This is not my blog.

Well, I guess that it's time to blog about it ... Scrabble! Okay, I've been good about Scrabble blogging this week (Inca) ... though I have blogged a few things over at the new team Scrabble blog that you can check out (favorite scrabble t-shirts and how to play muggles for example). We had our regular Scrabble Club meeting last Saturday. Those of us who attended the tournament (and not those posers like Raf) were talking about how much fun that we had. We had a new player show up who quickly schooled Martha while her husband watched and seemed relieved that he wasn't the object of her Scrabble thrashing this time. I ended up going 1-2 and dropped from 5th to 6th in our club's ratings but that's okay because I beat Brad Saturday and that's worth it all man!

My first game was with Brad and I thought "oh shit" since my last club or tournament game had been a total ass-kicking by Lisa. I drew to go first and just about shit when I saw that I had a bingo on my rack with GROTtOS! I played it 68 pts. and then Brad challenged it thinking it was GROTTOES*. It wasn't and I got to go again with BECOME for 18 pts. (check it out). It only took Brad two turns to drop his bingo of GOONIEST for 70 pts. but I stayed in the lead until about the mid point of our game. I took it back a few turns later with QUIPS and kept it with a final score of 384 to 356 (+18 pts. for me on the Scrabble guru). We sure played some odd words too. Brad had HILI, JEE, LEA, UNBE, RILL, and TURDS along with the phoney of BECOMER* that I didn't challenge. I didn't use any phoneys and managed to come up with words like TODDY, VANE, QADI, and KIVA. It was about 2/3 of the way through the game that Brad announced that he didn't think he could come back. Of course, I kept waiting for the second Bingo that never came and was thrilled when the game finally ended with my points ahead. Yay!

My celebration would end soon as I was up against Raf again. I had beat him once and he had beat me twice I think ... and he would again on Saturday. He got off to a good start with LAMENT for 18 pts. but I responded with the risky play TOWNY (15 pts.) which I wasn't sure of and Raf didn't challenge (turns out that it was good). Then I slammed down the highest single score of the meeting with the bingo BLInKED for 85 pts. Raf slowly caught up to me as my racks started to suck and then I found myself down in the points again with SITEING staring at me from my rack. I gave it a try and Raf challenged and we learned that SITEING* is a phoney (it would have been 89 pts. too ... damn). When I tried it again as the bingo IGNITES Raf almost took it except that I hooked it onto HUGE for HUGES* which Raf successfully challenged. Now I had lost two turns in a row and was decidedly down. Doing damage control I caught up a little and managed to draw a challenge by playing the suspicious looking RIF which Raf challenged while I made the joke that it was short for "Rif-Raf ... as in Raf" and then Raf lost his turn for an unsuccessful challenge. The final score was 371 to 328 with a -43 pts. for me. :-( It was still a good game though and I was joking with Raf about it. At one point I told him that I had gotten by with a good one on him because when I laid the blank for BLInKED I had meant for it to be a "Q". Raf thought about this for a minute and then he got it and had a good laugh over it ... while proceeding to kick my ass. Like a gentleman, Raf never tried any phoneys on me but he did manage words like SH, PICAS, and NEVE. I got the phoney LEENER* by him late in the game for 12 pts.

Now it was time to play Lisa again. Ugh. I'm now going to have a perpetual mental block to playing Lisa since this is the second time that she would hand me my worst defeat of the day. The final score had me in a 65 pt. deficit. Again, it seemed like my tile racks just continued to suck while Lisa plugged away with those very good plays mixed in with a lot of not very special ones (lulling me into a false sense of security). No bingos or phoneys were played in this game but it was still high scoring ... for Lisa at least. Rather than playing her bevy of vulgar words (I keed, I keed ... sort of) she played words like AMIS, SCAD, PRANK, and FLUB. I played consistently but not well with REV, NOG, KITE, GORES, OILY, and BEN (which Lisa thought about challenging but didn't). When the dust had cleared Lisa, who had led me the entire game, beat me 324 to 259 for a -65 for me and a 1-3 record against Lisa. Oh well, there is always next time!

As usual we all had fun. K-girl went and played Raf, Martha, and Brad ... all of who kicked her butt as they helped her learn how to play her tiles better for points ... I've mostly been working on her with word knowledge up to this point. K-girl played her mom this week in a very close game that had Kay winning by 3 points (well ... it was 238 to 227 because K-girl had points left in her rack when Kay went out). They saved their board for me to look at and it was dense since they were both playing while looking at a list of the 2 and 3 letter Scrabble words. I was very amused to see that someone had played TUP and told Kay what it meant later. :-) K-girl is certainly coming along with her Scrabble skillz and her little brother has been wanting me to show him lately too. I hope it will help both of their reading skills and their interest in language.

Check out all of my Scrabble posts here or from my blog's sidebar.

Labels: scrabble