Light strategy, 2022 card

 

Greetings and salutations from Bubbe, who is giving you some light  strategy ideas for the new card, as well as some links for extra reading!

 

Bubbe had the opportunity to chat for a while with Tracy Callard, another self-labeled mah jongg nerd. Tracy is an excellent teacher of both children and adults. She teaches mah jongg in the community, but her "day job" is working for the school system in Wichita, Kansas. She summers in the Catskills, where she plays mahj and canasta almost incessantly for a good 10 weeks or so.

 

We were speculating that this card is unlike any that we've seen in our many years of play. We're not quite sure who drew it up, and it defies the internal consistencies that we've usually found. Even so, we know that somehow we're going to work through and understand it, so that we can teach it to other people!

 

Another thing that Tracy and I agreed about is that strategy is going to be a little different this year. I know that traditionally there were many hands that needed a pair of Flowers, so I would throw a Flower out as soon as possible, right after the Charleston, if I didn't need it. I didn't want to be stuck throwing it later, when somebody was ready to call it for mah jongg.

 

This year’s card has several hands with Flower pungs, so it will create a different kind of joker bait. [If you don't understand that term, please click the link--mahj master Tom Sloper explains a key concept in strategy.]

 

For 2022, instead of throwing out my Flowers immediately, I will be likely to hang back a bit, counting on timing. If I wait for a few turns, somebody else may have collected one Flower and a joker. I will hope that another player gets them to call for the pung, exposing that joker, which I can then redeem with my Flower. It's worth waiting a little bit for it, anyway.

 

We also talked about how pairs of 2s are crucial to so many hands. Pairs must be natural, and it is rough to select a hand that requires them, knowing you may never achieve the second. There are a lot of hands I don't risk if I don't already have that pair by the end of the Charleston.

 

Just as a humorous exercise, I decided to count how many hands require a pair of 2s. Actually, I considered counting every hand that doesn't require a pair of 2s!

 

There are 16 hands that COULD use a natural pair of 2s--of those, 8 explicitly require at least one pair of 2s…not to mention the four hands that require natural pungs of 2s! If you want to know my opinion, if you have a choice, DON’T PASS 2s. I try my best to avoid passing soaps or Flowers, and now I’m adding 2s to my list. This may also be the year that Bubbe finally embraces the 369 section, avoiding 2s altogether!

 

You can contact me anytime with questions and comments at bubbefischer@gmail.com . Meanwhile, I’ll be hard at work on tomorrow’s “backup hands” article.

 

Happy weekend!!

 

Bubbe