January 2006 Archives

The renamed U.S. Scrabble Open will be held in Phoenix, AZ, August 4-9, 2006.

It's a bird word and seven letters at that. A bingo waiting to happen to me.

I so badly want to go, but I'll have to get my DUCKS in a row. I'll have to start planning and saving now...as well as hydrating: Arizona in August, whew!

It will be held at the Biltmore, which I understand to be a fine hotel, albeit an expensive one ($120 a night!). Anybody want to share a room?

Originally, the tournament was going to be held in New Orleans, which would have been awesome. Katrina has had an awful effect on my Scrabble life, not to mention its effect on the real life of many people I know.

It's the first bingo puzzle of the year. It comes from a game I played this evening on the ISC.

My rack is shown at top: ?AAILST.

You know I looked at it and sweated bullets for a few minutes before I came up with a good one. What did I play?

What happens when you pick an all-star team, not for their skill, but for the Scrabble scoring potential of their last names? You get: The NFL All-Triple Word Score Team.

In the end, I heavily considered starting a fullback (Chris Hetherington of the 49ers) but felt that my performance would be improved with a third wide receiver — Joe Jurevicius, because 22 always beats 19. Besides, even with a lead blocker, Obafemi Ayanbadejo can’t establish the run. So with Ryan Fitzpatrick as a gunslinger, he will be better suited with three wideouts and a tight end.

What is especially funny to me are the comments that point out the logical fallacies of the concept. For example:

Real nice, except…

1) You only can spell a maximum of a 7 letter word unless letters have already been placed…and this would change your scores.

2) You’ve exceeded the number of several letters in the tiles.

Nice try, tho.

Ed

As if the entertainment value of it is somehow diminished because he wasn't following official Scrabble rules. Maybe he was using a Super Scrabble set!

Thanks to Diane Firstman for posting this link on the CGP.

Well, at the end of the day, Joe Edley had his way. Here's a notice composed by Helen Joffe, who would have been the tournament director.

>Subject: [ospd] 2/11/06 Tourney Cancellation

The great and powerful OZ hath spoken -- no, wait, it was the NSA
"Advisory Board." I was advised (in an exceptionally nice e-mail) that due to insufficient notice the 2/11/06 tourney could not be fully rated, but could be rated on a 1/3 basis, as a Local Club Tournament. Technically, this would be a rules violation also, because the tournament would have had participants from at least three different Louisiana clubs whose members do not play at more than one club, but that is beside the point.

After polling those who had expressed interest in having the tourney
prior to the ruling, it was determined that proceeding would be "too much shufflin of de dishes for de fewness of de food." In other words, there is insufficient interest in attending a one-third rated tournament to justify the time, expense, and effort to hold said tournament.

On a more positive note Lila Crotty, to whose capable hands I turned
over the reins of directing Club 541 about a year ago, has advised that she TENTATIVELY plans to have a New Orleans tourney the third weekend in May, provided she can secure sufficient hotel room reservations for expected out-of-town participants. Lila can be depended on to properly dot the i's and cross the t's required to ensure that the tourney is fully rated, advertised, and promoted, which is a good thing.

My sincerest apologies to those disappointed by cancellation of the
2/11/06 tourney; you may rest assured I won't muck up like this ever again. I resign fully and finally from directing and hope to improve my playing abilities so that I can once again derive the pure enjoyment from playing this game that led me to become involved in tournaments in the first place.

Helen Joffe

I guess that means I won't be able to play a tournament before the new word list kicks in on March 1.

That means I've got to learn those new words (and unlearn the expunged words like EMF), and get accustomed to the possibilities of QI and ZA. No more Q-sticks!

Hey, I'm back! There's a lot of Scrabble news I need to catch up on. But first, there's the matter of the Baton Rouge Scrabble Tournament.

As far as I know, there will be a one-day Baton Rouge Scrabble Tournament on Saturday, February 11. It will be held at the Baton Rouge Bridge Club. The question is whether the tourney will be officially sanctioned by the NSA.

Apparently, there's a rule that a tournament needs to be announced 12 weeks before the day of the tournament, or it won't be sanctioned by the NSA. Because this tournament is being thrown together at the last moment, the proper notice was not given.

One must remember that two annual tournaments were cancelled due to the hurricanes this fall: the Lafayette and Baton Rouge tournaments. And the New Orleans tournament is looking too likely either. This tournament was put together to accomodate us Gulf Coast residents who are hankering for a return to normalcy.

The main rules hound in the NSA is Joe Edley, and he's sticking to his guns, despite that fact that everyone on the CGP (Scrabble mailing list) seems to think that the NSA should make an exception in this case.

I don't want to go on about how much the hurricanes disrupted everyday life here in Louisiana. But suffice it to say that things were still sketchy back in early November, when the tourney should have been officially announced.

And I think the 12 week rule is out of date anyway, if the reason is to let those people who would attend know about it and have time enough to plan for it. Modern forms of communication have made it obsolete.

So Joe Edley needs to meditate on this problem. Take some deep breaths, do some stretches and think about the reasons we all play games such as Scrabble in the first place.