Owning Up

Greetings and salutations from your Bubbe, with a story about taking risks and owning your decisions.

Last week, one of my mahj mates, Steffi, called for a Flower and put up two more and a joker. Ida, on her right, picked up the next tile--also a Flower--and exchanged it for the joker to make mah jongg.

Steffi began second-guessing herself all over the place. “I shouldn’t have put up the joker, would you have done that?” she asked each of us. 

The answer is, it depends. It depends on how far you are into the game; how close you are to winning; how many others of that tile have already been discarded. It depends on lots of things.

Why should timing matter? If you’ve read Searching for Bubbe Fischer, you know that Bubbe’s more aggressive when it comes to using a joker for the first exposure, especially early in the game. If it’s an exposure that fits into your strategy—full speed ahead! On this year’s card, a single legal exposure can’t result in your being called “dead”—so what do you have to lose? If it’s early, you will have as good a chance as anyone else of getting that joker back. You’ll also put your opponents on the defensive, immediately. They’ll wonder what you’re up to, and might be more cautious about their own discards.

In this particular situation, Steffi called for that Flower late in the game, with only about twelve tiles left in the wall, because she had satisfied the second of my questions: she was very close to winning. Exposing the Flowers put her on-call for mah jongg. She had no other exposures, so no one knew that, or what tile she needed. In the abstract, exposing a kong with a joker is not necessarily a bad choice—especially when it leaves you one tile away from mahj. 

But now we come to the third question—how many of those tiles have already been thrown? Is the joker still “alive”? Can it be redeemed? In Steffi’s scenario, no one had thrown out any flowers, so there was a high likelihood that the joker would be redeemed quickly. If it was a safe exposure (e.g. a kong of nine-craks, where one had been discarded earlier) then, by all means, she would have been secure in calling for the exposure…but there were five flowers floating around, each able to claim that joker. Objectively, Steffi was close—making her decision understandable—but it would have been a much safer choice if the joker wasn’t viable.

It’s a conundrum. Mah jongg is, inherently, a game. We are gambling. Steffi gambled that no one would take that joker before she was able to get her mahj tile. She lost (as did two more of us), but in another situation it might have played out differently. What if Ida had picked and discarded Steffi’s mahj tile?

Whatever her calculation, each player needs to take ownership of her decision. No one has the right to second-guess someone else’s choice, because we can’t know exactly what factors went into it. Steffi had her reasons for taking a risk. If she had been winning all day, she might have figured, “What the heck, it’s only fifty cents if I lose…” Then again, if she’d been doing poorly, she might have thought, “This is the closest I’ve come to winning. I’m going to try it, maybe it will work.”  

That time, it didn’t. So then we played another hand…

As far as your Bubbe’s concerned, it’s never a bad time to call, or at least email—so contact me at bubbefischer@gmail.com – I love hearing from you.

See you soon.

Bubbe Fischer