Living room Scrabble

I haven't played non timed livingroom Scrabble since July 2007...it might have been July 1, 2007, if I recollect correctly. I was visiting my friends in D.C., a husband and wife duo which had been cleaning my clock at Scrabble for nearly ten years. They were so nuts about Scrabble that they brought the game with them to the delivery room when their daughter was born. They were very good, but after a year or so of playing tournament Scrabble, I was better. And that day in July, I won both games and pretty handily, they promptly vowed never to play me in Scrabble again. Truth be told, although I enjoyed beating them, without the fast paced action induced by the clock, I was a little bored. So I gave up on livingroom Scrabble too and just played with my fellow New York wordfreaks. But this week I'm out visiting my friends in Utah and one of them has just started to play the game with her friends. On the drive back from the airport she told me an all too familiar tale about losing all the time and needing a Scrabble tutor. So tonight we went over to her friends house, after going over some simple Scrabble strategies and played with her neighbors. They have some quirky rules, like one person keeps score (and hell, as long as that person ain't me, I was cool with it), you get to look up words before you play them AND once the blank is played, you can replace it with the actual letter, if you have it, as long as you use it on your next play. And of course, no clock. I got the sense that my friend usually loses during these games, so I went in with the express purpose of winning and winning by a lot...these house rules definitely helped. I pretty much reused those blanks on every other turn to bingo and I could look up the words I wasn't sure about to boot! Throated, roached, beadily - all good! All bingos! I also got to showoff my ever growing impressive anagramming skills. It was super fun...plus, I think I've infected a whole community in Utah with my Scrabble obsession. Throated! That was an awesome play. I also had the oppurtunity to triple triple with anles?? Through a d, but just couldn't come up with anything and I felt like a jerk taking twenty minutes trying to find it when I had a million sevens. It was annoying though. I could have also regular tripled with some eight ending in an e with those same letters, but nothing. I ended up playing antlers/ami for 63. Bah.