No tourneys for a while

Looks like I won't be playing any tourneys for a while. I missed Philly this month, and I'll likely miss it next month due to end of the semester ruckus. I really wanted to play a one-dayer in Annapolis on May 12, but I have to proctor my class' final that day -- unfortunate scheduling.

I've started building my rating back up again on-line after a serious slide (see previous entry). I paid for a membership, so that I can use the in-game examiner -- totally worth it. I'm still missing way too many plays that I should see. Tonight I had AIORST? with an E on the board that could end a bingo. JAROSITE, TRAVOISE and OUTRAISE are all words I know from the OSATIRE stem, but for some reason I missed them. Probably just not thinking things through. That's my biggest problem. I just don't spend enough time looking at my racks, which is silly because I'm rarely short on time. I'm still making my best play consistently enough even when it's a word I know. Still tonight I best Eric 3 games out of 4, which is a boon, even if I did mostly outdraw him. My best find was probably STADIUM from ADISTU?, because it was the only playable bingo.

I've got loads of new stems. I'll put them up soon. I think I'm starting to get dimishing returns with my stems. I'd probably be better off learning the 4s and 5s better. It's just way less fun than learning the bingos.

By the way, the Scrabble Newsletter is a pretty shoddy publication. Trust me, I'm not expecting much from a monthly newsletter put together by basically an unpaid staff, that comes free with a membership to the NSA, but is too much to ask to have somebody give it a cursory read before putting it out? In one recent issue the annotated game board was aligned incorrectly making it impossible to follow, and in another a bunch of clues were missing for the anagram crossword puzzle. Those are things that should be pretty easy to spot and fix. Also, what's the deal with the giant barcode that's always somewhere random on the front page? Can't they put that in the corner? It blocked an entire paragraph of text in the most recent issue, and in the issue that featured the record-breaking game it was right over the picture. Front page -- two guys holding the board and right across their faces is a huge barcode. Great pic. All you have to do to make the newsletter decent is not do stuff like that.

Scrabble Low

This weekend might have been the worst two on-line Scrabble days I've had. I remember a time when I temporarily retired from on-line Scrabble that was also pretty bad but this probably topped it. I lost somewhere in the neighborhood of 15 games in a row. I stayed up until 3:22 am -- on a Sunday -- because I needed a win. Stomping Mr. Cqql into submission -- he called me a cheater and logged off after I bingoed the extremely obscure word SOGGIER -- was little consolation. Every time I needed a break I didn't get it.

I wanted to make note of this.