Greetings and salutations from Bubbe, who wants to digress
for a moment about CR 5.
That’s my short-hand name for the fifth hand in the
Consecutive Runs section of this year’s card. Perhaps you’ve seen it:
FFF
1111 2222 DDD
Bubbe’s just kidding. Of COURSE you’ve seen it. Everyone’s
seen it, it comes up all the time. It’s a very straightforward hand: you have two numbers in a
row, but you need something else to make a total of 14 tiles. Some Flowers, some of
the matching Dragons, and voila.
The required quantity of each tile varies from year to year. There have been cards like 1995 where the hand involved kongs of the numbers and
Dragons, completed with a pair of Flowers:
FF 1111 2222 DDDD
There have been cards like 2013 where the hand included kongs of Flowers and numbers and the Dragons were the required pair:
FFFF 1111 2222 DD
And then, of course, there have been cards like 2016 when there was NO
“Consecutive Run with matching Dragons” hand, and everyone moaned and sighed
because they missed it.
This year's iteration—pungs and kongs—is the first version
that I can recall that doesn’t use any pairs. Open
hands that don't require any singles or pairs are MUCH easier because you can use Jokers for any
exposure. They can’t go “dead”: for example, even if someone exposed all four
of the Dragons that you need, you could still use three Jokers to complete the
hand.
As I said in my article about tournament statistics, CR 5 was
the winning hand in nine of the 38 non-wall games I witnessed—that’s 24%. It
was far and away the most prevalent winner out of dozens of options. In
general, the number of each type of winning hand from my small sample was:
Two
pungs, two kongs: 16 (42%)
Three
kongs and a pair: 10 (26%)
Four
pungs and a pair (all closed hands): 4 (11%)
A kong,
two pungs, two pairs: 3 (8%)
Any
kind of quint: 3 (8%)
Two kongs, three pairs: 1 (2.5%)
Singles and pairs ONLY: 1 (2.5%)
In previous years, I have written about “old reliable”
hands. There is one always listed at CR 2, the second hand in the Consecutive Runs
section. It involves two pungs and two kongs, in two suits; sometimes it is two pungs
in suit A, followed by two kongs in suit B; sometimes it is pung/kong in suit
A, then pung/kong in suit B. It is a very simple hand: no pairs, open, easy to
call for, never goes dead. Easy-peasy.
I think that this year, because it involves the
Flowers and only one suit, CR5 has surpassed CR2 in popularity.
What do you think? Is anyone else willing to keep a list on
their weekly game and let me know which hands won, throughout the day? You can include
how many ended as wall games. You don’t
have to track Jokers and Flowers, just write down the appropriate letter for
the section and which hand in that group (e.g. Y3 is the third 2019 hand, E5 is
the fifth 2468/EVEN hand).
Send me your results (photo or typed out) at bubbefischer@gmail.com and we’ll see
what kind of patterns we find.
Thanks for participating—I think I’ll have a free giveaway
of both of my novels (Small World and Take Two), chosen randomly among the
respondents!
I look forward to hearing from you soon!
Bubbe Fischer
PS Many thanks to Nina H for the above photo. She recently played a game where ALL FOUR PLAYERS were going for CR 5!!!
PS Many thanks to Nina H for the above photo. She recently played a game where ALL FOUR PLAYERS were going for CR 5!!!
