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.

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.

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.)

This is not my first seven-game losing streak at a Scrabble tournament. I’ve done it twice before, both times at my first National Scrabble Championship in New Orleans. This is, however, the very first time I have ever gone a full day at a Scrabble tournament without winning a single round.

It’s not like I haven’t been scoring points, either. According to my statistics page (which all of you can follow, quasi-live!), I scored an average of 375 points per game—greater than or equal to the Day 1 averages of… all seven of my opponents (370, 346, 369, 375, 372, 364, and 329, respectively). Compare this to my average score against: 421 points per game. Conclusion: every single one of my opponents had an aberrantly high-flying game against me.

Bad luck? In Rounds 6 and 7, maybe. It would be more accurate to blame the first five on poor time management and gross incompetence.

(More on this in a moment. But first, my Day 1 bingos: OUTGROwN, TAINTING, FAGGIEST, TORsADE, COSINES, HANGArS, wRANGLER—wait, was that it? Was that all?)

I photographed every board for reference, as I almost always do, but I’m not particularly inclined to do a round-by-round, blow-by-blow summary of my day as I did for Orlando and Phoenix. So here’s to a quick diagnosis of what I’m doing wrong, which will give me an opportunity to use bullet points for a change, now that I’ve fixed the way lists are handled in my CSS stylesheet.

• Time management. This is becoming my curse. As I predicted, my ability to make quick, decisive manoeuvres has taken the greatest beating from seven months of Scrabble-muscle atrophy, with word knowledge running a close second—and keep in mind that I’ve been having time trouble for a few tournaments now. I finished virtually every game with less than ten seconds remaining on the clock, and I can attest that far too much of my thinking time was needlessly expended in the middle game instead of the endgame.
• Poor defence. The way I understand my relatively high points-per-game averages (both for and against), I’ve been going for high-risk, high-scoring plays, leaving dangerous openings sitting about as a consequence of a greedy point grab. I don’t manage my rack well enough to capitalize on the openings, and I end up dumping low-scoring tiles while my opponents stomp on all the bonus squares. This is a far cry from my usual defensive aptitude, and it may be because after being away from the game for so long, I’m far more confident in my knowledge of long words than short ones (which have always been a muddy alphabet soup), making me reluctant to shut the board down.
• An atrocious endgame. Again, it’s because I’m not leaving myself any time to think—and the endgame is when the most precise, methodical computations should occur, as that is when you have the most knowledge of your position in the game, and have to contend with the least randomness. I threw away at least two games in the last two or three moves.

After the first five rounds, I was sitting at 0-5 (-94), which was pretty good in terms of point spread, as I was only falling behind by about 20 points per game, and never getting blown away. Rounds 1 through 4 were more or less quite winnable; Round 5, certainly so. Unfortunately, those are the games that make all the difference: the ones that could have gone either way. As for Rounds 6 and 7, not much could be done once bad luck decided to show up to the party.

The one round I’ll talk about is Round 5, because of an interesting circumstance that handed me a game I’d seemingly lost on a shiny, silver platter—which I promptly dropped on the floor.

A few moves before the end of the game, with three tiles left in the bag, my opponent knocked one of her tiles onto the floor, and didn’t notice it. She saw that she only had six tiles on her rack, and we both presumed that she simply hadn’t replenished her rack. (My tile tracking seemed to be off by one, but I blamed my tile tracking, which has had some unreliable moments in the past.) So she drew another tile from the bag. Two in the bag.

I’m holding the unenviable DDIIILT and am behind, 360-386, and play DID for 12 points, drawing the last two tiles from the bag (L and K) for IILLKT. An empty bag, with eight tiles unseen (again, I blamed this on a tracking error): IIMNOSSU. My opponent plays SUE for 18, I play KILT for 24, and she plays MIB for 14. The score is 396-418, and it looks out of my reach. I’m holding IL, with INOS unseen (but only three tiles on my opponent’s rack).

Then the Division Leader, while making his rounds, notices our dropped tile on the floor. It’s an S, so I know my opponent holds INO. The director’s adjudication is to back up and figure out who should have drawn the S, were it the last tile in the bag. That’s me, as I emptied the bag (with room on my rack to spare) when I played DID. So, right before I was to play my last move, I was basically given the mighty S for free.

I saw a winning move that would have given me 18 points, plus 6 off my opponent’s rack, for a narrow 420-418 victory.

Unfortunately, I didn’t see it until half a second after I hit the clock to end my turn, after having given up on the search for a play that would get rid of all three of my tiles, and dumping the S for 18 points elsewhere.

So I lost, 414-430, with ten seconds left on the clock. The fallen S ascended from the depths to give me one last chance, and I threw it in the dumpster like it was a dead hooker.

It was all downhill after that. Well, it was already downhill, but then it got steeper.

I have a bye in Round 8 (thanks to being in last place, I think), which nominally puts me at a 1-7 (-270) record in the standings heading into tomorrow morning. We’ll see where things go from there.

And it was fortunate that I did, as it turned out to be my most successful tournament in recent memory: I finished first in my division with a record of 8-4 (+377), worth a $200 cash prize; I posted the division’s highest winning score (492, $10), highest losing score (427, $10), greatest deficit overcome en route to a win (I was down by 99 points and two bingos in one game before I conducted a fortuitous rollback; $10) and highest total bingo count after 12 rounds (20 bingos, $10).

My bingo list (as always, lowercase denotes blanks and * denotes phonies): ObEYING, SeETHING, BITTIES*, ELATIONS, FAINTING, REMEDIED, sEDATED, TOADIES, OWNABLe, SKATERS, FIXAtES, CLOSURE, CHAMBERS, WEARIES, RELaTIoN, IMPENDS, CABiNETS, CARRIES, DUCTILE, LAtTICED. Nothing really strange—just the usual smattering of common prefixes and suffixes.

As it happens, I forgot to pack my camera, so there’s no photographic evidence. Ergo, here’s to a holistic postmortem.

I am not a morning person. I do not bear a passing resemblance to anyone who might conceivably be mistaken for a morning person. I did not have a very good morning session, losing my first three games and effectively tying the fourth. (I only won Round 4 because my opponent had a handful of seconds left on his clock when he rushed to make his final play, which would have ended the game in a tie had he not misplaced his tiles in his haste.) That only made the 7-1 comeback in Rounds 5 through 12 all the more euphoric.

One could argue that my record in this tournament benefited from a lower level of competition than what I usually face. But there wasn’t much of a correlation when it came to the games themselves: while most of my opponents were lower-rated—I was seeded second in the division—three of my four losses were to substantially lower-rated players, and the other one was the 427-430 photo finish in Round 3, which earned me the High Loss.

My High Win wasn’t a blowout either, much to the credit of my opponent: the score was 492-409, a combined total of 901. In my experience, your typical game of competitive Scrabble winds up with a combined score in the 700-800 range. A combined score north of 900 isn’t at all unheard of—it’s just uncommon, especially in the intermediate divisions.

More significant, to me, is that I posted scores exceeding 400 in seven games. My average score over the whole tournament was 393.5. (My lowest score was 290—actually a 310, but with a 20-point penalty for going two minutes overtime.) This isn’t a big deal at the expert level, where a winning score typically breaks 400 unless it was a very defensive game, but it tells me I’m looking for decent plays.

In the absence of a considerable disparity in skill level, you need luck on your side to put up a good run at a tournament. I didn’t have any games where my opponent drew absolutely everything of worth and blew me out of the water. What surprised me, though, was that luck didn’t correspond to the scores (or the wins and losses) to the extent it often does. There were games I won decisively even though my opponents drew equally well or better. I can keep up with them without an unhealthy dependency on the blanks. It was often a matter of timing: they didn’t necessarily pick up blanks, S’s or JQXZ at opportune moments, whereas I often drew tiles that weren’t great in and of themselves, but happened to fit the board position. And that’s still dumb luck with the usual dose of patience and vision.

Psychologically, I’m not getting demoralized when my opponents pull ahead with a bingo or two, and I’m working to fight back. In the game where I posted my 99-point comeback and eventually won 414-346, my opponent surged ahead with ANGRILY and ALTOIST before I got a chance to return fire with FIXAtES and CLOSURE. As with my last tournament, my shutdown game is steadily improving, so it’s encouraging that I’m managing to pull ahead of opponents who trounce me in the first half of the game, then close up the board and finish them off.

Time management is still a serious problem for me, and I still have a tendency to fish around with low-point plays when I’m holding nothing but low-point tiles that are too close to a bingo to give up but too individually feeble to be useful, but I think I addressed both of them as the competition went on. (What I didn’t fix, the tile gods did.) That’s the great thing about a one-day marathon tournament: you can adjust to bad strategic habits on the fly while they’re still fresh in your memory, assuming you’re awake enough to access said memory.

Word knowledge remains the biggest hump ahead of me, as I lost a fair number of turns to bad challenges, and they are costing me games.

8 of my 20 bingos were eight-letter words, which means I’m actually looking for bingos in the context of the board instead of juggling my rack in isolation. I used to depend too much on sevens. There is some measurable improvement here.

I am often intrigued by the tendency for measurable statistical patterns to emerge as a metric of skill in a game dominated by chance. Let’s hope that it was skill at work this time, and not merely the fatigue of my opponents as the day wore on, or the tile gods deciding to pardon me because I’m going to receive my due punishment when I write the examinations for which I was supposed to study all weekend.

Every year, the month of October hits me upside the head and I come to the sudden and unwelcome realization that I haven’t studied or practised in months. The fact that I’ve been letting my word knowledge atrophy is probably the biggest reason my rating has been hovering around the 1300 zone for years now, and cramming the week or the night or the morning before the tournament doesn’t tend to help—because after all, what should you cram? With this in mind, the preparation I did for the tournament amounted to a lot of sleep, a lot of tea, and several hours at a Yamaha grand.

Did it help?

Perhaps it did, though it’s hard to determine a causal link without a controlled experiment, and I’m not about to jeopardize my performance in a major tournament by testing the control case of “nothing resembling any preparation whatsoever”. I speculate, however, that there is a certain intangible benefit to organizing the mind in a way that is amenable to perceiving patterns and permutations, especially when you are about to fumble around with anagrams and board geometries for a span of three days. The spiritually inclined might refer to it as “meditation”, though I’m not convinced it’s quite the same thing. I like to conceive of it as being more like the alignment of magnetic domains.

I should clarify that I hit the keys with a specific aim in mind. In my own assessment, one of my greatest weaknesses as an improvising pianist is that I am grossly right-handed, and I’ve largely trapped myself in the standard idiom of framing interesting harmonies in the left hand and leaving the linear melodic figurations to the right. Part of this is because I haven’t trained my left hand to be quite as naturally dextrous, or to play melodically by habit, as I haven’t practised the likes of Bach for several years now. At fast tempos (like the 200-some beats per minute typical of bebop and rhythm changes) my ability to consciously do something musically interesting in the left hand virtually disappears, and the difference between what I can do and what a horn player can do becomes effectively nil.

So I decided to do something different, and make a stab at contrapuntal improvisation—for example, playing slow ballads in three voices, and making the middle voice as continuous and hand-independent as possible. I’ll have to record a sample sometime. I can’t emphasize how necessary a good and properly tuned acoustic piano is in order for this to work, because much of the immersive, meditative effect comes from leveraging the resonance of the strings to define the harmonic space.

Speaking of grand pianos, the other thing I’ve been trying to do in my solo playing is develop a natural feel for the sostenuto pedal, so I can achieve the clarity of articulation appropriate for maintaining a jazz-like rhythmic feel while letting the harmonies ring. As someone who grew up playing an upright, it’s not a skill I’ve ever really developed—and it’s not like it’s something that comes in extremely handy for the kind of repertoire you are likely to encounter as a beginning student of classical music.

Lately I’ve been listening very carefully to Brad Mehldau, who is arguably the defining jazz pianist of the past decade, and in my estimation, the best jazz interpreter of the Beatles on any instrument. He’s also produced a trove of articles about music, which are a real pleasure to read. I recommend the liner notes from House on Hill, in which he discusses the dissolution of the harmony/melody boundary in the context of the relationship between composition and improvisation, illustrating his discussion with examples from Bach, Brahms and Monk. It’s a phenomenal article, accessible to anyone with some basic music theory: you don’t need to know about jazz, or even listen to the record, to pick up on his finer insights.

Part of why I hold Mehldau in such high esteem is that he exhibits an exemplary flair for contrapuntal thinking in his improvisation, which is why his style lends itself so well to the rich countermelodic writing in the Lennon/McCartney oeuvre. (Listen to his renditions of “Martha My Dear” and “She’s Leaving Home” off Day Is Done and you’ll immediately know what I mean. Or watch this YouTube video of a solo performance bounded by Mancini’s “Moon River” on one end and “Dear Prudence” on the other. It unfortunately cuts off at the end, but it’s still worth a look.)

Mehldau is clearly the primary influence on my little contrapuntal project, although I don’t pretend to be anywhere near him in either technique or imagination. For me, it’s all part of a larger initiative to develop a mind that can operate spontaneously on several parallel tracks, though the satisfaction at its terminus comes entirely from the music itself.

It’s worth pointing out that a staggering number of top-tier Scrabble players are musicians, mathematicians, or some combination of the two. The combinatorial relevance of mathematics is obvious, although math is not by itself a sufficient cause for quality performance in the game any more than physics is to curling. However, the question of whether musical proficiency translates to good Scrabble is an open question that’s come up before, and you’ll hear different answers depending on who you ask.

Some would argue that a musical background accustoms an individual to the discovery of a creative spark, a mode of perception that gently nudges a chaotic scramble of atomic units (be they letters or pitches) into the elegant lattices of a finished jigsaw. If we think of music as a form of language, then this is actually just a specific case of the general debate about whether your available means of communication determine the limits of your thoughts and behaviours—the best-known formulations being the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis and Newspeak in George Orwell’s Ninteen Eighty-Four.

Or as I like to put it: did Tchaikovsky have two hundred motifs for “snow”?

I’m not saying, of course, that I’m developing musical skills for the purpose of playing better Scrabble. I’m developing musical skills for the purpose of playing better music. But I’d like to think that the benefits of any creative or intellectual activity bubble over to everything else you do in life.

As for the Scrabble-playing itself?

Considering that my wins and losses only differ by one game, a point spread of +512 is rather massive: it goes without saying that I won by considerably larger margins than I lost. As usual, part of it is luck, but I also got the distinct sense that I’ve improved in certain respects—namely, shutting down the board when I’m ahead without destroying my own scoring opportunities, and scoring at a consistent pace every turn without depending too much on getting bingos down. As a result, I’m holding onto my leads and turning over more tiles (which often leads to picking up the good ones, creating the perception that I’m getting away with a good run of luck), although I’m still having trouble coming back from big deficits.

On the downside, poor time management is killing my endgame; I lost one game by 6 points because of the overtime penalty. I also lost another one by 15 because I was in a situation where there were two bingo lanes open with two tiles in the bag and the nearly unblockable DEIINRST? unseen (my opponent held EIINST?), and I had a choice between “blocking both lanes while creating a new but unlikely one” and “blocking the more bingo-friendly of the two lanes”, and really should have gone for the former, but didn’t. Now that I look at the board again, there was actually a blocking play that would have worked, but I missed it completely—again, probably because of pressure from the clock, or just bad judgment in general.

Realistically, I expect to be a 1300 player until I dedicate some serious effort to not only doing vocabulary exercises again, but also playing more games and testing my ability to make decisions in challenging, high-pressure situations. And I think much of that is going to come from understanding the patterns beneath how championship players assess and react to these scenarios. It’s not unlike listening to someone like Brad Mehldau—really listening—and picking up on the subtle creative decisions that make him stylistically unique, the minutiae of spontaneous reasoning that impel him to find the best plays in an established aural position.

You can tell this post is going to be about Scrabble, because its title consists of three playable ways to spell a certain interjection used to express disgust. But I digress. On to the story, then: as you can see from the results of last weekend’s tournament in Calgary, my division played out dans un mouchoir de poche. I placed second with a record of 10-4 (+454), behind a record of 10-4 (+457). There exists self-incriminating photographic evidence.

In order to place first, I needed to not only win my last game, but win it by at least 31 points. I had it handed to me, and then I proceeded to subconsciously do everything I possibly could to methodically twist a rusty bayonet in my foot prior to firing the armament to which it was attached, and win by 29.

On my final rack, I held a 405-380 lead and AEERSU? to my opponent’s AEELOS. In spite of the fact that I couldn’t find any of the five bingos through the G at the bottom (AUbERGES, REGAUgES, lEAGUERS, pUGAREES, REArGUES), with the blank in hand – and no place for my opponent to go out in one turn – a 31-point win should have been a piece of cake for any even remotely competent novice player. Yet somehow, I did all of the following: a) not score nearly as many points as I could have; b) not block the natural spot for my opponent’s S, the hook on the end of JOLT; 3) play off my blank for a zero-point gain on the same play without the blank. The first two sins were suboptimal. The third was anti-optimal.

In case you’re following the photograph, the play was ERASErs, hooking onto the blank S in WARTIEsT with the other S on the end of TAV. That’s how you use the blank if and only if you’re trying your darndest to lose a game you’ve already won. I’m fairly certain it is the worst play I have ever made.

Why did I do it? I was tight on time (under half a minute), and the spot where I played it was a location where I was looking for potential bingos. It was a panic move based on the typical instinct to play off as many tiles as possible at the end of the game, a usually sound endgame principle that does not at all apply if a) you know your opponent can’t go out in one turn, or b) one of said tiles is a blank.

It’s been four days now. I’m still not over it. I could have forfeited the tournament by headbutting my opponent in the chest, and suffered less regret.

The mouldy icing on the flea-infested cake, though, was that this didn’t lose me a shot at first place. I still held a U, which would have fit in nicely at 4D (between R and IN to make RUIN) for a 33-point win. Nope! With under ten seconds left, I played UP for half the points. By that time, I’d realized what I’d just done with my blank, and the subsequent horror may have blinded me to the winning play. I still won the battle, 427-398, but the war was so acutely a self-inflicted defeat that I initially handed my opponent the tally slip for recording the final score, a duty that falls upon the victor. It was a mite confusing.

Sometimes, people ask me if playing Scrabble competitively is just a matter of knowing a lot of words. I tell them about how you need an intuitive grasp of probability and board geometry, and a strategic mindset in general, in order to succeed. But it’s more than that. Surviving a tournament requires a degree of mental fortitude that verges on the absurd. I’ve plateaued at the 1200-1400 ratings zone over the past two years, and while much of that is due to lack of practice, I wonder how much of it falls upon a lack of discipline and self control in moments of extreme panic. You don’t have what it takes to be an expert until you can lift stones with your mind while standing on one hand with Yoda balanced on your foot. Maybe that’s why Joe Edley does Zen.

On the upside, in Round 10 I finished with my first triple-triple in a long time: BUSTLING for 158 points. An expert opponent would never have given me the opening created by STUMpER: even upon failing to see MURkEST (making FE, ES and ATT and not opening any new lanes), he or she would have blocked. Every available bingo that opens the A column would have begun with either S or M, permitting BUSTLING or TUMBLING. I’ll take the points and like’em.

Sigh… poor little blank. I threw it away like an unwanted child. Like it was trash. Like it meant nothing to me. And after all we’d been through together. I’m sorry, little blank. I won’t do it again.

Okay, I’ve had enough. I’m going to Disneyland.