First Post

Hello World Wide Web,

This is a blog I am starting to chronicle and record my scrabble exploits and the peculiarities I observe in the bizarre world of tournament scrabble. I have not ever done anything like this before, so we will see if it works well or not.

So the story so far is this: I have been playing various games competitively since I was around 12 or so. When I say games, I mean activities that involve strategy and not much physical exertion. Chess is the obvious and stereotypical example. It is a fun game and I became proficient enough to win high school state titles as in individual and as a team (still waiting on that promised letter jacket SHS by the way) and in college to win a state amateur title. I did not see anywhere to go from there though. I could study everyday for the next twenty years and not be able to compete with the grandmasters who now play in our states top division. Also the game gets a bit repetitive. Same pieces, same openings, blah blah blah. The clincher was when my two best chess buddies left the state to pursue their graduate degrees. It is one thing to practice and compete with good friends, it is quite another to do so for the "love of the game".

So what else is out there for a young overly competitive male? For a long time the answer I found was a card game called Magic the Gathering, or simply magic. I am not sure why, but not many people seem to know what this is outside of a certain demographic. To oversimplify in the interest of brevity: take the artwork of Dungeons and Dragons and combine it with a limited information, multiple resource management math game. Umm, or put chess, poker and Lord of the Rings together if you are still confused and/or impatient. Magic solved my frustration over chess's oppressive deja vu since there was a much more random nature to each game while still maintaining significant strategy elements. I became fascinated with something called a "metagame" also. In magic you choose before you sit down to play what cards you will use (although they are shuffled into a random order in your deck) the cards you have chosen may be a good choice against one opponent, or even one group of opponents, but not another. It is like a huge version of rock paper scissors. The trick is to improve your percentages. A person could make a "rock" deck that beats scissors decks 66% of the time, paper decks 40%, and other rock decks 55%. This would be a very good deck to take to a place full of scissors, but not so much paper. So before a big event part of the preparation is deciding what others are most likely to be playing. What if many others think the same way as you and decide to change their choice of deck at the last minute. Of course there are many more than three possible archetypes and the fields are in constant flux. Furthermore the company that makes magic releases new cards several times a year. This alters the strengths of the various deck types and even creates new choices altogether. When a person feels they have found something new that has a favorable match up with the pre-existing decks, the common parlance is "I have found the hand grenade." (which obviously is unimpressed with rocks paper or scissors...). So stagnation is not an issue and the strategy level is high also. Why is this blog not about magic then? Well similar to chess, I reached a certain plateau with magic also. I won a state title and even made the playoffs in a south eastern regionals with hundreds of people present. The only step left would have been to make the pro tour. Yes there is a pro tour for this game you have not heard of and yes people can make enough playing it to support themselves. There is even a hall of fame for the truly elite: http://www.wizards.com/default.asp?x=mtgevent/hof/welcome. The two other factors that led me to drift away from magic were the financial cost of continuing to update my collection of decks to remain competitive and my outgrowing the bulk of the player base. While the best players around the world are largely successful bright and sociable individuals, the teeming unwashed masses are just that. Smelly and mob-like teenagers tend to constitute the majority of the lower level competitions. I continue to have friends that I play magic with casually at each others houses in casual invitation only events of our own design, but in the interest of continued sanity, the days of long road trips only to deal with brats with access to their parents credit cards are long over.

Which brings us to scrabble. There have certainly been other less long lasting detours (poker being the most notable ) but nothing had the mix of strategy, pleasant people, competition and variety that I was looking for. I had played scrabble some as a kid and as a voracious reader had a decent vocabulary to deploy (800 sat verbal for instance). I overlooked the strategic elements somehow though. I also had no idea there was an organized play network. things started to change when I saw a scrabble national championship on espn (espn2 probably). By this time I was an English graduate student and working as a first year instructor for freshmen English. I shared an office with several others in a similar position and any opportunity to halfway justify all the years we had spent buried in books was eagerly welcomed. Casual scrabble games led to a full blown league with updated standings and pairings. Around the time the league and semester finished, I stumbled upon a group of people playing scrabble in a Panera restaurant. They were using clocks similar to what I was used to from chess and were clearly serious about their pursuit. Feeling cocky from my recent victory though, I sat down to play an older lady that reminded me of my grandmother. If I can beat PHD candidates easily then an octogenarian would be no trouble at all right? Umm, no. Scrabble uses real words that can be found in most dictionaries, but many of the most valuable words to know in scrabble come from disparate and often obscure locations. Greek letters, Chinese spirituality, African currencies, chemistry adjectives all meet and mingle with the only shared denominator being their construction from "power tiles" such as the j,x,q, and z. There was a whole new world to discover. Pleasant people to meet and befriend from all age groups, ethnicities and genders. New ways to think and new strategies to employ. Most importantly, a new mountain to climb.

Next time I will introduce a few of the fellow climbers I have met along the way and begin to catch up from that fateful day in Panera to the present as I stare my first National Championship in the face.