my worst moments in scrabble
Thought this would be humbling...
-missed AEOLIAN. This one I don't feel SO bad about... It was during a tournament, and I had just drawn AAO from my LINE leave. I needed a bingo and was so pissed that I drew shit tiles that I didn't take more than a few seconds to make my next play.
-challenged FRONTIER. (how can something be FRONTY* anyway?) In a club game, against mike frentz. (again, I still don't know how to make a link to an LJ user) The game was lost already, but I have to give him credit for his poker face upon me exclaiming 'hold'.
-played HATRID*. Against Tom Conrad in Portland. I was ahead around 80 points with an empty bag, and both of us holding full racks. He has a bingo in two spots, thus unblockable. But a quick calculation revealed that if I make basically ANY play that uses a few of my tiles, he falls short by like 30 points and the game is handily mine. So I quickly play HATRID* for like 31 instead of the 100 or so other plays that would win me the game, and he challenges it off and bingos out to win. I ended up 16-4 +1400 or so... but wouldn't 17-3 have been sweet?
-missed ROSEATE. In a semi-casual game at the bookstore session in Seattle... Looked at the rack as AEROSET and decided there was nothing there. This made me realize the danger of not being able to RECOGNIZE racks that contain EASY words long ago learned, and probably got me to start going over old words more regularly.
-challenged JESSE... against JESSE Warnum. I had 100% never seen the E hook in my life, and apparently I didn't trust JESSE's judgment on whether or not it was a word.
-missed RETINOL. In an online game if I remember right. I probably had about a 1700 rating at this point. Continuation on the ROSEATE dilemma... As of now, I have ALL the words I've learned, including ANEROID, on Cardbox* in Zyzzyva. A problem still persists though, even though I don't feel like I'd miss those easy ones in tournaments anymore. W/ the Cardbox* system, if I get a word right 8 times in a row, I won't see it again for half a year. In that half a year, I could theoretically forget the visual cue from those racks, like EILNORT, and dismiss it as not having a bingo in it. On Zyzzyva, or in any form of study, the underlying assumption is that a bingo IS in that rack, but in a tournament game, I might not necessarily HAVE that assumption, like with AAEILNO. If I look at that rack and somebody tells me "find the bingo", it takes .1 second. But if you aren't LOOKING for it, sometimes it can evade your bingo-vision.
-challenged TALK. This was in my pre-tournament days, against Rafi in one of our thousands of after-school games. I had recently learned TALC, and thinking I was hot stuff, challenged his 39-point alternate spelling of it. It would be safe to say most 5-year-olds would know better. This showed me that I had begun to treat words so much as letter strings that I couldn't even recognize a 4-letter string as a word. Those Thai guys might have it EASIER than us, considering they don't have the lingual baggage associated with each letter combo that us native speakers do, thus simplifying the information in their brains.
So anyways, this all coming from a "top 20 player". I should wear my "Jenius" shirt more often, I think it gets the message across effectively.
---Side note: I was supposed to find out if I made the national ultimate team today, but the decision was delayed for a few days because of some "tough decisions". I can't help but think one of those is me!---
-missed AEOLIAN. This one I don't feel SO bad about... It was during a tournament, and I had just drawn AAO from my LINE leave. I needed a bingo and was so pissed that I drew shit tiles that I didn't take more than a few seconds to make my next play.
-challenged FRONTIER. (how can something be FRONTY* anyway?) In a club game, against mike frentz. (again, I still don't know how to make a link to an LJ user) The game was lost already, but I have to give him credit for his poker face upon me exclaiming 'hold'.
-played HATRID*. Against Tom Conrad in Portland. I was ahead around 80 points with an empty bag, and both of us holding full racks. He has a bingo in two spots, thus unblockable. But a quick calculation revealed that if I make basically ANY play that uses a few of my tiles, he falls short by like 30 points and the game is handily mine. So I quickly play HATRID* for like 31 instead of the 100 or so other plays that would win me the game, and he challenges it off and bingos out to win. I ended up 16-4 +1400 or so... but wouldn't 17-3 have been sweet?
-missed ROSEATE. In a semi-casual game at the bookstore session in Seattle... Looked at the rack as AEROSET and decided there was nothing there. This made me realize the danger of not being able to RECOGNIZE racks that contain EASY words long ago learned, and probably got me to start going over old words more regularly.
-challenged JESSE... against JESSE Warnum. I had 100% never seen the E hook in my life, and apparently I didn't trust JESSE's judgment on whether or not it was a word.
-missed RETINOL. In an online game if I remember right. I probably had about a 1700 rating at this point. Continuation on the ROSEATE dilemma... As of now, I have ALL the words I've learned, including ANEROID, on Cardbox* in Zyzzyva. A problem still persists though, even though I don't feel like I'd miss those easy ones in tournaments anymore. W/ the Cardbox* system, if I get a word right 8 times in a row, I won't see it again for half a year. In that half a year, I could theoretically forget the visual cue from those racks, like EILNORT, and dismiss it as not having a bingo in it. On Zyzzyva, or in any form of study, the underlying assumption is that a bingo IS in that rack, but in a tournament game, I might not necessarily HAVE that assumption, like with AAEILNO. If I look at that rack and somebody tells me "find the bingo", it takes .1 second. But if you aren't LOOKING for it, sometimes it can evade your bingo-vision.
-challenged TALK. This was in my pre-tournament days, against Rafi in one of our thousands of after-school games. I had recently learned TALC, and thinking I was hot stuff, challenged his 39-point alternate spelling of it. It would be safe to say most 5-year-olds would know better. This showed me that I had begun to treat words so much as letter strings that I couldn't even recognize a 4-letter string as a word. Those Thai guys might have it EASIER than us, considering they don't have the lingual baggage associated with each letter combo that us native speakers do, thus simplifying the information in their brains.
So anyways, this all coming from a "top 20 player". I should wear my "Jenius" shirt more often, I think it gets the message across effectively.
---Side note: I was supposed to find out if I made the national ultimate team today, but the decision was delayed for a few days because of some "tough decisions". I can't help but think one of those is me!---