Rating slip

My rating dropped from 1450 to 1407 after my weak performance in Philly -- not too bad, I guess. I won't play a tournament for a while, so it'll stay there for a spell. There is a tourney in York, PA only a few hours from here this weekend, but I can't make it. I imagine the next one I play will be the next Sunday-er in Philly, probably next month. There was no Philly tourney one this month.

I've been playing a fair amount on-line (about 2 games a day) and studying stems while I exercise. I'll give the new stems I've learned below. What I really need to do is get the 3s down 100% (about 99% now), get the short J-Q-X-Z words and vowel dumps down 100% (about 90% now), and start putting a dent in the 4s (not sure what % I'm at now). The things is, I enjoy studying the bingo stems much more than anything else, so that's mainly what I study. Plus I really can't devote any time to it outside of my allotted exercise/study-word time. I do have other things going on.

One small consolation from the last Philly tourney is that I tracked and scored almost perfectly. To keep those skills sharp I'm playing a 5 game series against Eric this weekend -- $1 per game and $.01 per point. One of my goals is to be able to play .500 against Eric, so this will be an indication of how far I have to go (although 5 is a small sample size).

I was playing on-line the other day, a 3 minute game, and my rack was EIKLNRT. I wanted to play TINKLER, but it didn't fit, so I just laid down TRINKLE in utter haste thinking, "what the heck, maybe it's valid." My opponent didn't challenge and instead laid down EXED extending TRINKLE to TRINKLED for 60+ points. I did challenge and since neither TRINKLE nor TRINKLED is valid, EXED came off. I made a play and then my opponent played just ED again making TRINKLED for 30+ points, obviously she thought EXED was the problem the first time, but that's a valid play. I challenged. Again her play came off the board. She then sent me a message that said, "That was really mean, trinkle isn't even a word!" I wrote back saying, "I wasn't sure. That's what challenge is for." After the game I thought about what she said and I came to the conclusion that it's not at all mean. There are basically two reasonable schools of thought you can have on this issue and neither lead to meanness.
1) It's perfectly okay to play any word at anytime regardless of validity. That's what the challenge is for. If your opponent doesn't like you playing phoneys they can challenge, or if they are on-line they can play the void mode.
2) It's poor sportsmanship to play words you know for sure are phoneys. Even if you believe this, I didn't know with 100% certainty the word was phoney. Surely you don't have to be 100% certain on every word you play, as that takes a significant factor of risk vs. reward completely out of the game. Let's say I'm 60% certain a word is good and it's a huge score with the next best play being a very small score. From an expected value standpoint it might be completely worth it to play the word. Now, if they extend my questionable word via a D or an S for a huge amount of points, then that is a risk on their part that they should have considered. Again, from an expected value standpoint it might be completely worth it to challenge. In both cases I could have made what I thought was the best play without trying to trick or deceive my opponent. There is no meanness in that.

Anyway, some new stems:

STONIE -- WATSON WILL RAX THAT LIMP BITCH
RANEES -- MOTTO: LOOK GOOD CROW ON
DARTLE -- ADIOS WAXY SET
ORATES -- HEAR THE ENDLESS CHAMP GAB
ENTERS -- GOES INSIDE A COUPLES VERY WAXY YURT
LINTER -- A GOOSY KID
ARDENT -- CUB VIG SUX
SEALER -- EPOXY STOPPED THE VEXING NICK
RETIES -- A HEP DAZED MAN KVETCHES AND RELACES
RAINED -- POURING BIG CATS AND VINO ON HIM