NOTE: This article is about 18 months old and references hands from the 2015 card, but it's still useful analysis!!
Greetings and salutations from Bubbe, who needs some rest…
“76” is a number that resonates with a lot of Americans.
1776 was the year of America’s independence, and many of us remember the
bicentennial year, 1976. (Here’s a scary thought: according to The World
Factbook, the median age in the United States as of 2014 was 37, meaning that over
half the population wasn’t even alive in 1976…but that’s another story.)
Lindbergh named his plane “The Spirit of ’76.” The triumphant number in “The
Music Man” is “76 Trombones.”
I just played 76 hands of mah jongg, over the course of
41 hours. I had a little sleep, two showers and a few meals, but the majority of
my time was spent in the same ballroom of that lovely hotel in Industrial Park,
New Jersey, that I described in my book Searching
for Bubbe Fischer.
I think I’ve conclusively proven that 76 hands is…a lot of
mahj. My opponents (approximately 50 different women: I played against some,
two or three times, because of the mini-tournaments) universally said that they
felt it “wasn’t enough” for them, but I personally reached saturation point.
There was a moment Saturday evening, as I was facing the 40th hand
of the day, that I definitely lost focus. Someone stopped the Charleston after
first left, and I was completely befuddled.
I took notes on every single game I played. It became a
conversation starter among my opponents: “Why are you taking notes?” I would
explain that I was doing it for my blog-readers. I thought you’d be curious
about which 76 hands I played, and which were successful. That got them asking
about the blog, and the book, and “who the heck is Bubbe Fischer?”
Here, in a nutshell, are some of the most important
statistics from the weekend. First of all, what I have been saying for years
was almost spot-on accurate, at least for this limited sample size: 19 out of
the 76 games I played ended as wall games--exactly 25%! And, since I consider
myself a good but not great tournament player, I was pleased to note that I won
16 games—21%, which is what I say in my book. “On average, over time, against
people at your level, you should expect to win 20% of the time.”
What were my
successful hands, you ask? Seven of my sixteen wins came with hands that didn’t
require pairs: the flexible, pairless “3-4”’s, using only pungs and kongs (e.g.
222 4444 666 8888),
and NNNNN DDDD 11111.
I won 50% of the times I played that, as well as FF DDDD 2015 DDDD and Like Numbers.
I never won in
the 369 and Singles and Pairs sections (although I only tried, five times). My
worst performance on a specific type of hand was “two numbers and dragon”: FF XXXX YYYY DDDD, whether one suit or
three, Consecutive, 1’s and 9’s or 2’s and 8’s. I played it fourteen times (18%
of my hands), but couldn’t manage one win!! Also, it became a running joke
about me and Soaps—anyone who’s read the blog or my book knows that I am loath
to pass Soaps in a Charleston. Sure enough, I never passed one, but I tried the
“2015” hands too often: 17% of the time. I only won 15% of those attempts.
As for which hand won each particular game, mine isn’t a
scientific sample—it’s just among the 76 games that I was a part of—but among
those, hands in the Singles and Pairs, Winds and Dragons, and Sevens sections
won least often (three, four, and three times, respectively). As for types of hands, those flexible, pairless
hands made up 33% of all wins. To
paraphrase Meghan Trainor: It’s all about the jokers.
Note: a 20% success rate put me in the middle of the pack of
128 players. In order to win a tournament, you need to win approximately two
hands every round (50%) and make as few errors as possible. That’s why mini’s
are worth trying: you only need to be hot for two or three rounds to end up “in
the money.”
I’m going to take a nap now. Talk to you soon.
Bubbe Fischer
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