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What happens if I draw from the wrong wall or the wrong end of the wall?

Draw from the wrong wall or the wrong end of a wall and rack that tile, and your hand is dead. The tile stays with your dead hand and everyone else carries on drawing from the right place. If more than one player has drawn from the wrong end, the hand is thrown in, and a player who pushes out the wrong wall, or a wall too early, takes the dead hand.

Answered by Prim. Last reviewed 2026-10-16.

Which end is the right end

Every hand draws from one place only: the open end of the live wall. East breaks the wall by rolling the dice and counting that many stacks from the right end of East's own wall. The stacks inside the count are pushed back and become the very last tiles of the hand. The deal begins just to the left of the break, and every draw after it follows on from there.

The walls are used up clockwise, the opposite way to the turns. When one wall runs out, the player to the left of it pushes out the next. So East's wall is followed by North's, then West's, then South's. A tile from anywhere else, the far end of a wall, the stacks behind the break, a wall not yet pushed out, is a tile from the wrong place.

The moment it becomes a dead hand

The rule turns on racking. A tile is racked when it sits on the bottom ledge of your rack and leans against the back with your other tiles. Once a tile from the wrong wall or the wrong end is racked, the hand is dead. The tile stays with it, and the other players continue drawing from the correct place as though nothing had moved.

Before that moment the hand is not dead. A wrong reach caught before the tile is racked is a fumble, not a forfeit, and the tile goes back face down exactly where it came from, as any tile out of the wall does. Holding it, tapping the rack with it or looking at it is not racking.

When more than one player goes astray

One player at the wrong end is that player's problem. If more than one player has drawn from the wrong end, the table cannot sensibly untangle whose tile was whose, so the hand is thrown in and dealt again.

The player who pushes out the walls carries a responsibility of their own. Push out the wrong wall, or push one out too early so that somebody draws from it, and the dead hand is yours, not the drawer's. The person who reached for the tile offered to them did nothing wrong.

Who says so, and what follows

Nobody declares their own hand dead. Another player calls it, on what the table can see, and a draw from the wrong wall is about as visible as errors come. Once the call stands, the dead player stops drawing and discarding, calls nothing, stays silent to the end of the hand and pays the winner the full value of the winning hand.

It lasts that hand only. The next deal starts everyone fresh, and the cure is simple: before you reach, look at where the last player drew, and take the very next tile.

New to the words? Wall · Dead hand · Pusher · Rack