Illegal Exposures, 2025 edition

 

Greetings and salutations, and welcome back to Bubbe’s Big Rush, season 2025!

Today I'm going to talk about illegal exposures and some other interesting features of this card. Come back over the next three days and you'll get to see articles detailing every hand on each of the three panels of the card!

One of the first things I encourage when going over a new card is to see what CR1, the first Consecutive Run hand, looks like. This year it is a standard bell curve, with pairs on each end building up to a kong in the middle. It looks like two-three-four-three-two, a bell or a little hill. CR1 has two versions, 1-5 (CR1a) and 5-9 (CR1b). Its companion hand, in the Odd section of the card, is O1.1/O1.3. O1.1 is another bell curve with pairs of 1s and 9s on the ends, all in the same suit. O1.3 has the same shape, rising to a peak in the middle, but the ascending pair-pung and the descending pung-pair are in two different suits, with the middle kong of 5s in the third suit. We'll discuss again In a few days, but the number one thing to remember about these hands is that they all have the pairs at the ends and the kong in the middle, with pungs leading up to and down from the kong. There will be other hands that are not exactly designed as bell curves, but I’m going to show you a trick, juxtaposing the order just a bit, so that you can make them easier to remember that way.

I also like to talk about pung/kong hands, or three-four hands, where all the components are either melds of three or four of a kind. These are the easiest hands to win, because every unit can use jokers and/or be called for exposure.

This year we see several different combinations but the most prominent is 3434, a pung and kong in suit A and a second pung and kong in suit B. This combination shows up all over the card, including the Year section, Evens, Odds, and 369. Consider it the old reliable.

Interestingly, there are two different Wind hands, one with and one without “2025,” that offer variations. Please pay attention on your first exposure. In both cases, the companion wind must have the same number of tiles, that is Easts equal Wests, Norths equal Souths. I also noticed that they've returned to the conventional East-West goes with Even tile (W6) and North-South goes with Odd tile (W5).

Yesterday I mentioned that there are Addition Hands hidden in the Even and Odd sections. I neglected to mention that there's also an addition hand in the 369 section. Note that both those Even and 369 hands have two versions, allowing the use of one or all three suits, but the addition hand in the Odd section only has a two-suited version.

 

So here are the specific exposure by tile type: Flowers are used as pairs, pungs, and kongs this year. There are no Quints or single flowers.

Dragons show up as singles, pairs, pungs, and kongs. They're in all sorts of interesting places, and as I said, “14” is going to be your best friend, reminding you how each of the components of a hand come together. Note that there are no Quints of Dragons.

Winds obviously appear as singles in “NEWS,” but they also appear in pairs, pungs, and kongs as well. There are no Quints of Winds. 

Other observations:

You will really need to pay attention on this card. Order matters. There are many three-suited hands, but there is only one two-suited hand that I would refer to as a modified knit hand, where the melds alternate by suit. In that hand, 369 #4, there is a pung of Flowers (not suited), a kong of 3s in suit A, a meld of single 369 in suit B, and a final kong of 9s in suit A. Y4 is not a knit hand, remember that zeroes have no suit.

Someone had a real sense of humor with the Like Number hands. We've all played them before, sometimes getting natural (jokerless) melds and sometimes needing to cobble melds together with jokers. LN2 involves four different number melds: pungs of X in suits A and B, and two pairs of X in suit C. Essentially that means that as you're collecting number X, figure out whether any of the suits is a natural kong to hold on to, or at worst a natural pung where you'll hope to call that fourth tile (second pair) as your final mahj tile.  There's some strategy involved but it isn't impossible to make this hand.

Another tricky one where you need to pay strict attention is CR7. This disguised Like Number hand may turn out to be my favorite on the card, I'm going to call it “the Floating Pair”. In suit A, you will need to have a consecutive run of five straight numbers anywhere on the number line. So that's five tiles. They're going to be accented by two like-number kongs within that number line, of the complimentary other two suits (B and C) That's another eight tiles. That leaves you needing one more tile to get your 14, which is your “floating pair” tile. It must be the same number as the two kongs, but in suit A. In other words, the two kongs in suits B&C are of the same number (X) as the pair in suit A. The other four tiles need to fall on a number line which includes X. X can be the highest number, it can be the lowest number, it can be somewhere in the middle, but somehow there need to be four other singles around the pair X which matches the X kongs. It looks pretty fun, I'm looking forward to trying it.

 This leads me to a reminder for newbies, but it never hurts to say it to everyone: any single tile or pair, or a combination of single tiles, is an illegal exposure.  It cannot be called for anything but the final mah jongg tile. This is going to come up frequently until you get used to the card, and especially this year with single dragons, floating pairs, all sorts of weird things, you must pay attention!! I warn again: even if a hand isn't concealed, there may be components of it that can't be called except as the final mahj tile.

 

So just as a reminder: It is legal to make a first exposure of a pung of anything: Flowers, any number, dragon or Wind–and you can use as many jokers as you need to make that pung.  The same holds true for a first exposure of a kong of anything: Flowers, any number, dragon, or Wind. The only legal Quints on the 2025 hand are numbers: any first exposure of a Quint number is fine.

Some of you are new to this and may not understand what I mean. What I'm saying is things get complicated once you've put out that first exposure. That's when your hand becomes vulnerable. Often, when you put out the second exposure, you are locked into one very specific hand. If a tile you need for that hand is unavailable, you need to make an alternative plan. If there is no alternative plan, your hand could be called dead.

 

I hope this has whetted your appetite for learning more about the new card. I think it's going to be a good one. There's enough flexibility, enough like numbers to cruise all over the card. I'm going to talk about specific panels (left, center, right) starting tomorrow, and then it's time to get to the meat of advanced strategy: Figuring out backup hands.

Remember, Bubbe always says luck favors the prepared mind. What that means is, by having a backup hand, you have prepared yourself. You have a plan in mind for what to do if your current hand goes dead and/or you suddenly come across some really helpful, lucky tiles that point you toward a totally different hand.  Perfect example of this is the player who suddenly, as the game goes on, draws five or six Jokers and is completely at sea about what to do. Talk about frustrating!!

If you ever have any questions or comments, you can contact me at bubbefischer@gmail.com

 

Talk to you soon

 

Bubbe