What do you call a typo when its on the board?

Playing on-line typos occur fairly frequently. When I'm playing Eric we usually challenge (assuming the play is invalid) and pass when obvious typos occur under the rationale that that doesn't happen on a board, but, as I found out at club last night, sometimes it does.

It began in my first game of evening when I tried to play UNUA to dump some vowels and block a triple word line. I realized immediately after announcing my score (so immediately after it was too late) that I had transposed the second U and the A. In that same game my opponent, Rebecca Lambert, played the invalid bingo RUSLTERS. Again, I didn't notice the mistake until just after it was too late. Then in my last game of the evening I played AEROLE (instead of AREOLE), but my opponent didn't challenge. In fact, I didn't even notice it until long after the game was over. I was at home thinking about the game and realized from how the game ended that I must have made an invalid play. Sloppy, sloppy.

Overall, however, it was a decent night. I went 2-1 with a spread close to +200. My only loss was to Rebecca, but aside from my typo and missing her typo, I played pretty well. I was double blanked and had to fight through some ridiculous vowel-heavy racks, but still managed 402 points. I would've won if at the end I had a place go out with BANDS on my rack, but I didn't and ended up losing by 8. At one point, I had five vowels on my rack and I played the aforementioned UNUA, which resulted in me retaining the same crap rack and scoring nothing. I exchanged 5 on my next play and drew 4 vowels, so I played a vowel dump on my next turn for nominal points, and then proceeded to draw all vowels which required me to exchange again my next turn. I had netted about 10 points in 4 turns. Not surprisingly I was down big, but I tried not to get frustrated, and just focus on making strong plays. To a large extent it worked as I came back with two bingos, ENTERAL and ORGEATS, the latter of which was quite nice because the only place to bingo required a front hook of both WO and OY with the last two letters of the bingo, so it pretty much had to be TS.

The other two games I won fairly handily, although one of them could have been very close if my opponent had challenged AEROLE, or if he had not played AFRO, which I challenged off the board (I guess he never saw "Word Wars") and instead played FORA for way more points. He played GNAWINGS on me, which I challenged, but much to my surprise, it's valid. The only other noteworthy thing that happened on the night is that I bingoed with three Ns in my rack, and that's barely noteworthy since it was the rather boring TANNING and I had both blanks.

I am slightly put-off by the club format. I wish that the last three games included a one-and-done tournament between the top 8 people at club that night. I think it would be fun to have a conclusive "winner" for that week and it would be a much better way to pair opponents, in my opinion, than having the director do it almost at random. It would require slightly more organization by the director however, which might be a problem considering that there seems to be a new one each week. I can't complain too much though. The directors are just volunteering, and it's not like I'm offering to do it.