Second tournament: One day in Philadelphia

On Saturday I stayed with my friends Tyler and Stefanie in W. Chester, PA. The next day they followed me into Philly for the tournament. Despite my warnings of boredom they wanted a first-hand glimpse of the competitive Scrabble world. While I played my first game, they sat across the room on a little sofa. After the game I went over to them.
"I lost," I told them.
"Oh, that's too bad," Tyler said, "well, we're gonna go now, good luck."
"Yeah, good luck, we're gonna go now, there's not really much to do here." Stefanie followed.
Well, they were warned.

Berndette Buckley handed me the loss I told them about. She played well, and I could never get anything going. I lost the second game also to a woman whose name I don't recall to fall to 0-2. Bad plays beget bad luck and that's exactly what happened. With the game pretty close and about 20 tiles or so left I had TARRING on my rack. The only place to play it required a hook of FUME to FUMER. I was about 50-50 on whether or not FUMER was valid (it is). Instead of playing it though, I played RERATING through the E. I was about 80-20 that RERATING was invalid, but I played it anyway following the assinine rationale that she would be less likely to challenge RERATING than FUMER. She challenged RERATING right off the board, and blocked the spot. That was my bad play, then came my bad luck. With the game still very close and the bag almost empty I had a rack with no vowels. She played QUOTE for 15 points vertically down the second to last column with the E in the second to last row. I had both an R and a D and had I had a single vowel, I could've hit up a triple word score that hooked QUOTE. As it were I had to play elsewhere and she hit up the triple and subsequently edged me by a few points.

I was not happy about being 0-2 in division 4. (I later found out that due to a misspelling of my last name I came in as an unrated player. I should've been in D3.) I wanted to move up, and I was off to a bad start. I don't do Tai-Chi in my yard before I play, nor do I receive acupuncture, but I do think Joe Edley has got it right with his even-keel mentality, so I did my best to block out the losses and just focus on my current play in my current game. It worked, and I started winning. In fact I won the rest of my games, and due to my high spread I finished in second place. Ron Millard, the man who edged me in the bingo derby in D.C., took first prize by going 6-1. On cross-tables it has me listed as coming in first, because Ron had a bye, so we each had 5 wins against actual opponents, and I had the better spread, but Ron actually won. Given my bad start though I was satisfied with second.

My rating actually went down after this tournament, but it's still above 1100 which hopefully is good enough to qualify me for D3. I don't like D4. I'll give a few examples why. In one game (actually a rematch against my opponent in the second loss) my opponent kept making comments like, "oh, you're so serious," and "oh, you're on a mission." I guess she was implying that I should lighten up or something, but I was just concentrating. I wanted to make the best plays I could -- that's where all the enjoyment comes from for me. Then, in a different game, this woman played TE, so I challenged. And she said (in what I think was a German accent), "Fine, I vill just take it off then." She wouldn't even go to the computer. Later she played ZEN, which again I challenged, and she said "Ugh... you just spend zee time going up and down, up and down to zee computer. I vill just check on this." And she pulls out the list of threes, "Oh I see it is zin I vas thinking of, not zen." "Yeah," I was thinking, "why don't you play that on your next turn, now." It was absurd. Also I don't know where she got off complaining about challenges, because she challenge every good play I had -- common words like OUTLIER and QUOTA. At the end of the game I had the rack AEELNRT and I know the 3 bingos in it, so I played ENTERAL instead of the other playable one ETERNAL thinking she would challenge, which she did. I got so many extra plays that game. I crushed her, but it wasn't an enjoyable game. I don't think you run into players like her in the higher divisions.

The only big name player there was Marlon Hill who won division 1. Before the awards were presented I was chatting with him and he was complaining about the $140 grand prize. It is a pretty paltry purse for the division one champ. I took home $80 for second prize in D4.