That silver lining came to me once during one of yesterday’s hands. We have a habit of joking about “stingy” feeders – players who do not discard anything that the next player can chow and "taking revenge" during the next seat rotation. I was trying to make the below mixed straight hand (123D 456C 789B) and playfully complaining that SJ wasn’t being generous enough in her discards.
I couldn’t manage to draw the missing tiles for the straight myself and SJ wasn’t discarding them. This went on for quite a while.
We were into our third row of discards when I noticed a pattern in my tiles. By dint of drawing and discarding, suddenly I had the makings of a full flush hand in front of me – my silver lining!
At this point, EP discarded a 9B. I was, as usual, not paying too much attention at this point, and I konged the 9Bs. Now I wonder if punging them would have been a better strategy. I could always kong the 9B later if I had no use for it, and have one ready 789B set in the meantime.
The beautiful thing was that I drew another 8B slightly later and managed to make pungs of both 7B and 8B. I discarded all the other suit tiles in the process.
By not giving me what I wanted at the point I wanted it, I was now looking at a potential 40 points hand (full flush + pure shifted pungs) instead of a measly 10 points hand from mixed straight + all chows. In a way, I also now see how keeping hands concealed (to a certain point) have their uses.
Unfortunately this hand did not have a happy ending, all due to my own carelessness. Either I had forgotten to take my replacement tile when making the kong, or when declaring flowers, or I had forgotten to draw tiles before discarding. Whichever it was, I ended with one tile less in my hand after making the last pung. As a result, I couldn’t go out.
However, I am still grateful for that philosophical lesson that the hand highlighted.
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