Results of the Northern Colorado Scrabble Tournament

Yesterday, Saturday, Sept 17, I and fellow Cheyenne Word Birds Scrabble Club member Rich drove down to Loveland, Colorado to take part in a one day Scrabble tournament.

For the last month at least I'd been working on my anagramming and that has certainly improved. But although I worked a bit on 3-letter words (there are a little over 1,000 that it is important to know), I didn't have them fully memorized, and that was a bit costly.

I expected Rich, one of the two best Scrabble players in the club, to do better than he did. As it is, he won one game - he beat me in an early round, and I won twice, beating Rich in the last, position round so that I came in 7th and he came in 8th.

What is annoying is that none of the people we were playing, played any words that I didn't know (except twice. Someone played MIP, which I should have challenged  - and TIZ, which I shouldn't).

The only difference between us that *I* could see was that they drew well and we drew poorly. Or if they drew poorly and I drew well during the start of the game, by the end of the game the tables had turned.

For example in one game, about halfway through, I was even with my opponent. Then I started drawing unhelpful things in triplicates - spelled a word and drew three "a",  used two of them spelling "aal" or something of that nature and then drew three "i", then three "s".  S are great but not if you draw three of them at the same time.

Then there's the strategy... my opponent would play something and all of a sudden there'd by a triple-letter-word square over a vowel, meaning if I had a high-point consonant and a way to spell two words, I'd make a lot of points. But I'd be faced with a rack full of awful letters. So, should I turn in tiles and give my opponent a free shot at that double- or triple-letter score, or should I somehow block that square by placing a low pointer there, just to prevent my opponent from using a high pointer.  (Because invariably, my opponent *would* have a high pointer.)

So I never made the right decision on those types of problems - leave it open and my opponent would grab it for lots of points - block it and I'd draw one tile of no help to me, so that I couldn't make a decent play on my next turn, either.

In talking to Rich, the same seemed true of him- on at least two of his games his opponent simply outdrew hm. There's not much you can do if you keep drawing one pointers and your opponent gets the Z, X, Q and J - spaced out enough so that each one can be properly used!  (I had all those letters once - and ALL at once, so couldn't do anything with them because I didn't have the right vowels.)

So over the course of 8 games in one day, to lose 6...is that because the players were better than I was or because they drew better?  I'm still not sure! (Well, one guy was demonstrably much, much better...but the others...not sure.)

But...for the next tournament I will have those 3-letter words down pat, I can promise you that!