Mahjong Ways, and where its 96.92% actually sits
Two PG SOFT titles carry the Mahjong Ways name and most players open both without noticing the difference. One has 1,024 ways and a 25,000x cap; the other has 2,000 ways and a 100,000x cap. Here is what separates them, and where each one keeps its return.
Where the 96.92% actually lives
PG SOFT publishes something most studios keep to themselves: the split between what a game pays out in ordinary spins and what it holds back for the feature. Mahjong Ways carries a theoretical RTP of 96.92%, and PG SOFT breaks that into 68.89% from the main game and 28.03% from the Free Spins Feature. Close to a third of everything the slot ever returns is sitting behind three scatter symbols. Mahjong Ways 2 is built the same way — 96.95% in total, 70.39% main game, 26.56% free spins. Neither headline number describes an evening that never reaches the bonus. That evening is the main-game slice, and on the original that slice is 68.89%.
That split is also the honest answer to the first question everyone asks: is this a high-return mahjong slot? At 96.92% and 96.95% the pair sits near the top of anything any provider publishes — and publishing is the operative word. PG SOFT and Pragmatic Play are the only two studios on our shelf that print RTP for these games at all. JILI publishes none, anywhere on its own site, which makes the 97% figure attached to JILI titles across affiliate blogs a number with no provider standing behind it. We keep the whole comparison on our slot RTP page, including which titles ship in more than one operator-selectable configuration.
The match applies to your first deposit and the spins land on slots. Balances run in USD — no riel conversion to think about.
The multiplier ladder is the whole game
Both titles open the round the same way and then spend it very differently. Three scatters trigger the Free Spins Feature, every additional scatter adds two more spins, and the round retriggers from inside itself — which is why a good sitting on Mahjong Ways runs well past the twelve spins it started with. The original opens with 12. The sequel opens with 10. After that they part company completely.
- Mahjong Ways — Wild symbols transform on the reels, and the free-spins win multiplier climbs a fixed ladder: x2, then x4, then x6, then x10. The last spins of a long retriggered round are worth ten times the first.
- Mahjong Ways 2 — during free spins every non-Wild, non-Scatter symbol on reel three turns gold, and a gold symbol converts into a Wild the moment it forms part of a win. The middle reel becomes a Wild factory for the length of the round.
- Both — three Scatters to open the feature, two extra free spins for every Scatter beyond the third, and the round can retrigger while you are inside it.
Which mechanic you prefer is temperament rather than value. The ladder on the original is predictable: reach the top step and every remaining spin is multiplied by ten whether or not the reels cooperate. The gold reel on the sequel is not predictable at all — it can flood the middle of the grid with Wilds or do almost nothing, and spread across 2,000 ways that swing is exactly where a 100,000x ceiling comes from. Players who like watching a number tick upward take the first. Players who want one outsized spin take the second.
25,000x, 100,000x and what a billion spins actually produced
An advertised maximum win is the roof of the building, not the ceiling of the room you are standing in. PG SOFT ran a one-billion-spin simulation on both titles and published what came out. Mahjong Ways recorded a maximum exposure of 2,893x against its advertised 25,000x cap. Mahjong Ways 2 recorded 1,708x against 100,000x. A billion spins is a sample no room full of players will ever produce between them, and the largest single result anywhere inside it landed under 3,000x. Read the cap as a description of what the mathematics permits, not as something to plan an evening around.
| Title | Studio | Advertised max win |
|---|---|---|
| Mahjong Ways 2 | PG SOFT | 100,000x |
| Lucky Neko | PG SOFT | 100,000x |
| Mahjong Ways | PG SOFT | 25,000x |
| Sweet Bonanza | Pragmatic Play | 21,175x |
| Gates of Olympus | Pragmatic Play | 5,000x |
| Fortune Tiger | PG SOFT | 2,500x |
Both games are rated Medium on PG SOFT's own session volatility scale, which runs from Entertaining (Low) through Medium to High. Every PG SOFT title we cover sits at Medium — these two, Lucky Neko with its collapsing reels, and Fortune Tiger with no free-spins round at all. The rating separates PG SOFT from other studios far more than it separates one PG SOFT game from another, so do not use it to pick between the pair.
Playing Mahjong Ways from Phnom Penh
Your balance here runs in US dollars. That is not a preference, it is how the platform is built: our Cambodia region is restricted to a single currency, USD, and the string KHR does not appear anywhere in the platform configuration. Cambodia is 83.4% dollarised by broad money as of the end of 2025, so for most readers this changes nothing at all — you already hold a dollar account at ABA or ACLEDA. If you hold riel only, settle that before you deposit rather than after, because the Bakong rail performs no conversion mid-transfer: the sending currency and the receiving account currency have to match, and there is no in-app FX along the way.
Deposits arrive over the same rails you already use for everything else. ABA PAY is accepted at more than 200,000 merchants across Cambodia and appears as a payment method on the checkout page rather than asking for a QR scan; our ABA deposit guide walks through the steps. Wing's agent network — more than 12,000 agents, roughly 80% of them women — is the practical cash rail when you are nowhere near a branch. KHQR is the single national code any participating bank or wallet app can read, with Bakong, the National Bank of Cambodia's own platform, running underneath it. Registration needs a Cambodian number, and 855 is in our country-code list; phone and email verification are both required on a Cambodian account before the first spin.
Both banks are configured on BK8 for Cambodian accounts, so money moves on rails you already use every day.
PG SOFT, and why the studio behind the tiles matters
Pocket Games Soft, trading as PG SOFT, was founded in 2015 and lists a Malta contact address at Valletta Buildings, South Street, Valletta. Its products are validated and certified by BMM and Gaming Associates, it supports over 40 languages, it holds nine European patent certificates, and it was named Best Slot Game Provider at the SiGMA Euro-Med 2025 awards. More useful for a reader here: PG SOFT states its services are not available in the United States, Australia, Israel, Iran, Singapore, Malaysia, Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, the UAE or North Korea. Cambodia is not on that list, so nothing in the studio's own restrictions stands between a Cambodian account and these two titles.
The certification runs on two levels. PG SOFT accredits the game; the games we run are audited by BMM Test Labs, GLI and iTech Labs, and those marks sit in our footer rather than in a paragraph somewhere. PG SOFT is also one of the six slot studios we name publicly, next to Pragmatic Play, Microgaming, NetEnt, Mega888 and 918Kiss. If you want the studio-level view rather than the game-level one — what else PG SOFT has built and how it behaves across a session — our PG SOFT page covers the rest of the catalogue.
Demo first, then the deposit
There is no reason to learn a x2-to-x10 ladder with money riding on it. Run Mahjong Ways in demo mode first, count how long three scatters take to arrive at the stake you would actually use, and decide whether a Medium-volatility round is the shape of evening you want. Then do the same on the sequel and watch reel three. Ten minutes of that teaches you more about the shape of the game than any write-up can. Our demo slot guide covers which titles run in play-for-fun mode and what changes the second the same game switches to cash.
When you are ready, a first deposit on a Cambodian account carries +1500% and 250 free spins. Promotional spins attach to selected slots rather than to the whole lobby, so check the eligible list before assuming Mahjong Ways is on it — and remember the in-game free-spins round needs no promotion at all, only three scatters. Open an account when the game makes sense to you and not a moment before; the offer attaches to your first deposit whenever you make it, not to the day you registered.
What a mahjong slot cannot promise you
Three claims circulate about these games in Cambodian chat groups and none of them survive contact with the maths. There is no hour of the day when scatters land more often — a random number generator has no clock. There is no bet size that moves the published return; 96.92% is 96.92% at the bottom of the stake range and at the top of it, and the only thing a bigger bet changes is how quickly your balance finds out. And no sequence of previous spins predicts the next one, which is the entire point of certified RNG software and the reason PG SOFT submits its titles to BMM and Gaming Associates in the first place.
RTP is a theoretical long-run figure, not a forecast for your session. On Mahjong Ways, 68.89% of it lives in the base game and 28.03% behind the scatters, so a night that never triggers the feature is simply not the game the headline number describes.
One practical note about the screen you play on. Cambodia is still a desktop-majority market — 59.05% desktop against 39.98% mobile in August 2026 — and the phones that do browse here are narrow, with a quarter of mobile traffic at 414x896 and another 14% at 360x800. A four-row grid running 1,024 ways reads cleanly on both. The sequel's extra row across three reels is where a small screen starts to feel crowded, so try each of them on the device you actually use and let your eyes decide rather than the specification sheet. The wallet, the free spins and the withdrawal behave identically either way once you are signed in.