Ntuple Indemnity

The way the pairings work at the NSC this year divide the thirty games of the tournament into sessions of three or four games apiece. After the first day of a straight round-robin evenly distributed by rating, each successive session is a round-robin within a group of four in their given win-loss bracket. Because of my abysmal 1-7 record on Sunday, I began Day Two with other players who had endured a similar experience.

Those of you who have participated in or observed a debate tournament, particularly in the points-based Worlds style, are familiar with the notion of riding the lower bracket; a decent team that drops to an unlucky draw in the round-robin can feed off the bottom and bounce back into contention. Doing the same thing at a Scrabble tournament is a little trickier for a number of reasons. Because the tournament is divisionally segregated, the opponents at the bottom of the pile are often either players of equal skill who have just had a horrific run of luck, or overrated due to a stellar performance at a prior event. The first category confers limited raw advantage in terms of providing a rebound, and one has to rely on two other things: defiant concentration in the face of demoralizing circumstances, and blind superstitious belief in the law of averages.

The case study for a miraculous recovery is my performance in Rounds 9 to 15. Was it luck or a relative superiority of skill? You decide.

So let us begin with a look at Round 9 against Ossie Mair:

The game began modestly enough. I permitted a low-scoring phony (TREW*) on account of not knowing for certain whether or not it was allowed, and trailed by a slim margin for the first couple of turns. Then I played the one bingo on the board, TASTING for 78, and never looked back. Ossie made it halfway back across the divide between our scores when I left a triple-letter open beside the O in AZO, where he played JEU for 51 points. As the game wound down, it looked very much like he was shooting for a comeback bingo, so I made a succession of small plays to close up the board. I kept a blank in reserve as the Q was still unseen, but he picked it up and managed to squeeze it out in his last move. In my previous draw I had picked up a second blank, so I played out with ROsiN for 24. On paper it looks like I outdrew Ossie significantly – he only had the J, Q and one S – but it was actually quite even, given how the blanks were not a factor. My seven-game losing streak comes to an abrupt end with a modest but triumphal victory, 399-335.

Round 10 vs. George Rogers:

In spite of how I controlled the board the entire game and cruised to a win by a sizable margin, I am actually disappointed with this one. A lot of the credit goes to my being fortunate enough to have an opponent complacent enough to not challenge a silly and unnecessary phony. I refer, of course, to OUTRoAD*. Yes, that blank is an O, and although George considered challenging, he mistakenly did not. For some reason I did not play any of the eight legal words in that rack, the silliest of which is OUTReAD – the same play, but defining the blank differently. Against someone with a solid knowledge of the words that take an OUT- prefix, that wouldn’t have lasted a second. This time, I was forgiven for a critical mistake without penalty.

I started closing the bingo lanes early on to maintain the lead, hence the stepladders slithering their way to the top and bottom right corners, though George managed a big counterplay with ZEKS for 54. However, a second bingo, BANTIeS for 69, followed by PAX for 53 with a tripled X in two directions sealed the round. Final score: 412-292.

Then came Round 11 with Bruce Cramer:

Bruce, who now lives in Buffalo, tells me he was actually a cellist in the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra back in the 1970s. So it’s only appropriate that four turns in, holding ACENILT, I see my own instrument for 72 points across the R in REJOIN. As soon as I established a 103-point lead with my second bingo, GUPpIES for 80, I start closing it down like I did with the first two games, only with a lot more urgency, as it becomes increasingly obvious with the plays my opponent makes that he is on the verge of squeezing one out. The riskiest one was FIRS down the M column, which took care of a dangerous hanging I and made a vertical bingo unlikely due to the adjacent consonants R and S, but left a T hook open to make FIRST. In fact, I was the one who subsequently drew to a bingo rack with a T in the fifth position – NEGATES – but Bruce blocked it as he played ADD to open up for the S he was holding. KNEE was the nail in the coffin, forcing him to play off his power tiles and draw the one remaining tile in the bag. I took this one by a slightly higher margin than the last, 393-268.

Round 12 vs. Herb Lewis:

I made a bad mistake in this game. Immediately after I play DaMNING at I8 for 70, leaving a volatile triple nearby, Herb plays SLATTER* at 15I, hooking it to make DaMNINGS*. I challenge the entire play, and it gets taken off – but when you challenge, you are not told which word in the play is the phony. So I notice that in his rack he also holds RATTLES and STARTLE, both playable in the same position, which he somehow missed – under the presumption that DaMNING might indeed take an S, which I did not know for sure either way. So in order to block the triple lane and either of the bingos I saw, I play OW for 12. But Herb sees the one I didn’t: STARLET for 68. Ow. I recover, and it really does come down to the endgame – his 40-point SuQ puts him within 5 points of me. He held DDLRUY, I held GLORSUU – neither of them impressive racks, but GURUS for 16 and LOG for 10 did the trick. Score: 351-309.

Armed with a 5-7 (+57) record, the adventure continued in the afternoon in a new round-robin group. First came Round 13 against Carol Spencer Yamashita:

I get off to an incredible start, drawing two blanks and an S in my first rack and immediately seeing HALidES for 74. Then I draw the Q and a U at the same time, play AQUA at E5 – only to notice that I had the tiles to extend it to AQUARIA for a double-double (not the kind you order at Tim Horton’s, but hitting two double word scores at once) – 64 points. Unfortunately I get overly enthusiastic and lose a turn for mistakenly playing WO at 6J under the E and D in PAGED, which was challenged off. It’s not that I forgot EW* was not a word – I didn’t even see it until Carol stopped the clock for its removal. I now have an arrow pointing to that turn’s respective cell on my scoresheet with the words “pay attention” beside it.

My second mistake: at one point I need to dump some consonants, and I wrap a C and a D around OWED to make COWED. At that point I had an S (which I played off in STORY for a few measly points and to take out the lane under dEW) – not even noticing the huge opening I left until she played ZEST, hooking to make SCOWED, for 51 points. It puts a dent in my lead, but I still manage to work my way to a 402-310 victory.

The funny thing is, I’d managed five consecutive wins by this point and had yet to hit one that I would consider the Requisite Lucky Game of the day. Then comes Round 14 against Lynda Cleary:

Right off the bat I held the J, playing JUG for 41 with the J doubled two ways. Lynda tried CANKORS* at L1; I challenged it off. Another two turns and I have ADEINZ? on my rack. I see ANoDIZE, but there’s nowhere for it to go, never mind the others – AGNIZED, DIAZINE and ZENAIDA, only two of which I knew, none of which I saw. The last three letters in CRANK were the most open and volatile spots at the time, but I didn’t know ZENAIDAs, rENDZINA or KyANIZED, so I played ZIN for 32. Then I held QUAIlED, but again, there was nary a place for it – I didn’t see ANtIQUED through the N over IKON, which Lynda had just played – so I played QUAI for 33. The bingo came out with EVIDENt for 74, which I followed with IXIA for 33. FATALITY was not a bingo – I played FATAL for 42 first, and extended it for another 42 four turns later. Drawing only an S and a blank on a board that I was quick to tighten, she never managed a play over 35 points.

I scored my way up to 453 points, but Lynda held an unplayable G at the end, and kept passing her turn as I played off my last rack (BDERRYS) piece by piece, not realizing how long I was taking to do it until I had about twenty seconds remaining. I went overtime by ten seconds, rounded up to a minute for a 10-point deduction. It’s my sixth straight win nonetheless, 443-262; I’ve recuperated from the disaster on Monday for a 7-7 record.

Then I finish the day with Round 15 against Susan Rhea:

Well, I was overdue for a Requisite Unlucky Game, but despite drawing only the J and a blank, I kept pace for most of the game. I got a natural bingo out early, MARRIED for 109, and played JIVE for 48 to take what seemed like a thundering lead. But against my better judgment, I neglected the open X next to a double word score, thinking that it would amount to an average dump of two or three tiles – then Susan played QuASI for 67. With four A’s on my rack, I had to blow a turn on an exchange, and she came out in front. Even after she plays TWEEZES for 40, I keep within 30 points of her for the rest of the game until the last few moves, when I held some bingo racks that had no place to go, and was trying to block at the same time. I burn a blank by playing DIs, a block that is successful, but renders me unable to catch up with her remaining plays. I lose, 343-397, but at least I kept it from being the blowout it could have been.

After two days and fifteen rounds, my record is 7-8, +256 – 90th place with the second-highest spread in my win-loss bracket. Although I am still a long ways away from the money zone – the top players in my division are sitting pretty at 12-3 – it is a remarkable recovery given the unprecedented slump on the first day.

Later in the evening I attended the National Scrabble Association town meeting, a Q&A forum that exhibited the hack side of Scrabble – questions about the progress on the next revision of the dictionary (ZA* and QI* are in, EMF is rightly out), the ESPN deal (the crews arrive tomorrow), factoring scores and spreads into the rating system (not until there’s a better way for tournament directors to submit them), that sort of thing. The most interesting question was one about why, if Canada falls under the NSA and thus the North American lexicon, no Canadian dictionary is among the many sources used in said lexicon’s compilation. It was assured, though, that LOONIE* and TOONIE* are indeed in the next revision.

There was another interesting legal issue brought up concerning the rights to Scrabble software, particularly online play, but it relates to the state of the electronic games industry on a much broader scale, so let us leave that for another post someday. Fifteen rounds down, fifteen to go.

Okay, this is ridiculous.

Today was the first game day of the 2004 National Scrabble Championship held this year in New Orleans, the city that not only gave us the legendary Louis Armstrong, but named their international airport after him. (Now that’s class.) Originally my plan was to document the thirty rounds I am playing over the course of this week to give the regular readers back home a sense of what an intermediate-level game on the competitive circuit looks like, but given where I am in the standings after the first eight matches, this may no longer be exposé of fancy plays and astronomical scores as much as it is fodder for thorough personal humiliation.

Alas, the sheer embarrassment of what is perhaps my worst performance in any sanctioned tournament to date is hardly grounds to break promises to oneself and to one’s readership. In fact, it could serve as an inspiration, a public self-inflicted flogging of sorts to quite literally whip me back into shape. So below, for your amusement, is a demonstration of what happens when I play like an idiot.

But first, a quick primer of some of the terminology I use, for the benefit of the laypeople in the audience. Words played are indicated in all caps, except for blanks, which are described in lowercase when used, as question marks when unused. An asterisk next to a word indicates a phony, or a word not in the tournament dictionary. A bingo is a play using all seven letters on the rack, which awards the player a 50-point bonus. Power tiles refer to the four S’s, two blanks, J, Q, X and Z due to their scoring potential. Occasionally I will use grid notation: columns are alphabetized from A to O, and rows are numbered from 1 to 15. A horizontal play is indicated by the row number before the column letter; a vertical play, vice versa. For example, if I played a word that started on the centre square and worked its way to the right, it would be at 8H. If it worked its way down, it would be at H8. Got it? Great. Without further ado, here we go.

Round 1 vs. Gene Rawlins:

This is an example of how to secure a victory with a well-planned endgame. It was a tight match from beginning to end; the power tile draws were equitable, and even when I pulled off a 100-point lead by playing tROTTING on a triple for 77, Gene responded two moves later with GERMaNIC. Completely forgetting that GERMANIC is allowed (in reference to germanium, and not the barbarians on the outskirts of Rome) I make an unsuccessful challenge. At the time I held RESIDUE, which could have been hooked under the R in ROUGE, but Gene’s bingo blocked the spot and I never played it off.

The score was 372-333 when my opponent emptied the bag with JEEP for 42, and here it gets interesting. My rack is EIKRSSU, and I contemplate playing LIKERS at 15C to hit the triple for 33, but thinking that he held BOLW (it was actually a C, not an O) I retracted, as he could score a big counterplay with WO on 14F for 28, securing a victory. I almost play RISK at 5B, hooking the S on JEEP, but recall that he has a B and can play out by extending it to BRISK – which in reality he couldn’t, as he has no vowels. So I settle for KISS at the same spot for 30, seeing that I had a big out-play in the making. Gene plays WaB for 16; I dispense of my remaining tiles with RUNE, turning QUIT into QUITE, for 22 – then get an 8-point bonus for his remaining tiles, C and L. Final score: 392-389 in my favour.

Inexplicably, this is the best I do all day.

With a 1-0 (+3) record on my belt, I head into Round 2 against Joe McCollum:

Every now and then, the tiles swing in your favour. Round 2 was my Requisite Lucky Game – I held all the power tiles except for a blank and an S, though the Q doesn’t really count for reasons I will soon reveal. I played SILLIEr for 68 and HEARTHS for 83 in opportune spots, and by the time there were four tiles in the bag, I held CEEMOOY and a somewhat commanding lead of 337-263. The unseen tiles were AEEINNGOQRT, and there were two open bingo lanes: through TURDS, and over the E in CURVE. The obvious move is MOC at 14E, closing the lane but leaving a tile in the bag as insurance. However, being greedy for spread, I play COME for 26 to block the U and hopefully stick my opponent with the Q – whereupon he plays RENTING for 64 and gets a bonus of 38 for sticking me with AEEOOQY, emptying his rack with no tiles in the bag. I lose, 363-365.

Even if I had played MOC, he could have played RETUNING on a double down the open U, but he would have had to pick up a tile, and while the Q-stick would still decide the game, I could have had a fighting chance to hold what was otherwise a sure win. As it turns out, violating every endgame principle in the book was not the end of the stupidity that went on today, though it was certainly the most egregious move on my part.

Round 3 vs. Jerri Bergeron:

In this game I held about three different bingo racks in succession, only I had no place to play the words in question, as they all ended in S. A few turns later, my bingo-prone tiles had largely disappeared. Then Jerri plays AROINTS for 81, extending HOOKS to SHOOKS. I challenge SHOOKS, which, had I known it, would have provided me with an easy bingo several turns earlier. It’s acceptable, and I lose a turn with an 86-point deficit. I manage to squeak out rEFINES for 83 a little later, but she plays ZETA on a triple with the Z on the double for 69 points, sealing the deal. With a 354-434 loss, my record stands at 1-2 (-79).

Round 4 vs. Daniel Casey:

This round starts fairly well, despite being a low-scoring game on both sides. At one point he starts fishing for a bingo rack, and perceiving that, I start blocking to maintain the lead I earned early on when I played LIVENEd for 79. When I play TAP to block the lane in the top two rows, he finally strikes gold with ORDINALS for 76, which I could have foiled had I played PAT; I should have seen that O is far more likely the beginning of a word than its end. Things are still in order; within two turns I play CREATInE for 61, which would have been far safer had I made the blank a V instead of an N – only I didn’t even see CREATIvE, which is telling as to my state of mind.

What really loses the game for me, though, is when I fall behind by playing ENROOF* to the triple in the bottom right, which Dan challenges right off. He plays off both the Z and the J before I dump the rest of my tiles, and my score declines again as I head to a third straight loss, 339-355.

Round 5 vs. R. Jason Sommer:

Two serious blunders cost me this one. I challenge COLONUS, which my opponent plays for 75 points to the left of EsTRONE, which I played earlier for 77; it turns out to be good. I trail him for the rest of the game by a small margin; my final rack was EEFISTY, and I knew his was EGILSS?. I play REIFY for 22 to block a potential bingo, missing a huge play – FEY at J12 to hook onto PREXY for 42 points, still blocking the same lane but pulling within striking distance. As such, I concede another amateurishly low-scoring game, 321-352.

With 1-4 (-126) record, things are looking pretty dire. Then comes Round 6 against Teresa Sanders:

So far, all my games had been fairly balanced in terms of luck; the four losses could largely be attributed to bad gamesmanship under relatively even circumstances. In Round 6 I get hit with the Requisite Unlucky Game, and it is horrifying. Teresa gets the run of the board with two early bingos, HARDENS for 67 and CREATIoN for 68. I am still within range to retake the lead with a bingo of my own as the game nears its conclusion. Finding no place to play ApOGEES, I play off the E and O in DOE to open a second lane for myself. Joke’s on Nick, as she just happens to hold the tiles to play ESQUIRES for 104.

Thankfully, this time around I had learned my lesson from Round 2, and left a tile in the bag – picking up R and Y, leaving a U. I played out with my only bingo of the game, GYRAtES for 86, but ESQUIRES had already decided the game. It’s a fifth straight drubbing, 340-411 – well into the zone of personal record lows.

Round 7 with Helen B. Douglas continues punishing me for squandering the games where I actually had good draws:

Now it’s my turn to draw only an S and a blank while my opponent makes big plays with all the other power tiles, like QATS for 35, OX for 36, extended to SILEX for 36, and MAZE for 38. Despite two bingos on my part – tAURINE for 69 and ISOLATED for 70 – the lack of strong plays in between and the good fortune of my adversary resulted in the biggest loss of the day, 325-438 – a spread of 113 points in the red.

Round 8 vs. Kit Morehead finished off the catastrophic first day of play:

Again, a low-scoring game on a tight board, and my first with no bingos. When the bag was emptied, Kit had a marginal lead of 303-283 and held the rack ADEINOL, while I had EFGITU?, which makes FaTIGUE, only that had no place to go. So I meticulously calculated an optimal endgame strategy, first considering FITtER down to the R in QUIRES and then playing off the G and the U elsewhere (say, BUG at 6M), then realizing GUTtER for 12 would work better despite scoring less, as I could play out with FIR or IFS for another 12. Kit plays DIRL for 12, blocking FIR, so I go with IFS. With 8 points for her leftover tiles, AENO, I tie the game at 315 apiece.

That is, until we conduct a Florida-style recount, and discover that she scored 30 for DINGED, not 27, and 75 for BATTErS, not 74. Final score: 315-319.

So there you have it, folks: a public, game-by-game (if not blow-by-blow, which would have been much too painful to recount) recollection of the very worst single day I have had playing Scrabble. A seven-game losing streak places me at 1-7, -314 – 165th in a division of 169 players; not quite rock-bottom, but negligibly indistinguishable from it.

At the other end of the spectrum, fellow Calgarian Albert Hahn – who beat me by over 200 points on Thursday in my last game before leaving town – is currently in third place in Division 1 with a 7-1 (+589) record, even defeating Scrabble legend and defending champion Joel Sherman – who, incidentally, is the spitting image of a balding, forty-two-year-old Kyle Kawanami.

Those of you who know our favourite Virgil-quoting UADS President would have no idea just how uncanny the resemblance is from pictures alone (far left); it becomes evident when you see ‘G.I. Joel’ in person – the sinus problems, the walk and everything. Alternatively, you could see him – among other Scrabble legends, some of whom I met at the opening banquet last night – in the documentary Word Wars, whenever it happens to come by Alberta, which is not anytime soon.

I did get to catch the film tonight at a special screening by director and top-division expert Eric Chaikin, which was followed by a short Q&A session. I would write a review, but it will have to wait as I need some rest, lest the seven-loss calamity be extended to eight.

Last night I was at the receiving end of a loophole in the Scrabble Tournament Rules, one that I had known about for a long time but had never personally observed. It comes from a unique situation where you can exploit the overtime penalty of ten points deducted for every minute over, rounded up, and the stalemate rule that six consecutive turns with a score of zero result in a draw.

So there I am with an unplayable Q on my rack and “00:00:00” on my clock. If my opponent plays his remaining tiles, the game ends, the clock is neutralized and he gets a twenty-point bonus off my Q. But alas, my opponent is Jason Krueger (who, it was observed, may be the bastard child of two classic movie monsters) – and what he does is not only crafty, but perfectly legal.

“I just wanted to warn you,” he says, “that I’m going to be a jerk.” As his clock keeps ticking – he has about three minutes left – he explains his diabolical plan in true James Bond tradition: because regardless of whether or not any legal moves remain, it takes three consecutive passes by both players to end the game, he was going to pass two of those three turns – pushing me a second into overtime, and knocking me down by ten points. Only then would he play off his tiles and bring the match to its conclusion. It was quite courteous of him to notify me beforehand, really – pull that off without warning in front of a stressed and antsy player who hasn’t read the fine print, and you can bet on some rising tension in the room.

Combined with the Q, that boosts his point spread by thirty. He already had the game in the bag, so in the context of a single game, the move was inconsequential; but in a tournament setting where win-loss ties are broken by cumulative spread, it could make all the difference.

Roger Ebert, whether you agree with him or not, is always an entertaining read. In his three-star review of the Scrabble documentary Word Wars, he says of the rack-and-tile subculture:

Scrabble is one way to kill time. I can think of better ways to pass obsessive, lonely, anti-social lives; a documentary named Cinemania is about people who literally attempt to spend every waking hour watching movies, seven days a week. At least they get to see the movies. After a Scrabble player has triumphantly played a word that contains Q without U, where does he go from there? How long can you treasure that memory?

Actually, QAT is the most-played word in the game at the tournament level, and the list of words containing Q but not U (which, incidentally, is sold as a T-shirt) is one of the first thing a player learns. The first ‘bingo’, a play using all seven tiles – now that’s a milestone. Then you have the first game over 500, or in very rare cases, 600; I have yet to surmount the latter myself.

Then you have the guys who memorize the entire dictionary. They are in a class of their own.

Vote Out Anders! – which, incidentally, anagrams to “devout treason” – had the courtesy of putting me on their links page, under the heading “Canadian Politics Blogs”. While this may not give me an upper hand insofar as my position in the global game of Six Degrees of Paul Wells, it is rather amusing to think of the potential visitors who come here looking for analytical treatises singing the praises of Star Wars and instead, find… well, analytical treatises singing the praises of Star Wars.

I received an invitation to their All-Party Block Party last night, but was tragically unable to attend. With just over a month to go until the National Championships and over a month since I had last played, Scrabble took precedence, and will continue to take precedence in the weeks ahead. In the North American lexicon, there are 96 playable two-letter words; those I’ve had down cold for years. The 972 three-letter words were in the bag about a year ago, but more than a little rust has accumulated. Somehow, within the next five weeks I need to establish a study regimen that will address these issues and cover the 3903 four-letter words au minimum, not to mention high-probability bingo stems, front and back hooks, vowel dumps, and power-tile fives.

Yeah, right.

Speaking of the great pastime, the documentary Word Wars has yet to screen in Alberta, despite being a hit on the festival circuit since its Sundance debut last year. Now, one would at least hope that it will screen in New Orleans, but it’s not listed. By all appearances, it features pretty much the same gang of kooky top-rated players as all the other publicity about the competitive circuit; in fact, in his NSC 2004 registration, former world champion Joel Sherman quite accurately lists his occupation as “Featured character in books and films on Scrabble.”

More fun with anagrams, for the Students’ Union hacks in the room: in addition to the one Steve Smith mentions in his post dated 25 June, I’m particularly impressed with the discovery that “SU BOG rep Roman Kotovych” has a tendency to “hack up tomboy governors.”

Which, of course, brings me back to Star Wars. These are not mine – they come from the endlessly amusing alt.anagrams newsgroup – but observe: “Ronald Wilson Reagan, the late President of America” not only “dares generate a plan for the Cold War’s elimination,” but “the man fails to recall weapons ordered in Irangate.” And in much sadder news, “England’s team knocked out with defeat by jubilant Portugal” – “Gaunt idiot won jokes; fatal penalty blunder gutted Beckham.” Man, those guys are good.

Never mind that I have yet to send in my registration for this year’s National Scrabble Championships; it’s enough of a pickle to pick a division in which to play.

It so turns out that I did well enough at the last Calgary Summer Tournament for my NSA rating to shoot up by 112 points, which puts me at an all-time personal best of 1399. 1399, as it turns out, is a nasty little bugger of a boundary value. Players rated in the 1200-1399 range are slotted in Division 4 but eligible for Division 3, and the same ability to “play up” applies to the other divisions above and below, so should I play in Division 4 – as was the plan back when I sat pretty in the mid-1200s – I would be the top seed in what is effectively a 1000-1399 competitive pool. While that would theoretically give me a clear shot at $1500 USD, it does mean I would have to win almost all my rounds just to keep my rating afloat. Now Division 3 looks almost a certainty, though the expectation would be to break even – and I am but one rating point short of tackling Division 2, which is well into the 1600+ expert range, which would have been optimal for boosting my rating, though picking up some hard cash would not be a reasonable expectation.

Division 3 will still be a challenge, though. I will be playing with the likes of Robert Gillis, author of indispensible reference Bob’s Bible, and the mystery man known only as Winter, who registered under the fill-in surname “Zxqkj” (which, he explains, is “not for human consumption, but rather only for reporting results to the NSA computer”) and has achieved some renown for his epic quest to visit every Starbucks in the world.

But first, I need to register.

My next post, when it comes, will be to one extent or another a discussion of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, which I am seeing later today at an IMAX screening. It is unlikely I will afford it quite the same depth of analysis as I did The Return of the King in my extensive adaptation notes, but I make no promises either way.

Flames, once again, in six.