BITTERNS

ISC bird watching is back! It has been several months but I finally spotted this lovely bird.

At this point, I'm losing pretty badly: down by 98 points. But I am pleasantly pleased with some of my plays. I opened with YENTE (not even considering the less obscure TEENY). After FAKING, I got down OVOID and GAED. I remembered OVOID from watching Keith Savage open with it in a tournament game (arguably the best player in Louisiana).

After briefly considering BITTER, BITTERNS came to mind. I wasn't 100% sure about it, but I put it down. With the challenge mode on VOID, there was literally nothing to lose.

Sure enough it plays. It put me to within 30.

After the game I started to wonder where I've seen that word. It would have disappeared into the haze of my memory but today I decided to load up a list of words that all are bird names into LeXpert. And there as plain as day in the 8s was BITTERNS. I looked it up:

BITTERN n pl. -S a wading bird

This could have been the one that got away. I've decided to go ahead and make some notecards with the bird words, just so I can make sure to catch all the birds that may float by on the ISC.

Here's the final position.

I made a strong comeback to win the game. PUBIC for 36 was a good find, and I got PIQUE for 32, JAIL for 23 and JONES for 36. When I played JAIL I noticed there were only 2 vowels left out of the last 11 tiles, so I banked on the opponent not having OUST to make JOUST. Sure enough, he didn't have any vowels.