After 25 years of playing online, I participated in my first in-person Scrabble tournament yesterday in Stratford. (I joined the Stratford club a few months ago.) There were ~ 45 players divided into four divisions. Not having a NASPA rating yet, I was in the ‘D’ group.
I won! I ended up 7-1 for the day, with a point differential of +385, and in the ‘D’ final played Bill (brother-in-law of Ross who I play tennis with) for the second time. My games:
W: 410-357 vs. Ani
L: 382-440 vs. Samuel (from Buffalo)
W: 395-368 vs. Mark (ditto)
W: 347-298 vs. Shubha (from Rochester)
W: 353-318 vs. Bill
W: 380-291 vs. Lisa (also in the Stratford club)
W: 349-323 vs. Eileen
W: 458-292 vs. Bill
‘A’ - A scratch golfer who goes out with the expectation of beating par. These players are lethal, Word Freak (the Stefan Fatsis book that got me started down this road) savants. You’d have about the same chance of winning against one of them as you would playing a well-programmed computer.
‘B’ - someone who routinely shoots in the low 70s.
‘C’ - mid-high 70s, let’s say, but on a really good day might challenge par.
‘D’ - 80-83, could maybe shoot 75 if everything fell into place.
To be competitive at the ‘D’ level, you pretty much have to lay a bingo at some point in the game. I had 10 bingos for the day--one per game for six of my matches, two each in the other two: trailer, bandito, service, taurines, reputes, tangler, grooving, gelating, planers, outages.
I definitely had good tiles throughout the day. Not so much an unequal distribution of the most important tiles--the two blanks, the four ‘s’s, z/q/j/x/k--but a good balance of vowels and consonants the whole way, lots of w/h/m/b/c’s, and only very rarely the kinds of racks that can make you hate Scrabble. I only remember one game where I hit a rough patch.
Outside of the win, my three highlights for the day:
1) Right near the end, there was some tricky rules matter to be adjudicated, so John (one of the two organizers) asked everyone to quiet down so he could call John Chew, head of the NASPA (based in Toronto, I think). I immediately had this mental picture of John Chew sitting in an empty room with a red phone under glass, just like the one Commissioner Gordon had in the old Batman series.
2) The Kid. My division included a 10-year-old prodigy from Toronto named Allan. Thankfully, I managed to duck him--he was 5-2 in his first seven games, one win shy of the final, but his point differential was much better than mine, so it would have been him rather than me had he won his last game. One of his opponents who lost to him told me that Allan was able to track tiles (like counting cards in Vegas) in his head, rather than on paper (which is perfectly legal in Scrabble). We asked him later if he played chess; yes, he said, but he wasn’t nearly as good at that as he was playing Scrabble. “Not comparatively,” he added--know a lot of 10-year-olds who drop “comparatively” into their everyday conversations?
3) I lost the one challenge I made during the day: “m@#&”! (Rhymes with "Wilf," as in Wilf Cordero of the Expos.) I let a few words go for various reasons: i.e., I was ahead and didn’t want to risk missing a turn; one obvious misspelling--“nexis”--set up a bingo for me; and sometimes I just didn’t have the confidence to challenge. I was absolutely sure that “m@#&” would have been one of the words dropped from the Scrabble dictionary in the past few years…Arie Sinke, who won the ‘A’ division (ranked 5th in Ontario), gave me a mini-history of all that over lunch. He said there was a push to clean up the dictionary--i.e., rid it of anything racist, misogynist, profane, etc.--that picked up speed after George Floyd was murdered in 2020. And a lot of words have been eliminated since then. But somehow, “m@#&” is still in there.
I now have a severely inflated NASPA rating (1240), so next year I expect I’ll be moved to the ‘C’ group and come up against a very sobering reality check.
(That’s Henri Kennedy--winner of the ‘B’ group--and Arie next to me; Sid, the ‘C’ winner, had left already.)
(Facebook post, 9/27/26)
-----------------------
I thought I was going to have to miss it for a friend's cottage, but I was able to play in my second Scrabble tournament today, this one in Cambridge. Because of the longshot win in Stratford, I came out of there with a freakishly high NASPA rating of 1240, moving me into the ‘B’ division this time. From ‘D’ to ‘B’...I was going to say that that’s like pulling a guy out of Double-A and giving him a major-league start (with this being a tournament, you could even extend that to a major-league playoff start), but that’s an exaggeration. Not wildly so, though. I’m not a B-division player; I hope to settle into the C-division eventually, but I’m not a ‘B’. So, honestly, I was bracing myself for a Peckinpah-level bloodbath.
Did much better than I expected: 4-3, with a point differential of +134. My seven games:
L: 300-346 vs. Luke
W: 448-312 vs. Heather
W: 375-352 vs. Jean
L: 364-407 vs. Walker
W: 413-364 vs. Terry (co-head of the Stratford club)
W: 377-308 vs. Ian
L: 294-348 vs. Evan
As much as the four wins, the big thing for me was that all three losses were between 40-55 points; I was worried about getting trounced at least a couple of times, and it didn’t happen. Highlights were beating Terry for the first time, then bingoing out with “eagerer” to secure the win against Ian. I wasn’t sure if that was good, and--being the last play of the game--he was granted the automatic challenge. It was.
Didn’t bingo every game, but, besides that one, I played “rebooted,” “restart,” “dippers,” “foliage,” “temples,” and “wearies.” So seven for seven games.
By and large, I had good tiles again. The last game was frustrating--went five or six plays with an ‘s’ and a blank and an open bingo lane, but just couldn’t get anything together; I looked at a lot of six-letter words with one problem tile left over, usually a duplicate vowel. Evan closed down the bingo lane, and that was that. If I’d won that game, I think I would have finished second (ended up fourth, just out of the money).
In even bigger news, after falling in love in the lineup at LifeLabs yesterday morning, there were two women at the tournament today I was very attracted to. Blood clinics and Scrabble tournaments--it’s like I’m living inside a 50 Cent song.
(Facebook post, 10/10/26)
-----------------------
This is exciting: like Serena Williams and A.J. Foyt, I now have lifetime earnings on the Scrabble circuit (tiny print under "Lifetime Record").
Some follow-up to Cambridge...as I said, I finished fourth. I think there's a small chance I may have finished third. They go by point differential: three of us were tied for third at 4-3. The guy who won was +181, and they've got me down for +54. Except: I was actually + 134--they lost 20 points in one game, and 60 in another. If there was a similar error with the guy they gave third to (or any error that gave him more than an extra 47 points), I would have ended up ahead.
Putting that aside, though, ties are almost always broken by head-to-head results, right? I won both my games against the other two 4-3 players; you could make an argument, I think, that that's more important than differential. If I had finished third, my lifetime earnings would have shot up another $40, up near that heady $200 neighborhood.
I supplied NASPA with a photo, but I'm still shadowman for now.
(Facebook post, 10/17/26)
No comments:
Post a Comment