Thursday, January 15, 2009

And now for another segment of things Joel says

So, it's my first day back at the club after my second place finish in AC and my new four digit rating. Now, I'm not expecting confetti or balloons...I mean, it's not like I came in first or anything, but I figure a "hey, good job" from our Director might be possible. Okay, I'm kidding, I didn't think that was possible, he is Joel, after all. However, when he says "Wow, you finally had a good tournament, what happened?" I smile and reply "got lucky, I guess." And without missing a beat, he says "I'd say."
Ah, that wacky wacky Joel.
Later in the night he yells at me for missing obvious bingoes in my rack. (In my defense I had ?litter, but the only space open for it was like a spot worth 59 points and I thought it was worth it to burn a play and give myself a chance for more points, so I just played off a t--which is what Joel saw-- and then I bingoed on my next turn with lustier. In Joel's defense, lustier didn't score all that many more points and it gave Jim a spot on the triple line to play zoon and basically halve my bingo anyway...what? Scrabble is hard.)
I had a 1-3 night. I won my first game against this guy, who I can't remember if I've played before...but he let me get away with bingoing with tiniests, so I dunno how often he's played, but the best part of the game was when I needed to find an outplay ending in a and my rack was aemost? I had been studying the solate stem all afternoon (though I couldn't remember the em one for the life of me...stupid maltose. Not that it would have fit...but still, what's the point of studying if you can't remember it during a game. Stupid maltose. Anyway, I had lots of time, so I shuffled and shuffled and shuffled till I found it! The only a ending bingo in the rack! Osteoma! (It was played on my ass during that "Scrabble Open" I did in Albany and oh, how it hurt then.) My opponent challenged it, but it was good and he said it was the most painful experience in his life...I said, it didn't even rank in the top ten things that happened to me during that Open, but that it did hurt enough that I will never forget the word. I also assured him that it helps the pain to play it on someone else. Heh.
My next two games were against people that I have never beaten, including the famous Jim Piazza. The first game against Baraba, I drew so horribly...blech, five to a stem racks and then I'd get a cee and a y to complete nothing...over and over again till I'd give up on the rack, play some four letter word and then draw a new five to a stem rack. Sucky. But she has absolutely no respect for my game, so I challenged off her phony bingo and when she opened up a bingolane on the triple line, I bingoed on her ass with ruinate. Unfortunately, there were still four tiles in the bag, so I didn't go out and she was able to dump her c and v for enough points to hold on to a eight point win.
Then I played Jim Piazza, I outbingoed him 3-0, got both blanks and he won by sticking me with the q in the end. Cest la vie. (The worst part is, when I had my first bingo, I had like satineq, so I traded in and put the q back. When I got my next bingo I had seaqrn?, So once again, I threw the q back. And of course, the last five tiles that are left in the bag when I draw them qrfat. Bah.
And then my last game, because he wants to reinforce the fact that I suck at Scrabble, my AC tournament results notwithstanding, was against Joel himself.
He got both blanks, bingoed on me twice, kept the board on absolute lockdown and then after blowing me out by 200 points, he said "HOS is a word, so it doesn't matter what else was on your rack, AH was an awful play."
I wanted to tell him that I KNOW HOS is a word! I FOUND OSTEOMA!!!!
But I don't want to get banned.

1 comment:

NancyK said...

Dude, let's play Teaneck - filling up fast so hurry up! And playing Port Jefferson the following week, wanna do it? But you can't play raisens!! It's ARSINESSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSSS!!!!