This is not my blog.

Well, last weekend I went to Cleveland, OH and got my ass kicked in Scrabble by losing 12 of my 15 games. I mean, I wasn't terrible or anything but the tiles just weren't with me. I mean, I've heard this excuse before and didn't give it much credit ... but I now think that it's true. Brad told me this weekend, at our club meeting, that he has been having back luck with the tiles for a while. I can believe this as Brad and I both sucked in our respective divisions along with a fellow friend from another club as we all brought up the rear of our respective divisions and struggled to stay out of last place (which Brad and I did on spread points alone). Still, Brad lost a total of 80 ratings points last weekend and I lost a whopping 128 ratings points dropping from 812 to 684! That's lower than my initial rating of 715 after my first tournament earlier this year meaning that I've lost all of the points I had gained over the last 4 tournaments!

Oh well, I'll recover. According to the ratings system I tend to play in the 800 range at tournaments and this weekend I played in the high 500s. Either my ratings have been inflated or I just had a really, really, really bad weekend. I figure that I'll bounce back ... it may take a few tournaments but I bet I'll be knocking on the door of 900 by this time next year if I haven't gotten there yet. My goal was to break 800 by the end of the year and I did that in Lexington a few weeks ago so I'm happy. This weekend I was able to bounce back a little bit. I won 2 of my 3 games in club and while that doesn't count toward my national rating it makes me feel good. Here I was just after beating the lovely Lisa who usually beats me pretty badly. She was having an off day and I was playing pretty well coming off of a defeat by Brad who bingoed with ElIXIRs. I was proud of my game with Brad though because I played a bunch of words that I never would have played this time last year just from picking them up in club and tournament play. I put down AALII on my second play and also played words like TIPI and VEXT where I could use the points and the play. So it was a good day for Scrabble.

Here are some game boards from the Cleveland weekend and you can click here to go to my backdated post about how the actual tournament went (dated for last weekend) if you really want to know the blow by blow and the geeky details. Enjoy! BTW, the first three boards here were made by our very own Tina who cleaned up at this last tournament which you can read all about here on our Scrabble Club blog!

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

Labels: scrabble, travel