Earning my Scrabble Dork badge one day at a time

So, I'm playing with Adam, one of my Scrapple friends, and he turns his rack around to show me that he drew satinea out of the bag.
"Can you believe that!" He says shuffling the tiles around in front of my face even though we both know that there are only two bingoes there.
Finally he plays "entasia" and I say "ooh, entasia...good find...I can't believe it only took you ten minutes."
Everyone laughs.
See, because that's not really a good find. It doesn't even really count as a find. At least not by Adam. Some Scrabble guy in olden times found it.

I love this game

I had one of my rare 3-1 nights at the club. My first game was against this guy Steve, who plays a sickly devastating closed board game, which as Alceste well knows, is the best defense against my bingo-dependent game. I lost by 155 points. Which made me sad. I was then pitted against a newbie, which made me happy because I handily crushed her with little resistence. She challenged basinets -- when I bingeod on the triple line. Grin. Hmm...I know it's good, but now that I look at it in print, I guess it does look funny. Okay, I take back my hysterical laughter inside.
Then I had to play. Niki. She was my very first opponent at the club ever. She's super nice and friendly-- and I'm not just saying that because people at the club know about my blog now. But she is also very competitive. Plus, she has always beaten me. You obviously know where this story is going.



I bingoed on her early - QUARTOS (seriously, how do I ever lose at Scrabble when I can play a word like quartos. Man, if it weren't for luck in Scrabble, I'd win every time.) She drew both blanks and bingoed back with serener to take the lead. I had a z in my rack (which I drew after the quartos move) and there were two places to play it two ways on a double letter square, but I didn't have an a. And then I became obsessed with getting the damn A. I musta wasted three turns trying for it, so she took an even more substantial lead, but I finally got my gitdanged A and played Azo and Za, to pull back into twenty points of her. We went on like this for a while, until she played unflat -- which I stupidly didn't challenge -- and jumped out to a 36 point lead. I had saiines on my rack, in the end game. There was an open t on th etriple line at the bottom, so I played off one of my i's knowing that I could bingo with whatever I drew next. But I hadn't been tracking and there were NO TILES LEFT IN THE BAG. Muzzerfocker.
Now I had six tiles left, she used the T to play total and I was down by 33, with no possibility to bingo out.
I wanted to cry.
Instead, I sat there pouting for five minutes until I decided to add ise to total and hit the triple on the other side with totalise, for 24 points. She laughed at my desperation play AND CHALLENGED! IT WAS GOOD! And it turns out I miscalculated and the play was actually worth 27 points! Now I was within 6 -- and she lost a turn. All I had to do now was go out and I could win!
And i said so. Out loud.
"I know what you have, you can't go out," fired back.
I stared at my remaining tiles of san. And pretty much as soon as she finished that sentence I saw the open w.
"Yes, I can!!"
And I played swan. And I won. BY 3 points. SO SICK.
My last game was against a charming British fellow. The first time we played, he was just off the boat and still playing sowpods words, so I won just by challenging them off. But he's a very very good player, so I was not looking forward to playing him now that he'd gotten the hang of OWL.
Our game started off being very closed:
Crap...thought I had a picture. Anyway, I did one of my cute sandwich played where I played faith right under his word, making like six words for 40 points. He came back with sick sandwich move of his own -- under that!
Then I bingoed with sextain, but I had been fishing for it for a while, so he had a 100 point lead on me, so that barely brought me back...I bingoed again with triages to take the lead. In the last play of the game he bingoed with renotice through a c on the triple line, putting him ahead by 16 points. I was all...crap. And was about to cry, when he was like "um...it's the last play, if I were you I'd challenge."
"Oh yeah....challenge," I said sheepishly.
It was no good.
I went out and won the game pretty handily.

Mazeltov!

I played Scrabble with Fisch yesterday. He conceded this game after I back to back bingoed and he back to back unsuccessfully challenged. This made me happy. And then we played a game a for money and I also won.

He then chose to wreck the board:


And then paid me my money. This also made me happy.

He is a very good player though. Every game is a sweat. But mostly cause I can't regulate the heat in my apartment.

HA

My mother insists on calling the people I play with "your Scrapple friends." This, however, is an improvement over "your Snapple friends," which was the term du jour just a few months ago.

Genius? Or Fool?

First game of a mini Scrabble tournament, you are the notorious Dawn Summers. Your first match is against your own Scrabble student, who actually has shown marked improvement and whose results against you in recent weeks have been disturbingly good. Now leaving aside some early round mistake you make fishing for the n to complete your satine rack, you are now down by 60 points. However, your student is already over by 1 minute on the clock. So, really you are down by 50. You have a bingo on your rack: Uterine or reunite. (Online anagrammer also says retinue, but you didn't know that word then.) There is no place to put it.
The turn, you played an a to open up a bingo lane on the triple line, unfortunately you didnt draw any letters that would go in front of ae.
Your student, usually predisposed to taking any open triple line, instead plays on the inside. So, you get a flash of brilliance. You pass your turn. No letter exchange, just pass. Again, she plays something on the inside. You pass again. Now she's down by four minutes on her clock.
She makes another inside move. You are now down by eighty, but her clock is running and you have plenty of time.
You pass again. She passes. You pass. She passes.
Now, there is a little known rule that when you have three sucessive passes by both players, the game is over. So, you play uterine down the triple line forming eae. She challenges it off the board and passes her turn.
You then play reunite in the same spot. Again, she challenges it off the board and passes her turn.
Now, another player that is just watching calls the floor for a ruling that the game is over.
I vehemently disagree. "I didn't pass."
I was then told that the rule is three sucessive "scoreless" rounds by each player.
I am mad, but I break up the bingo and just play two words. One five letter word. She passed. And then I played a two letter word to go out. She then showed me her rack. In addition to going over on the clock by 6 minutes, for sixty points for me. She had a q, two vees, a cee, a dee and an A on her rack, for another 42 points to me. There was some discrepancy with the scoring, which we couldn't resolve because she learned how to keep a scoresheet from me and um...I don't know how to keep a score sheet...but in the end we decided that she won by three points.
So I started regretting passing my earlier turns...but she said she drew the vees and the q in those last three turns, so I just would have been stuck with them and would have lost anyway.
So, I don't know...I think my strategy was sound. Why I went on to lose two out of the next three games, on the other hand...bad mazel yo.

Holes

I was triple tripled on for the third time in four weeks last night.



Now, since most people never see triple triples in their lifetimes...let along three in less than a full fricking month...I gotta say, it's probably my utter lack of any defensive game that is resulting in these repeated humiliations.

My offensive game on the other hand...getting better everyday:

With four tiles left in the bag, I was down by 54 in a game against Dee and I managed to find a bingo that hit the triple word score that ended in an s and had an s as the third to last letter.

Quote of the Day

"Dawn! You suck" Adam after I showed him my rack of LAMNATE and bemoaned my fate because their was no open i, only to have my opponent play zinc with her next turn with the z under the double word square, so I immediately and I mean spastimmediately played le on top of the z for lez and 24 points instead of laminate.

Also, not so random thought, it's a bad fracking scene when you can't beat the person who taught you to play or the person you taught to play.