This is not my blog.

Well, day one of the Third Annual Scrabble Tournament is over and I did much better than I had expected. I had thought that maybe I'd win 2 or 3 games out of the 12 and today I ended 5-3 and ranked 4th in my Division as the only unranked player in the top 10 (out of 15). In fact, as we went through the rounds I found that I never dropped lower than 7th. I don't know how that is possible and I don't really hope to hold that through tomorrow ... well ... I hope to hold it but I don't expect to. We'll see. Of the three people ahead of me I've lost to two of them who are both 7-1 and the third place guy is 6-2 and I play him tomorrow. I'm the only 5-3 player so one more loss will probably drop me pretty far since the eight next people below me are 4-4. Still, wow! I just can't get over it! I even made the Charleston morning paper as there was a guy there taking pictures and our club director sent him my way since I was a local player who was working on finishing up a game (that I won) before lunch. Winning my last game of the day won me a lottery ticket for the next Powerball.

There are more than 50 people from 13 states at the tournament and they are all sorts of interesting types. Kay asked me if anyone looked too weird and I mentioned this guy who must want to stand out by dressing as a uber-nerd purposefully (as he does seem to try to draw attention to himself). I don't know him and he isn't in my division. I also don't care to know him either as he seems pretty arrogant. There is also a guy playing who is supposedly famous for doing a nationwide campaign to visit every Starbucks Coffee in the USA. I didn't meet him but he seemed ... well ... a bit too intense for me. So far all of the people that I've played and spoken with have been very polite, conversational, and friendly ... well ... except for the 14 year old kid who is currently winning my division ... he was a fierce competitor and I was lucky that I only lost to him by 33 points since he skunked fellow club member Lisa by over 130! I had some very tense games but the worst was against an attorney from Ohio that was so close we did a recount and saw that lawyers truly can't count ... I still won but by an even larger margin after finding a nine mistakes.

I'm pretty tired from loading images into my blog for later play-by-play commentaries so I'm just going to give a postmortem overview while I still have the chance to do a little bragging since I was in the zone today and may not be tomorrow. I really just picked up steam as I went and kept managing my clock well and ended the last game with over 8 minutes left (something that never happens). So today I played 7 games and had one bye as my first match (during which I walked around taking pictures of the interesting stickers and plates on peoples' cars). Out of those 7 games my average game score was 353 pts. with my highest game being 419 pts. (I had four games in the top 20 game scores for my division). I managed to play 5 bingos (playing all your tiles for a 50 pt. bonus) today versus the 3 that were played against me. In one of my games I managed to get 2 bingos in the same game and still didn't win it! My highest play was the bingo STYLISTS for 93 pts. Currently my point spread is +173 which is supposed to be very good meaning that I will have a very nice rating at the end of this tournament if I don't slip too badly tomorrow. At the conclusion of the tournament I will get my official national ranking! I also tracked how many phoneys (or fake words) that I played and had played against me. I played 12 and got caught on 2 of them versus 6 played against me where I caught 3 of them. I didn't play them in every game and only about half of them were blatantly intentional on my part (unfortunately for Tina I got 4 past her in my last game of the day).

I'll leave you with a picture list of some of the interesting and varied custom boards that I saw at the tournament (check out the one that is built with legos) . When I watched Word Wars they remarked about the custom boards of some players as a rare thing but there are very few non-custom boards at our tourney. I have a non-custom board but it is also a limited edition board that I got from eBay for a steal. The board pictured here is the standard deluxe board from before the 75th anniversary. I didn't see any more recent standard boards today. Here are most of the rest. Everyone in tournaments also use custom tiles that are flat so you can't feel the letter that is on them (or more specifically the lack of a letter). Click each picture for a larger version.













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