Greetings and salutations from your one and only Bubbe, looking at the signs of Spring: chirping birds, a few daffodils here and there, and the LEGIT NMJL 2025 card!!
Before I give my overview of what seems interesting this year, I just want to point out that anyone that tried to buy an “early” card via Amazon got ripped off. Somebody has been trying to pass off an older card, with a few cut-and-paste 2025 hands, as the new card. Some hands on this “card” don’t even use 14 tiles! The only way to get the NMJL card (upon release, anyway) is to buy it FROM NMJL, whether as part of a mass organization order or by placing an order directly on the website: www.nationalmahjonggleague.org . Bubbe suggests that you don’t bother with Amazon, even after April—just buy it straight from NMJL.
A brief reminder: I try to put out new observation/strategy articles every day for the next week or so. Today is the first one, the quick overview. Tomorrow I will put out a more detailed impression including illegal exposures. Then, on the next three successive days, I will drill down to EACH HAND: first the left panel of the card, then the middle panel, then the far panel. I will go on to discuss ambiguous exposures and to identify hands that are good backups.
For those of you who have never read my articles before, I will be using special coding for each hand. For instance, the second hand in the “2025” section will be called Y2; the fifth hand in the 13579 section will be called O5 (for Odd). This year’s card happens to have two different options in O5: one suit or all three suits can be used. In that case, I will refer to them as O5.1 and O5.3. There are also a few hands, such as the first Consecutive Run hand, that utilize EITHER the lower or upper end of the number line. In that case, I refer to CR1a as the numbers from 1-5, and CR1b as the numbers from 5-9. Also I do my best to indicate any concealed hand using red font.
So let’s take a quick peek. I do NOT see anything as dramatic as last year’s “Sombrero” hand, where the order was neither a stair step (pair, pair, pung, pung, kong) nor a bell curve (pair, pung, kong, pung, pair), but rather a whole different concept: pung, pair, kong, pair, pung, like a hat with a brim and a peak.
This year, you’re going to have to look a little harder when deciding what hand to use. The neighborhoods are less clearly delineated than in the past. For instance:
*the hand that often shows up as a concealed Year hand, involving pairs and pungs of Winds and 2025, will be in the Winds and Dragons section this year
*there is no “addition” section, per se, but both the Even and Odd sections include addition hands
*Bubbe’s favorite mnemonic: EAST/West with Even numbered tiles, NORTH/South with Odd numbered tiles, comes back this year
* There is an extra “Like Numbers/Dragons” hand in the 369 section. Yes, it has to be like 3’s, 6’s, or 9’s.
There’s no groundbreaking hand like last year’s Sombrero or FFFFF 123 444 444. HOWEVER, that hand laid the path for this year’s, in that there are singles sprinkled all over the card. You’re not going to learn this one quickly without the important “14” rule: the combination of tiles will always add up to 14.
I will add one more thing: the first, OBVIOUS mistake on the card is the third hand in the CR section. CR3.1 is obviously in one suit. The proofreader dropped the ball: the second option should be represented in THREE suit colors, with the middle consecutive number being a pair. How do I know this? Because the parentheses say “Any 1 or 3 suits”!
Looking forward to providing you with lots of fun insights. You can always contact me at bubbefischer@gmail.com
Talk to you soon!
Bubbe
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