Greetings and salutations from your always analytical Bubbe!
Yesterday, I had the pleasure of playing with a different group than usual. Unfortunately, I could not find my card.
"That's okay," I said, "I'll probably just play the same five or six hands, anyway."
Everyone was very kind and, since we were playing with a bettor, each one was willing to share her card with me when she was betting. Some had the big print, some had the small print. The one thing that each card had was a little indicator marking every hand that the owner had won.
It was cute. There were dots, or little stars, in blue or black ink. One woman had even glued on little gems--bedazzled, I guess you'd call it. At the end of November, a little over halfway through this card, they'd each "made" about 70 percent of the hands.
As we played, I realized that, even with their sharing, I WAS playing certain hands more frequently than others. I probably could have gotten away with not using the card, after all.
One of the other ladies remarked that she often finds herself playing variations on the knit hand, this year. She was winning with it; I was winning with it.
As a reminder, it's AAAA BBB CCCC DDD where A and C are kongs of the same suit, B and D are pungs of a different suit, and "D" really does stand for "Dragon." The A, B, and C can be consecutive numbers; they can be 3,6,9; they can be 1,3,5 or 5,7,9. As long as the pung of "B" matches the dragon's suit, and the two kongs are both from one of the opposite suits, it works.
It's a very versatile hand. If you find that you've started collecting numbers in different suits and have a dragon here or there, you might be able to finagle your tiles into one of these hands. Of course, it really helps to have jokers...
It got me thinking, though. She said was winning a lot with this hand. While she and her friends (and probably many of you!) keep track of which hands they've won, there's no reflection of how often they've won with each hand. Likewise, there's no record of how often they've crashed and burned, trying for a Singles and Pairs hand....
I have a geeky proposal for my readers. Next time you play, try to keep track and forward the information to me at bubbefischer@gmail.com. Tell me which hands you ended up playing, and specifically which ones you WON! I'll be very curious to see, and happy to share the results.
Talk to you soon!
Bubbe Fischer
