Nerd Alert: MORE about CR 5!

Greetings and salutations from Bubbe, who wants to digress for a moment about CR 5.

That’s my short-hand name for the fifth hand in the Consecutive Runs section of this year’s card. Perhaps you’ve seen it:

                                        FFF 1111 2222 DDD

Bubbe’s just kidding. Of COURSE you’ve seen it. Everyone’s seen it, it comes up all the time. It’s a very straightforward hand: you have two numbers in a row, but you need something else to make a total of 14 tiles. Some Flowers, some of the matching Dragons, and voila. 

The required quantity of each tile varies from year to year. There have been cards like 1995 where the hand involved kongs of the numbers and Dragons, completed with a pair of Flowers:

                                       FF 1111 2222 DDDD

There have been cards like 2013 where the hand included kongs of Flowers and numbers and the Dragons were the required pair:

                                       FFFF 1111 2222 DD

And then, of course, there have been cards like 2016 when there was NO “Consecutive Run with matching Dragons” hand, and everyone moaned and sighed because they missed it.

This year's iteration—pungs and kongs—is the first version that I can recall that doesn’t use any pairs. Open hands that don't require any singles or pairs are MUCH easier because you can use Jokers for any exposure. They can’t go “dead”: for example, even if someone exposed all four of the Dragons that you need, you could still use three Jokers to complete the hand.

As I said in my article about tournament statistics, CR 5 was the winning hand in nine of the 38 non-wall games I witnessed—that’s 24%. It was far and away the most prevalent winner out of dozens of options. In general, the number of each type of winning hand from my small sample was:

                Two pungs, two kongs: 16  (42%)

                Three kongs and a pair: 10   (26%)

                 Four pungs and a pair (all closed hands): 4  (11%)

                 A kong, two pungs, two pairs:  3  (8%)

                 Any kind of quint:  3  (8%)

    Two kongs, three pairs: 1 (2.5%)

     Singles and pairs ONLY:  1 (2.5%)

               

In previous years, I have written about “old reliable” hands. There is one always listed at CR 2, the second hand in the Consecutive Runs section. It involves two pungs and two kongs, in two suits; sometimes it is two pungs in suit A, followed by two kongs in suit B; sometimes it is pung/kong in suit A, then pung/kong in suit B. It is a very simple hand: no pairs, open, easy to call for, never goes dead. Easy-peasy.

I think that this year, because it involves the Flowers and only one suit, CR5 has surpassed CR2 in popularity. 

What do you think? Is anyone else willing to keep a list on their weekly game and let me know which hands won, throughout the day? You can include how many ended as wall games.  You don’t have to track Jokers and Flowers, just write down the appropriate letter for the section and which hand in that group (e.g. Y3 is the third 2019 hand, E5 is the fifth 2468/EVEN hand).

Send me your results (photo or typed out) at bubbefischer@gmail.com and we’ll see what kind of patterns we find.

Thanks for participating—I think I’ll have a free giveaway of both of my novels (Small World and Take Two), chosen randomly among the respondents!

I look forward to hearing from you soon!

Bubbe Fischer

PS Many thanks to Nina H for the above photo. She recently played a game where ALL FOUR PLAYERS were going for CR 5!!!