Kicking myself
It was nice to get out to play Scrabble this past weekend.
etheridge2 had a great directorial debut, and I did reasonably well in Div. 1, though I probably lost a few ratings points.
I had some really good games, but there's one that's haunting me now: The second to last game of the tournament I was playing Eric Z., who usually beats me. I managed to get a good lead, both the blanks, and proceeded to figure out how to block his bingos. I had a perfect spot to play GYRO to block both of his possible bingo lanes, so I slapped it on the board and hit the clock. At that point, I was feeling REALLY good about the game. But as soon as he turned the board around to face him, I heard him say, "Challenge!" What?? And I looked down and saw that I had put GRYO* on the board. My heart sank. I took it off, not even bothering with the formality of checking the word judge. And then my heart sank even further when he immediately put down a bingo....and then after that a 70-pt. Z-word.
I was so angry at myself. I'm sure that affected my play in the final game, too. (And in that game, I ALMOST hit the clock, but luckily noticed that I had played TE*. Duh.) My final record was 6-7, which was not much below my expectation, but the fact that I had that one game in the bag and then just BLEW it really had me feeling down afterwards.
I suppose I should focus the game I won by 199 pts., and other really great games that I had. I'm going to be so busy this fall, so I don't know when I'll have another chance to play in a tourney and prove to myself that I'm not a complete ditz!!
I AM particularly happy for my clubmate and friend, Lisa Slankard, who had an awesome tournament and took second place! She and I have taken turns winning games against each other in tournaments, but she's been really working hard on her game lately and it shows. Congrats to her, and also to
porosus, who won Div. 2, and probably would have done well in Div. 1 had he played there!