Par for the course

I went 2-2 AGAIN. I lost my first game to Adam, I was drawing horribly, but I knew it was going to be a tough game, so I decided to take the 11 or 14 points for my two/three letter words rather than exchange tiles completely. I still don't have a sense of when taking the zero is your best play (except in the obvious all vowels or all consonants scenarios.) I have been studying the top hundred stems, but despite their *supposed* high probability, I didn't get 'em once in that game. (Okay, I did manage to get adeeils, but there was no where to play it, so I dumped the extra e and drew...an e! Having already wasted a turn drawing for my bingo, I decided to fish again. I dumped the e and drew...oh yeah, that's right, an e. But I kept opening up new lines, so I was finally able to play it. But he came back with a 50 point Zee play and that was that.
My second game was against a guy I had never seen before, I was drawing crap, but decided to play the craziest fours/fives I could in order to draw challenges. I played zincy, dawk, zoon...but he didn't challenge anything, plus he drew both blanks, all the esses...bah...I draw so bad, but still he only won by 32 points.
My first win came against a newbie who was still on the cheat sheet. He played two phoneys on me: barfers and voom. I was ahead by a lot and thought barfers might be good, so I didn't challenge; voom gave me a place to dump five tiles, so I let it stay.
My last game was supposed to be against Barbara (who is still telling the annoying story about how I played raisens instead of arsines) but when she saw she was going to play me, she said she was too tired and went home. Joel took her place. I was so not happy. I didn't need a 1-3 night. Luckily there was one game still going, so I got to play the winner. She was an intermediate player from Telaviv, so Joel let her use the cheat sheet for nonSowpods words. I opened with rex, she bingoed with "bingoed" I held the play and after thinking, I challenged. I vaguely remembered that bingoed is a famous nongo. I was right, I dumped a u under the x, and she came back with exuding, I bingoed with steeling through her g and then bingoed on my next turn with tortoise through the ess in steeling, she bingoed with ablation, but then I played za with the Zee on the triple letter square going two ways for 64. I owned this game. I was bashing her head in...and then, she played jigs/ablations for 90-odd points. Gross. I started fishing...I had saltini then saltinn then sartini...blech, she had taken the lead...then she played some word which made eel. I had just complete my satine rack, and played sinuate on top of eel. I wasn't sure seel was good, so I sweated it when she challenged. But it was good and she lost a turn, so I won by almost a hundred!