I lost for six straight weeks. Not narrowly — comprehensively. I would sit down, build the wall, do the Charleston, and then spend the entire hand looking up at the card like it was going to tell me something new.
What I was doing was trying to find a hand on the card and then collect the tiles for it. Every week. It never worked, because by the time I had found a hand I liked, the tiles for it had been discarded by three other people who were faster than me.
Then one evening a woman at the table watched me do it for about twenty minutes and said, mildly, "Why don't you look at what you've got first?"
It sounds like nothing. It changed everything. The next week I looked at my rack before I looked at the card, picked the thing I was closest to, and committed. I still lost that week. The week after, I won twice.
The lesson was not about reading the card. It was about deciding. I had been keeping every option open for six weeks and calling it strategy.