And now for something completely different:

• Start with Michael Weingrad’s piece in The Jewish Review of Books about why there is no Jewish Narnia. Then proceed to Israeli sci-fi reviewer Abigail Nussbaum’s response and her survey of the conversation.

• My friend Stephen McCarthy, who is coaching Korean schoolchildren in the art of debate, writes about his cultural collision with corporal punishment.

• Anthony Gottlieb digests a survey of what philosophers believe. The data set covers English-speaking academia and skews heavily analytic, but I’m not one to complain.

• Not exactly “reading” per se, but it’s election time, and I can’t stop playing with The Guardian‘s lovely polling widget.

• Wikileaks is in the news again after releasing footage of American troops firing upon a Reuters photographer in Iraq. The BBC profiles who they are.

• John McWhorter parses Sarah Palin. Typically the way the print media scrubs audio quotations into coherent, well-formed sentences (or doesn’t) is a good indicator of media bias, but the thing about Palin is that it can’t be done.

• Julie Just asks where the parents have gone in fiction for young adults.

• What are marching bands playing these days? Shostakovich, that’s what.

• Dale Dougherty writes about the iPad and misses HyperCard. He’s not the only one.

• Cartoonist James Sturm leaves the Internet. I should do that too.

[Edit: While I was composing this post, Stefan Fatsis wrote a piece for Slate explaining what's going on, and CNET had the sense to talk to John D. Williams. Mattel is promoting a spinoff product called Scrabble Trickster, with cards that allow players to bend the traditional rules—kind of like the "Cheat" card in Munchkin, but less funny and presumably without cartoons. I'll leave my original post up anyhow.]

Here’s what happened, as far as I can reconstruct it: Mattel’s PR geniuses thought it would be clever, not to mention economical, to publish a special version of Scrabble with one line of the bundled rulebook changed, then write a press release several orders of magnitude longer than the rulebook amendment itself, circulate it to British papers with a notorious history of swallowing press releases whole (this we know from Ben Goldacre, Britain’s most vigilant media watchdog in science and medicine), and rub their hands in glee as the story goes viral.

Some of the UK club directors were interviewed while caught off guard, providing a font of choice quotes in the Daily Mail. The reaction in the North American scene, as far as I can tell from the tournament players’ mailing list, has been fairly sedate; it only takes a minute to understand that this is a packaging manoeuvre, and a few more minutes to realize that Mattel is serious. How serious? Not very, as it turns out: those who have been in contact with the relevant sources report that the use of proper nouns is only to be one of many suggested house rules to liven up the game. Given that your average living-room player waiting forever for her grandchildren to make a move already plays by loose, provisional house rules concerning what qualifies as a word, there’s no reason to fuss.

There will no impact on competitive play, for whatever we’re worth. (Although I do not have hard figures, I am fairly sure that the worldwide tally of active tournament Scrabble players is presently outnumbered by the beta testers for StarCraft II. The beta testers.) In North America, where Hasbro owns the rights and Mattel’s Scrabble products are nowhere to be found, the official tournament lexicon is steered by the player-managed NASPA Dictionary Committee. In the UK and other Mattel territories, the competitive scene is managed by WESPA, which has its own degree of autonomy in its contractual relationship with Mattel’s Collins Scrabble Words. Here’s what WESPA had to say in April 2009:

Mattel has recognized that WESPA has the right to determine the content of any new official wordlist. The Committee has explored various options for publication of the next wordlist – these include approaching Collins, other publishers and WESPA itself publishing a new wordlist. The Committee concluded that the most pragmatic option was to approach Mattel’s licensed publisher, Collins, for the next update of the official wordlist. It has been agreed with Mattel and Collins that WESPA can determine the content of the wordlist, including sourcing words from dictionaries other than Collins.

So from a Scrabble perspective, there is nothing to worry about, short of a future newcomers to the tournament scene wondering why we don’t play by the same rules as the ones suggested by Mattel. I’ve seen this happen before: years prior to the inclusion of QI in the 2006 revision of the North American word list, one newcomer to the Calgary club played QI (having heard news reports of its validity in Britain) and was astonished when I challenged it off the board.

Certainly the predatory sabre-rattling between Hasbro and Mattel over intellectual property only muddies the issue for everyone, but this is nothing new. Hasbro has indulged in this madness before: there’s an old story—I believe it appears in Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak—about how John D. Williams, Hasbro’s former liaison to the North American tournament players, had a meeting with Hasbro executives that asked him what he thought about a special rock-star edition of Scrabble where names like Mick Jagger were playable words. And to this day, the official Scrabble dictionaries you see on North American shelves differ from the tournament lexicon in their omission of offensive words—a circumstance that led to an infamous conundrum at the 2004 National Championship, which I had the unique pleasure of witnessing firsthand.

The lesson to take away from this is that lexicons are a matter of communal assent. Nobody should be under the illusion that Mattel has any authority over how the game is played, even at the most casual level. So long as Hasbro and Mattel print the Alfred Butts layout with the bonus squares in the right place, with correct letter counts and point values in the English-speaking lands, Scrabble will remain the same as it has ever been.

The complacency of the media is of far greater concern. This is a story about printing a manual. It won’t even go as far as affecting the licensed computer games (because logistically, it can’t). There is no sane reason for this to be global headline news; it’s gross misinformation on an outrageous scale.

Nevertheless, I was relieved, if not entirely satisfied, to be undefeated after the first five games. I might even have begun to believe, much to my own detriment, that neither studying nor practicing since the Calgary tournament in mid-October wasn’t such a boneheaded idea after all. Sitting in first place with 5-0 (+479) ahead of the nearest challenger’s 4-1 (+293), I had first place in the bag as long as I didn’t lose by over 93 points.

Naturally, I made just about every possible mistake—the usual culprits, too: mixing up my 3-to-4 hooks (which I should know cold by now), not giving myself enough time to work out the endgame math, trying to play my way out of hopeless racks instead of exchanging—and lost by 98.

I wonder, sometimes, if I have the mental fortitude to play this bloody game. It’s been one long and steady decline since New Orleans in 2004. (2004!)

Not much happening on the bingo front, either: SATIRES, HERNIAE, TESSERa, ERASUrE, OVERlAIN, SARSNET, FACADES, VERiTAS, STRiATe.

I beg to differ from the caption: I don’t think a veteran player would consider OSTRICH down to the H (leaving an L) an option. Playing off the S for 13 points? No way. The available bingos, apart from the suggested CLITORIS, are COISTRIL, LICTORS, and TROCHILS. The highest-scoring play is LICTORS for 71 with the C hooking onto HI to make HIC, but don’t forget that placement matters, and that the greedy strategy may not get you very far.

CLITORIS (in either position) is not only one of the lower-scoring plays, but puts the O right next to a TLS—leaving ample room for OX for 52 points, or a less devastating but still competitive response using the F, H, M, or P. It’s probably the easiest of the bingos to spot, but the least strategically sound.

Naturally, I thought it would be fun to simulate the position. After 1000 iterations, Quackle equally favours LICTORS with the T hooking onto HI for HIT (69 points): LICTORS/HIC has a win percentage of 67.00%, and LICTORS/HIT is at 66.92%. (Compare CLITOR(I)S at 62.77% and CL(I)TORIS at 61.59%.) LICTORS/HIT has the advantage of opening two double-double lanes instead of one: if your opponent takes one, you can capitalize on the other. But that kind of wisdom—and most competitive wisdom, for that matter—only applies to two-player situations. In a four-player game, wherein one’s control of the board position goes out the window, I’d go for LICTORS/HIC and take the 71 points. It’s a safe play, and neither double will be open by the next turn anyhow. Besides, HIC is not as vulnerable as HIT to a certain family-unfriendly front hook.

Also worth noting: CLITORIS is not one of the offensive words expurgated from the home/school/ESPN-friendly Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. In the ever-squeamish OSPD, it is defined somewhat ambiguously as “a sex organ”.

What I’d really like to see is Scrabble on a roller coaster.

Day 1 (Rounds 1-8) was a right drubbing. I lost three rounds by margins of over 150 points, one of them because I went four minutes overtime. In those three games, I played no bingos while my opponents notched 11. Sure, there were the usual issues with time management, and a few crippling decisions with respect to rack management and defensive positional play; but as reluctant as I am to blame the tiles, a lot of it was dumb luck. What’s the use of a good, balanced leave if the bag is going to spit out EEE or UUU?

Apart from that, I let my opponents get away with too many yucky phonies, some of which sealed the fates of their respective games. Some, like PANTLESS*, I didn’t consider challenging at all. If someone without a shirt is SHIRTLESS, what do you call someone with no pants?

I only finished with a reasonable spread because Day 3 (Rounds 17-21) came along and finally gave me a shot at clobbering my opponents when I was already well out of contention for any prize money. And I did find my share of nice plays, my favourite being WHISKED with the K on a DLS, the S hooking onto BOO to make BOOS, and the E turning ZIN into ZINE, for a whopping 115 points—easily my highest-scoring single turn of the tournament. I also fulfilled one of my longtime Scrabble ambitions: to draw a challenge with CALENDER, which looks like a misspelling of CALENDAR but is actually something to do with papermaking. I also made some good decisions to play words I was uncertain about, like DIGITALS, instead of shying away from the risk. (What kind of watch do you have? Mine’s a digital. I really should have known the noun form of the word, though: the Scrabble dictionary’s abbreviated definition tells me that a digital is a piano key.)

In other adventures: on the Friday and Saturday, the Scrabble tournament shared the host hotel with an Alberta Teachers’ Association professional development event, a jolly sort of pow-wow for the public stewards of your children replete with sessions about adolescent culture and information-age learning strategies in addition to a well-stocked flea market of picture books. One of the delegates, a young gentleman who has a posting as a band teacher in Airdrie, thought it would be fun to commandeer the hotel piano for some good old-fashioned ragtime over lunch. I joined him for an improvised duet.

I played better after that.

My measly 23 bingos: ENErGIEs, ADORERS, cLOSERS, READIER, ATOnIES, SiNUATE, CALENDER, LINTERs, ENHAnCE, GOAlIES, ATONIES, LANDINGS, ReCLINE, JELLIES, DIGITAlS, TELERANS, GOLfERS, WHISKED, DELIvER, AEROBIc, INVADES, SCoLDING, SCORNeD. After the anemic Day 1 (only four bingos—four!), I finally remembered how to score, and the bag remembered how to let me.

The tournament scene here is fairly new, so the competition was light, and as the top seed I needed to win all six rounds to keep my rating. 4-2 is disappointing, but not catastrophic; I needed to stay above 1200 to play in Division 2 at the Western Canadian Scrabble Championship as I’ve been doing for the past few years, and I think I’ll be okay.

I lost my last game because my opponent drew tiles like a magician pulls rabbits from transdimensional hats. That happens, and I can live with it. I can’t live with Round 2, where I lost to the same opponent by 6 points with one second left on the clock, a defeat that epitomized everything that went wrong in Orlando.

The scenario: I’m holding CO with 0:03 on the clock. As far as I can see, I have a sure win as long as I play my tiles and announce my score before the clock runneth over. My opponent surprises me and plays YEG*—a word I instantly know to be a phony—but without thinking, or really looking at it, I dump my play on the board and finish with the clock reading 0:01. I lose by 6 points.

As it turns out, even if I’d taken the 10-point penalty for going overtime, and took the time to look at his play and challenge it off the board, I still would have won the game. This made all the difference between first and second place.

It’s time to admit it (and to be frank, I already have): there is something systematically rotten about my time management, and it’s killing my endgame. This has deteriorated from embarrassment to utter lunacy.

On the upside, my resumption of serious word study over the past few weeks is beginning to pay off. A month ago, I would never have seen HETAErAS. You would think that somebody as interested in ancient Greece as I am would know what the Greeks called their courtesans. Well, I do now, and I’m all the richer for it.

Bingos: RUINABLE, INDITES, ENTrIES, AMNIOtES, CINEAST, REMINTED, ENDEARED, HETAErAS, DIPOLES, kINDLES, MARLInE.

Not content with restricting myself to the usual landmark-hopping tourist experience of scheduling ill-lit drive-by shootings (now in digital), I thought it would be rewarding to amble around the City That Sleeps As Much As I Do with little planning and forethought, and let adventure ambush me as it will. At times, the excursion assumed the manner of a pilgrimage. Mecca, with less ululation. This isn’t to say that I didn’t tick my way down the usual checklist—the Statue of Liberty, the Empire State Building, the Metropolitan Museum of Art, the more navigable corners of Central Park, a Broadway production or two—but stopping there wouldn’t have made it my New York, and like any good tourist, I populated my list of things to see with a few sentimental items, guided as always by the invisible hand of personal entitlement.

So when I wasn’t busy getting lost in more of Central Park than most New Yorkers will ever see, I went looking for Scrabble and jazz.

For readability’s sake, let’s switch to point form. I intend to meander, after all.

First, Scrabble:

• If you’ve read Stefan Fatsis’s Word Freak, the definitive book on the subculture of competitive Scrabble, you know about the “parkies”—the legendary players in the northwest corner of Washington Square Park, some of them reputed to be the best players outside of the tournament circuit. (This was before the rise of online play, of course; now there’s a whole generation of players on ISC and Scrabulous who have never touched a real set of tiles.) Naturally, I went hunting. To my chagrin, the parkies were nowhere to be found: the entire northwest quadrant of Washington Square Park had been torn up for restoration.
• This didn’t stop a chess hustler from pulling me aside at the southwest corner, where the chess tables lie. Now, I know I’m not very good at chess, and I accept his challenge fully expecting to lose a few bucks. At five dollars a game, it doesn’t sound like such a bad proposition. What I didn’t foresee was how quickly he’d turn my pockets inside out. The first warning was when he pulled out a clock and set it to five minutes apiece. Dear God, chess I can handle—but speed chess? I don’t think it should come as a surprise that I lost the first game on time. My opponent swept the pieces aside and set up another game with the colours reversed, and the spicy taste of challenge was enough to pull me back in. With the pressure of the clock now firmly in mind, I tried to play like a speed demon. Careless, that: his queen kicked me in the nuts in five or six moves.
• After a reluctant escape—and believe me, that Stockholm-syndrome part of me wanted to remain captive, especially when the hustler offered to play without time constraints—I toured the perimeter of the park just in case there was Scrabble about. Later, I passed by the chess corner again: there was a prowler amidst the tables, and an arrest in progress. The scene would have made for an exceptional photograph, but I thought better of it: I wasn’t about to get involved in a mess in front of the NYPD and the most dangerous chess players in all of Manhattan.
• Still intent on playing Scrabble with people I didn’t know, I paid a visit to the weekly meeting of NSA Club #56, directed by former World Champion Joel Sherman. This was actually my first experience of club play outside Alberta, and the fact that it was one of the most competitive clubs in North America (and also featured in Word Freak) was a bonus. “G.I. Joel” runs four rounds a night in two divisions, and works out all the pairings himself. The Manhattan club plays under a time limit of 23 minutes instead of the usual 25, and several of the players have boards shaped like apples. There is also a frozen yogurt machine on the 14th floor.
• “Nicholas Tam? From Calgary?” I was flattered that Joel Sherman (the Joel Sherman!) had at least a cursory recognition of who I was, given that Scrabble-wise, I haven’t done anything that I would be known for in the last four years at least. (Joe Edley knew my name when I was introduced to him at New Orleans, but that was back in my prime, when I was bounding up the standings 100 rating points at a time.) Then I remembered that I was talking to a guy who knew every word in the dictionary up to nine or ten letters. At one point, another player argued that he was certain BEJESTS* was a word. “Look in this book,” said Joel, holding a dictionary shut. “You will find BEJEEZUS and BEJEWEL. You will not find BEJESTS*.”
• The two divisions at the Manhattan club are divided by NSA rating, with the boundary line at 1300. I was in the unique circumstance of being above 1300 before Orlando, and tumbling to about 1260 after my little four-day disaster, so Joel let me choose where I wanted to play. Naturally, I picked the upper division. I lost every game, and this time around, I couldn’t even post any decent scores. For record-keeping purposes, the club has a spread cap of 200 points—that is, you record a +200 or -200 even if the spread in the game exceeds that margin. I’m embarrassed to say that I had to use it twice.

And now, jazz:

• The first leg of my visit had the good fortune of coinciding with the Jazz in July festival at 92nd Street Y, a posh concert series directed by pianist Bill Charlap, who plays in every concert but refrains from carrying on like a star. If I had my way, I’d have attended every night: at the price of $25 per concert for under-35s, it wouldn’t have been infeasible. There was a concert dedicated to Leonard Bernstein featuring vocalist Kurt Elling, whom I saw wow Edmonton at the Citadel two years ago. An all-star tribute to George Shearing. Another tribute to Billy Strayhorn. A piano masterclass that regrettably overlapped with my trip to Orlando, though I received fair compensation for missing it: it took place on the apotheotic Day 3. I’m satisfied with what I did see: a piano jam on twin grands, featuring rotating permutations of Charlap, Billy Taylor, Bill Mays, and Cedar Walton, including a few solo improvisations and a two-pianos, eight-hands setting that involved more than a little on-the-fly seat-swapping. Or should I call it musical chairs?
• The most pleasant surprise of the piano jam was not a pianist at all, but cornetist Warren Vaché. This is the same Vaché whose recording with the Scottish Ensemble, Don’t Look Back, was the subject of a Paul Wells encomium not too long ago. Vaché has an ineffable stage presence that stops just short of calling too much attention to itself. When he isn’t delivering his pithy bebop aphorisms with clarity and grace, he responds to the music around him with a substrate of subtle gestures—a brush of the knee here, a straightening of the collar there, as Sandy Stewart (Charlap’s vocalist mother) danced over the lyrics of “Tea for Two”. Needless to say, I bought myself a copy of Don’t Look Back, which is every bit the landmark jazzer-with-strings recording that Wells venerates. To be fair, I was sold on it already, thanks to Vaché’s interpretation of what is probably my favourite Irish reel, the Percy Grainger setting of “Molly on the Shore”.
• I missed Monty Alexander when he played at the Calgary International Jazz Festival in June, but I caught his engagement at Birdland for about the same price—that is, before you count the souvenir polo shirt, chocolate martini, and succulent striploin steak. This isn’t the original Birdland, Birdland-comma-Lullaby-of, the Charlie Parker temple that witnessed the doorstep billy-clubbing of Miles Davis, which has long since closed. The Birdland name carries on at a fine little dinner establishment where they seat you along a semicircle of candlelit tables that hug a nine-foot Steinway handpicked by Oscar Peterson. In a trio setting, Alexander’s brand of jazz piano belongs to the same branch of the family tree as Peterson’s glistening swing, but with a homegrown Caribbean presence in its rhythmic underbelly. I was seated at a table from which I couldn’t see the keys, nor could I see bassist Hassan Shakur behind the lid of the piano; at first, this seemed to be a problem, but I seized on that whole other dimension of entertainment in live music performance: the facial expressions, the stomping of feet. It provides an insight into improvisational thought that we too often forget.
• I wasn’t about to leave New York without a visit to the Village Vanguard. For those of you who don’t know, the Village Vanguard—a cozy, intimate basement club with a fire-hazard capacity of 123 and no food—is a site of monumental importance in jazz history, the venue at which a staggering number of legendary concert recordings were produced. Chief among them are the last recorded sessions of the original Bill Evans Trio (Evans on piano, Scott LaFaro on bass, and Paul Motian on drums; LaFaro would die in a car accident two weeks later). As a piano enthusiast, The Complete Village Vanguard Recordings, 1961 (originally released as Sunday at the Village Vanguard and Waltz for Debby) is the crown jewel of my CD library. I’d say more, but Adam Gopnik’s article in The New Yorker will do more than I can to convince you that the Bill Evans engagement at the Vanguard was, and remains, a very, very big deal.
• So it was, to say the least, a special occasion for me to visit the Village Vanguard to see Paul Motian, the original Bill Evans Trio’s last surviving member. Motian played in a nonet setting—in essence, the septet from his 2006 album Garden of Eden plus Jacob Sacks on piano and Matt Maneri on viola. The curious thing about Motian is how he manages to remain a background presence, never overpowering his soloists and and never taking extended solos himself, while always doing something interesting whenever you consciously decide to pay attention to him. The music for the evening consisted mostly of originals with an emphasis on collective improvisation over free structures that appear to defy harmony, but somehow manage to remain coherent. There was only one standard: Charles Mingus’s “Goodbye Pork Pie Hat”, the jazz canon’s preeminent funeral dirge.
• Here’s something I don’t get to do every day: solicit an autograph from Paul Motian at the Village Vanguard, a few feet away from a 47-year-old photograph on the wall of Motian sitting with Evans and LaFaro… at the Village Vanguard. Motian doesn’t look anything like his picture anymore, now that he’s shed the moustache (and indeed, any trace of hair on his head), and wears shades when he’s under the lights. I tell him that I wish I’d brought my Evans albums with me, to get his autograph on them as well. “Yeah, I heard from a lady in London,” he says, as he struggles to help me unseal a copy of his own CD. “She’s doing a documentary on Bill Evans, and she wants to interview me—fifty years later!”

I finished on a record of 10-18 (-533), ending up in 125th place of 133 players in Division 3. I was bottom-feeding all day, but at least I was feeding.

Truth be told, this was an unremarkable day. I didn’t come away with many stories to tell, though I did pay more visits to the challenge table than on the first three days combined. On one occasion, I opened the game with FEDEX for 48 points, drawing a challenge and buying myself an extra turn. My opponent didn’t know that FEDEX was added in the 2006 dictionary revision, along with a whole smattering of genericized trademarks like PYREX and KLEENEX. This worked to my advantage, since I’d placed the word in a risky position: if he knew the back extension, my opponent could have plopped an -ING on the end to make FEDEXING and hit the TWS for 60 points.

Really, though: that’s the most interesting thing that happened all day, unless you count the incident where my opponent and I were mistakenly assigned to Nadine Jacobson’s permanent location at Table 65. Nadine Jacobson, I should explain, is the blind player with the Braille Scrabble set who reads the board in caresses and keeps score on a Perkins Brailler. She famously refuses the extra playing time that she is entitled to on account of her handicap, preferring the standard allotment of 25 minutes per player simply because it’s fair.

This year’s National Scrabble Championship did not feature a televised final, unlike the ESPN-affiliated editions that ran from 2004 to 2006. It reverted to the old format, where Division 1 is treated like all the other divisions, with no separate best-of-five showdown. In a way, this is fairer—why shouldn’t the top prize go to the player with the best record?—but it’s also a shame, because the thought of witnessing a Richards-Cappelletto battle on a closed-circuit feed in a room full of kibitzing experts strikes me as both educational and intensely entertaining. Oh well: I could always trace my way through Nigel and Brian’s top-table matchups in Rounds 26 through 28 online.

So that just about wraps it up for the Orlando NSC. According to the full tsh report, this tournament chipped my rating from 1315 to 1254. In a way, it was Day 1 that did most of the damage; I went 10-11 in the remainder of the tournament, good enough to save my rating from too steep a plummet (i.e. I can still play in Division 2 at the WCSC). Nevertheless, I think it may be high time to start being concerned that I haven’t appreciably improved in the last four years: sooner or later I’ll have to face the decision to either shape up or ship out. You know which one I’ll pick.

(Day 4 bingos: REtAINER, RERAISE, ABATeRs, RECLINeR, OVERPILE*, RIsIBlE, OUTROSE*, RESoLVES, FLOATIER—bringing my tournament total to 38 bingos over 27 games played, which is merely ordinary and not reflective of the travesty that was my win-loss record.)

“Good intentions,” I said, “and bad tiles.”

I am now at 6-15 (-528), and sincerely having the time of my life. I may be losing, but at least I’m playing real Scrabble. In my 133-player division, I’ve gone from 133rd on Day 1 to 132nd on Day 2, and now I’m 131st. At this rate, I should finish the tournament in fourth-last place, a smidgen worse than New Orleans (where I finished 165th of 169).

So why am I having so much fun? Round 19, that’s why. Oh, golly. Let me tell you about Round 19—instantly one of the most memorable games I’ve ever played, and enough to make me stop worrying and love the bomb (aka the SCRABBLE® Brand Crossword Game). It was like falling all over again for a lost and unrequited love that had already jilted you a dozen times. Like making beautiful baroque music with her after months of distant longing and minimal conversation. No, not whoopee, you unchivalrous pervert. Just music.

I lost Round 19, you know. It was euphoric anyway. Sometimes a loss is a loss, and all you can do is make the best of it. Is there a word for the opposite of a Pyrrhic victory?

(Before I proceed—Day 3 bingos: ESTUARY, WOrRIeS, WEARYINg, VISITOr, NOTaRIZE, ELECTOR, RADIANT, OPERATED, SANdBILL*, UNAIrEd, ANTSIER, FLATIROn, COILIEST*. More blanks, more phonies, and more laughs.)

So, Round 19 versus Jeanne Freebody. I fell behind early in the game, thanks to Jeanne’s 90-point JOIsTED. Not to worry, though: I suddenly had an outstanding run of luck, and played three consecutive bingos—RADIANT (71), OPERATED (80) and SANdBILL* (76), vaulting me ahead to a tremendous lead, 335-234. They didn’t take much searching, either. They just fell right into place, and I found myself with over twelve minutes left on the clock at the end of the game.

I was especially proud of SANdBILL*, which, alongside my tricky placement of ESTUARY in Round 15, was one of the few plays of the tournament that made me feel like a real Scrabble player for a change. Jeanne and I were absolutely certain it was an acceptable word, too, as did some of the players seated at adjacent tables who peeked at our board afterwards. We didn’t have a shred of doubt. And we all had the same definition in mind: isn’t a sandbill a kind of bird? Like a sandbill crane?

So it was quite a surprise when I tried to look it up in the dictionary, and didn’t find it listed. “I think it’s a sand-hill crane,” suggested one of our neighbours. As it turns out, SANDHILL* isn’t good either, but that’s because it’s a proper noun—the Sandhill Crane, capital S, capital C. Grus canadensis. So what does that make a sandbill? My theory: a cross between a Sandhill Crane and a HANDBILL (or, the product of rival campaigns for political office flipping each other the bird).

As an aside, there are a number of sevens in my rack, ABILNS? (BASINaL, LeSBIAN, ABLINgS, AIBLiNS, ALBINoS), but no valid bingos that would have fit the board position. I got away with that one, and I got away clean.

But that’s not all! As if three consecutive bingos weren’t exciting enough—I mean, it was the first time I’d laid down three bingos, consecutive or otherwise, in any game at this forsaken tournament—Jeanne immediately fired back with an outstanding play: HEISTER (99) parallel to the last six letters of OPERATED, making six auxiliary words: EH, RE, AI, RADIANTS, ET, and DE. The score: 335-333.

By the time the dust settled, she had sealed up the game with a third bingo, EVERSION (71). Final score: 403-474.

And this is how it looked:

If there was a specific blemish on the game that kept it from being an expert board, it was the trouble with word knowledge on both sides. I lost two turns to unsuccessful challenges: the HEISTER/RADIANTS play was the first. RADIANTS is an odd duck, but the one I was mostly unsure about was HEISTER. I suspected EVERSION was good, but challenged it anyway because I had the slightest doubt about it, and letting it go would guarantee my defeat.

I must emphasize that the unrelenting joy of Round 19 wasn’t just about the pendular drama of great comeback plays. It was the camaraderie, the sportsmanship, the mutual respect. There was never any bitterness about seeing the other person do well. Quite the opposite, in fact: we were literally high-fiving each other for great plays.

Not that we intentionally left openings for each other, of course. The game was still adversarial, not collusive; but most of all, it was friendly. After the last round of the day, Jeanne and I sat down together to fill out a board diagram in order to submit her HEISTER play for the tournament’s Flashiest Bingo award. I’m not sure how it will stack up against the kind of bingos that come out of Division 1—the top experts have a way of weaving 11-letter words through disconnected tiles—but we thought we’d give it a shot.

After Round 19, this Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Tournament didn’t bother me anymore. I’m love with Scrabble again, and I don’t care if it won’t love me back.

That doesn’t mean I’m going to let my other losses off easy, though. There’s a lot I have to work on going into Day 4.

Now that my luck is a little more balanced—I’m drawing blanks for a change—it’s my vocabulary deficiencies that are beginning to collect their toll. Round 17 was, in a word, horrendous: I posted my lowest score of the tournament and lost by the largest spread thus far, 290-497. My opponent admitted that he was drawing perfectly balanced racks (in terms of consonant/vowel ratio) every turn, while I was coming off bingos with draws like ORTTTTU, but that doesn’t mean I did the best I could. I was unsure about UPSOARS, so I didn’t play it. Then I tried IVOrIST* for 90 points, missing VIOlIST in the same position, and it was challenged off; my opponent used his extra turn to block the lane, and I had to settle for VISITOr (64). Drawing both blanks and using them aren’t enough to stay competitive, that’s for sure.

The most stressful game by far was Round 21, which I lost 383-393 after a heart-stopping endgame in which I saw the clinching play, miscalculated it as a guaranteed loss, and attempted a phony instead (BANDIER*—no, not a bingo). Still, it was an exciting fight to the finish, and my opponent and I were visibly on the verge of cracking. It was also a reminder of why I’m still a sub-1400 player: if I knew the word ZONULE, things would have been different.

It’s all part of a grand learning experience, I suppose. The tiles fall where they may, but good players rise and bad players fall. There’s no escaping the bottom half of the division now—I haven’t even been out of the bottom tables all tournament—but I can’t wait to see what tomorrow brings. More bingos, I should hope.

Yesterday, I had a lot more to blame than luck. Today was mostly bad luck. I drew 2 out of 12 blanks over six rounds (Rounds 13 and 14, to be precise), and I am at least relieved that I fired them off on bingos as soon as I picked them up. The blank in Round 13 was very nearly useless, too, coming as it did in my last draw from the bag.

That isn’t to say I haven’t been making bad decisions—missing bingos (like seeing RETILES and LEISTER, but giving up on the rack when a tiny bit more searching would have revealed STERILE), forgetting common stems (I knew there was something in BEIORST but tried SORBITE* instead of ORBIEST), and losing boneheaded challenges (LAYED looked funny at the time, and I let my opponent get away with PLIAR* instead of PILAR)—but they weren’t any worse than yesterday’s unmitigated silliness.

Time management is going better: I had over a minute left at the end of every game, leaving me time to find bingos on tight boards in the last turn or two. I benefited from not having to play against any speed demons, for the most part, so I didn’t get killed on the clock like I did on Day 1. Defensive play could still use some work: in Round 12, I missed a crucial bingo lane when I had almost tied the game (243-245), letting my opponent run away with it.

All in all, my play has gone from atrocious to average. It would be nice if the tile bag started cooperating. Then again, I suspect that I’m drawing at a disadvantage because I’m playing too many short words when I’m in a tight spot; I need to turn over more tiles.

(Day 2 bingos: LEANEST, TRAINER, ETESIAN, COUTURES, STANDERS, SPRINTER, CONFRONt, ERECTOr, SPITTLES.)