Greetings and salutations from your coach and cheerleader, Bubbe. Today I'm going to be using a lot of W words: what, why, where, when--and ideally, "WIN"!
You may recall Bubbe's central philosophy, that this game involves a great deal of luck (about 70%)--but the flip side is that 30% is skill. "Luck favors the prepared mind": in order to maximize that 30 percent "skill," you have to prepare your mind. How? KNOW THE CARD. Don't be afraid of any one section, recognize as many of the hands as possible so that you can entertain all the options that are available to you. Think, plan, and execute.
A key part of planning is not only choosing a hand, but having a backup hand as well. Understand the various hands' relationships to one another so you can recognize other options if they start to appear. Extra jokers, Flowers or dragons, or pairs you never thought you could attain--any of them could create possible alternatives. Likewise, if people expose or discard tiles, preventing your access, you may no longer be able to make your original hand. You don't want to be stuck in a corner, gazing mournfully at your tiles when your hand goes dead, because you didn't have any better ideas. Know WHAT other hands you might play, and also WHEN to make the jump to plan B. Then begin implementing the new plan.
I reiterate:
Be prepared.
Know the card.
Identify at least one backup hand.
Know when and how to switch from one hand to another.
WHY is a backup plan essential? If you've read my tournament summaries, you know I keep statistics about what I am dealt (how many jokers, how many Flowers), and what hand I think I am playing at the end of the Charleston. Then, when each game ends, I write down what I actually ended up playing; how many jokers and Flowers I have at the end of the game; what the winning hand was; and how many jokers were in it. I have consistently found that my hand CHANGED 50 percent of the time, from the Charleston to the end of the game--and the wins occurred more often in games where I switched my hand!
Using backup hands brings your game to another level. You'll WIN more, and even when you don't win, you won't be stuck on the sidelines when your original plan falls through.
Is Bubbe going to give you the backup plan for every hand on the card? No. I'm going to give you some essential thinking points and some examples, but my whole point in everything I do is for you to become your own Bubbe!!
I will start, today, with choosing backup hands, including WHERE they might be found.
Once again, you must KNOW THE CARD, every hand, every section. I didn't say memorize. I said "know": recognize, consider, understand. We all have our own learning styles. That's why I come up with all those goofy mnemonics and pattern nicknames, to think about the hands creatively. You might learn better forming hands in front of you on your rack, or playing against the bots for hours on end so that you see every kind of hand being played.
Why the whole card? Because sometimes you will switch within the same section, but often you may actually switch to a hand in a totally different section.
I've already written about how to switch from Y1 to W2. [Reminder: this is what my abbreviations mean] This illustrates an important lesson about the "WHERE" of backup hands: those two are far apart on the card, but that doesn't matter! Don't fixate on their "sections" so much as their components: in this famous example, both required Flowers and multiple kongs of dragons.
In identifying backup hands, you need to think outside the box, or rather, outside the immediate sections of the card. SP hands are really stripped down versions of other sections: this year's SP1 is very literally a Winds and Dragons hand, and SP6 is a 369 hand. SP2 is an Odd hand, SP5 is an Even hand. SP3 and SP4 are CR hands. Quints are (sometimes) "supersize" versions of other hands; Q2 is the most obvious example, but there are others.
I also want you to remember that even though they have their own section, Like Numbers are all over the place on the card. We see them in Y2 and Y3, E2, Q3, W4, and 3 #5. You could even say that hands like E4, CR6 and SP2 draw on Like Numbers, because of how they use pairs.
Consecutive numbers are also useful in developing backup hands. This ties into what I have said, in previous year summaries, about ambiguous exposures. On the 2022 card, an ambiguous exposure of 333 5555 could be part of CR5.2--but it might be O3a or O6a. Since two of those three are "pung, kong" hands, no one would be able to call your hand dead!
I will not provide you with a Rosetta Stone for deciphering every single option/combination of backup hand. I want to encourage you to find your own similarities among hands!
I'll be back soon to delve deeper into WHEN and HOW to switch hands. If you have any questions or comments, feel free to contact me at bubbefischer@gmail.com
Bubbe
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