A Wisconsin Yankee in Walt Disney's Court

I went 5-2 on the third day, which I’d be pretty happy with if my bonehead plays from the second day hadn’t pushed me out of contention, and if there wasn’t some controversy over the last game I played.

The way these tournaments work, you’re assigned a table to play your opponent at for the round. Everyone sets up their Scrabble set and leaves it there for the rest of the day, so you’re playing on a random set most rounds.

The round before last, at the game next to me a woman kept calling the referee over to check this kid (guy?) who was doing some funny stuff drawing tiles, and apparently had a bag of tiles with him that matched the set on the board. My next round was on this board, and we counted 100 tiles and started the game, and I didn’t think anything of the incident earlier.

But near the end of the game, I was down 30-some points, and the bag was empty. My opponent played REVING, and seemed pretty certain it was good. I challenged because I’ve only seen it as REVVING, and it was my only chance to pull out a win. It was no good, and came off the board.

Now, my tile tracking seemed to be off (you get to cross off a list of all the letters played) but I was certain the second H hadn’t been played, as well as the second blank, and I saw the EVING he had to take back. In tournaments, you get double the other player’s rack if you go out first, so I thought I had it made. I put down URN to make RHO and NUN for 14 points and a sigh of relief.

My opponent flipped over his letters, and he had the blank but no H– just some other one point tile. So he had 10 points worth where I thought he had 13, I got 20 out of it, and lost by 1 point.

The table set next to us turned out to have 2 extra tiles, and both sets were a similar enough color that we had at least one from that set, and they had one from ours, but I never figured out what exactly was missing from what, although we seemed to come up with two matching sets at the end.

I filled out a complaint with the woman from the previous round about the monkeying with tiles, but there’s not much to be done about it now. They’ll probably keep an eye on the kid but I hear it’s pretty hard to actually get kicked out of a tournament.

Otherwise, I go into the last day in 14th place og 96, and if I finish in the top 20 I’ll be pretty happy. My buddy Art from the local Scrabble club is in 4th in my division so we’re wishing him some luck to win it all by the end of the day…

I won 3 of the first four games this morning to sit in 6th place for a short time, but 3 losses in a row to finsh the day dropped me back to 20-something place. I’m embarrassed to check. I really only blew one game, and can blame crappy letters on the others, but the bad onee was against the current leader and would’ve swung things around. Oh well, another 14 games to go, and hopefully I can learn something from my idiocy.

What did we learn? JEU doesn’t take an S, don’t empty the bag if you don’t need to, and block the stupid board when you’re ahead. Bleagh.

Before 9 am I thought I was ready to go with 28 games of Scrabble, but 30 seconds in I’m staring at UNPOLAR and wondering if I’m an idiot in way over his head or this guy’s just trying to pull a fast one on me first thing in the morning. Another minute and a half of staring and I finally challenged it off the board, but I went on to put my only bingo in the wrong spot, open the board, and continue to draw vowels until I lost by 100+ points.

The day got better– it’s fun to play a word like JUCOS for 60 points and have your opponent lose a turn on a bad challenge. I went on to win 5 of the next 6 to sit in 13th place out of 95 or so players at the end of day one.

It’s a strange group of people– not to say I don’t belong. When a group of us from the local club crammed into a sub-mid-sized car for lunch, the running gag was “Heh, did you hear they made SARDINE a verb? You can add a D now! It’s like I’m being SARDINED back here, get it? Haw!” Then grown men lamented missing KEITLOA (It’s the anagram of OATLIKE, duh)over cheeseburgers and Pepsis.

Coverage and updated standings are at the official Scrabble site if you care…

I’ll be spending the next four days playing Scrabble in the National Scrabble Championships at one of the resorts here– 7 games a day Saturday through Tuesday. It’s a 28-game hardcore marathon, with custom boards (mine’s above), chess clocks, and even special smooth tiles made for tournaments– the thought of a cheater feeling for a blank or an S with the standard wooden pieces drives the afficianados into apoplexy.

The lowliest players know words like KI and OE, and longer words like ANESTRI are commonplace (there are 8 anagrams for that one, btw). The better players will get down QUIXOTRY and COQUITOS without batting an eyelash. Thankfully, for now, I’m in the 5th bracket of 6, based on a chess-master sort of rating, so my meager word knowledge may hold up.

It’ll be stressfull, but there’s nothing much I’d rather do all day than play boardgames, so I’m looking forward to it. I should have time at night to update here and let you know how it’s going, so check back…

I’ve been stricken by a Floridian virus for the past week, so the posting slumped off. Florida has been in high gear with the weirdness lately, though, so here’s a rundown:

Fish walked through a suburban Florida neighborhood one morning last week, as seen on the news clip above. Note the part where they explain how the fish come up out of the drainage sewers after heavy rains, and then watch the lunkhead throwing the catfish into a cooler as fast as he can catch them for a big cookout over the weekend. It makes me yearn for the old days up north when the relatives would scan police frequencies for reports of dead deer on the highway and head out to pick up the carcass before highway crews could clean it up. Good times.

The whole country must be aware of the Florida 2-year-old who disappeared, and her mom didn’t report it for five weeks because she was “conducting her own investigation.” There are other equally off-their-nut relatives involved, and a string of implausable tales that don’t add up. The Ramsey’s might’ve gotten that tactic to work, but these yahoos don’t look to be able to pull it off. I haven’t kept up on any developments, but we can hope the kid turns up OK, as unlikely as it seems now.

This tasteful billboard popped up near the highway here, linking voting for a Democrat to blowing up the World Trade Center buildings. As much sense as that makes, billboards are a hotbed of 1st Amendment expression down here, with scores of message-type boards, mostly religious, dotting the area. My favorite, right up the street from me, is one of those all-black boards with a select quote from God himself.

“As my Apprentice, you’re never fired.”
–God

You’d think whoever your God is, he/she would be offended by that.

The southern part of the state is overrun with iguanas, according to this hard-hitting piece. I like the entire “commission” that put their brain power together to decide that dumping pets should be illegal, while they already have a breeding population of thousands. That’s some nice work there, Monroe County.

Also in the Keys, they had the annual Hemingway look-alike contest this weekend. My daughter took home the trophy two years ago: