play mahjong with I had to spend my precious time and money to get kongpoints by sitting at Texas Hold’em, a variant of poker. After that the ordeal wasn’t over. I had to submit ‘front and back of photo ID plus current utility bill’. Asking for something like the latter is against all privacy regulation in Europe, and having told them, I sent it anyway. After I lost about 75% of my winnings I reached the right balance in money and kongpoints for withdrawal. And after paying some fee to moneybookers after three months and many hours spend on playing games I didn’t like I had some money to spend.

If you are willing to go through the motions and happy to play other games to get kongpoints, there is some money to be gained. But if you just want to play for fun then you do better to skip Kong Gaming.

Kong88