First glance at the 2023 card

 Greetings and salutations from your Pesach-prepping Bubbe—I’m literally stirring the pot as I bring you a VERY QUICK overview of the 2023 card.

 

Tomorrow I will give you a more in-depth, section by section review of each hand, but let me give you some initial impressions:

 

*The Addition hand people will be happy

*There is ONE knitted hand this year, they threw Bubbe a bone (hint: it’s in the 369 section)

*Some of my other old favorites (e.g. junk hand of consecutive kongs; kongs of consecutive numbers with matching Dragon) are back

 *There are some nice 2023 hands scattered throughout the card, including in Winds/Dragons and Singles/Pairs. In fact, the “big hand” is back to normal: it’s in its usual place on the card, and is a pair of Flowers with the year in all three suits, valued at 75 cents again. I guess inflation didn’t affect EVERYTHING this year 😉

*Not a lot of funkiness on the Flower front: only pairs and kongs, no matching “bouquet” pungs and no quints.

*A few fun surprises in the Winds and Dragons section. Most notably, there is a very clever pung-kong Wind option: as long as the quantity of Easts and Wests match, and the Norths and Souths match, you can go either way!

*Overall reminder about concealed hands: in general except for the Addition and Quint sections, the last one listed in each section is concealed. Of course all of the Singles and Pairs hands are concealed!

 

What I am seeing in general is a pretty traditional card, one that makes it fairly easy to find backups. For instance I'm looking right now and seeing you could go easily from a Like Numbers hand to an Addition Hand (you have until the next blog to puzzle out what that's going to mean!). There are plenty of pung-kong opportunities so that your hand is not going to go dead.... or at least it might not be called dead, but you could still be very far from your goal.

I'm looking forward to talking more about this with you over the next week or two. Don't be frustrated if your card doesn't come in the mail immediately, you can always look back on these articles once yours is delivered!

 

And let's remember why I'm doing this. Bubbe says that mah jongg is a game that is 30% skill and 70% luck; there is a significant amount of the game that we can't control. However, Bubbe also says luck favors the prepared mind, and I want you to be as prepared as you can be so that when lucky tiles come your way you will know what to do with them! The best way to prepare is to LEARN THE CARD.

 

I think you're going to like the new card. We were all very ready for Spring and new hands!

 

Talk to you very, very soon.

 

Bubbe