I played Al once in Reno. I won the game, and he had some kind words for me and a smile on his face the whole game. Later after the awards ceremony, (I came in 1st in my division), he approached me with a somewhat serious expression on his face. He basically warned me not to become like Brian and let the game interfere with my schooling. I was a little unnerved, but gave some thought to what he said.

We were both at the following year's Reno tournament. I never heard the specifics, but there was some problem with the finances and somehow the entry money wasn't going to be available for prizes because of some complication. Al fronted something like $10,000 to save the tournament. He heartwarmingly won his division as well. Every single person in the room had an ear to ear smile of joy as he walked up to collect his check to himself.

Though my time with him was brief, Al was one of the most caring and thoughtful people I've met in the Scrabble community. R.I.P.

Game 1 against Dean Saldanha:
"http://cross-tables.com/annotated.php?u=1753"

I can't get new quackle to work on my comp so these won't have any notes, so I'll mention anything relevant here.

I (and he) missed his outplay. I didn't play the pre end-game very well at all, tho I felt I did at the time. The rest of the game I didn't screw up much at all.








"infuriated" has an awesome icon.

For whatever strange reason, scrabble kids are by definition amazingly talented at ultimate.

My vision: A team of scrabble kids, JOINING FORCES to enter an ULTIMATE TOURNAMENT.

I'll organize it, Stephen Sneed will captain, cuz he'll obviously be the best player. Conrad, Rafi, Fogel, Tim Michaels, Jesse, Jesse, Dion+DL!, Sneed, Jason KB, Fiszbein, Kenji!, myself, i KNOW there are more ultimate kids that I'm forgetting, but the point is we would actually make an amazing team and this is probably my best idea ever. It might take several years, but it WILL happen.

Had a miserable 290 point effort to verbophage, who bingoed out with ThORNI(ES)T, the only bingo lane.

Made up for it in game two against Ken Clark with FIVE bingos, TRAILERS, LOgANIA, ANEArED, GENESIS, and TREEING. my (PUTTI)E hook drew a challenge. final score was 583-371.

Against etothiepi I had a lead nearly the whole game, and toward the end she caught up with her own bingo, but I bingoed out with a triple triple through the lane I had just attempted to close; REvIS(I)ON, making a couple of 2 and 3 letter words.

Lost a close one against Rebecca Slivka; her bingo with a blank blocked my bingo, and my rack deteriorated until I drew a blank for my final rack on a completely closed board where it didn't matter. I lost 340-358.

2-2, averaged about 430. Starting off strong for the year with an average of around 450 for the first 16 games.

bingos: 38 to their 32.
Avg: 427-390
14 games had one player get both blanks; only 6 games w/ split blanks. I would GREATLY prefer having 1 blank every game rather than 10 games w/ 0 blanks and 10 games w/ 2 blanks. Splitting the blanks reduces the luck factor, and when I'm seeded in the top half that's to my advantage. As it was, my only losses were when I got 0 blanks... or played Wiegand (i had both that game; the tiles were pretty even but that's beside the point).

brief update cuz i'm too tired for anything more;
I started off yesterday going 4-4, -300. (apparently that's what 2 playable blanks of 16 will do to a guy's record). My dreams of continuing not to drop in rating seemed over. but today things turned around, I had a couple double blank bingofests and won 7 of 8, dropping only one game to drbing by 13. I jacked my spread back into something reasonable too, winning multiple games by 100+ margins. 11-5, +370, 5th place, only 1 game and several hundred spread behind dave in 1st. 4-0 to end out the tournament will put me way up in the money and boost my rating a bit more, 3-1 would be super good by just maintaining rating and getting something for my trouble $$$-wise, 2-2 or worse and frankly I'll be a little disappointed, but that's what I get for setting my expectations too high.

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!---