Friday, July 11, 2008

Checking back in with the Crusty Crew

So yesterday was scrabble club night and its been a little while since I talked about the cool people there that keep my spirits up. Everyone in scrabble is crazy but my friends are the "good" crazy (and no I'm not biased at all). Let's see... Peggy and I have basically started our own nuclear arms race and are both obsessively studying at this point. We play each other outside of club at least one a week and sometimes have several sessions. This has been very good for our performance against others. We both have had big rating gains and we finished first and second in our last tournament (we split the two games we played and I got first due to the magic of spread). Before anybody asks, there were no little kids in the division, and the two games I had the biggest margins in, were against someone who was in the top three until the last few rounds and a low rated player who was around my mom's age (not my grandmother's). No phony bingos in either either ( Is that right? I want the sentence to end eeether eyether. Oh well) Anyways, since we play so much and are both investing a lot of time into getting better, the games are getting a little tense. Luckily, her last rating gain came after the deadline for putting people into divisions for the Scrabble National Championship (why this deadline exists I have no idea. No other tournament I know does this. It seems to encourage manipulation. When I was below the cutoff I thought about and was actually told by others to wait until a certain date to play anymore so I would be eligible for bottom division top prizes) So though we would be in the same division in almost any other tournament we will be separated at the big one. Since she is 5 and 1 against me in tournaments
(6 and 2 if you count the 4th of July unrated Freedom spectacular). I will be happy to dodge her even if it due to scrabble rule quirkiness.

Speaking of quirkiness and people who beat me a lot... Victor came by the club to get a game or two in before playing some softball. He had a close game with Louise. There may have been a way for her to win. I saw the board briefly and there was at least one phony on it (my first spelling of that was "phoney" by the way). He then played Peggy who lost despite successfully challenging at least one of his words off the board. It looked like he drew the bag on her when I was watching. (drawing the bag means to get all or most of the "good" tiles). It was an ugly evening outside with the rain alternating between a downpour and a humid trickle (that should be the name for a punk rock band. "Now at #7 on the charts with their new single You Smell Easy Tonite its... Humid Trickle!") So Vic assumed that his softball game would be canceled , but apparently it started without him, rain or no rain. So he left to get there while it was still going, but not before we talked about playing a game and renewed our long running argument about the appropriateness of resigning. Careful readers of this blog know that I am used to having the option to resign. I won't start a rant about it again, but the main idea is that it that is a frequently used option in the similar games of magic and chess and there is even a provision for it in the official scrabble tournament rules. Victor (and many others) feel that it is bad form to resign, whether at a tournament or playing a more casual game at the club. When Vic and I play the result is almost always one of two outcomes. Either I win by a small margin or he wins by a huge amount (oddly enough, he is also a big fan of spread). We have not played a lot lately, but in our most recent games I have won around 40%. So we had to "negotiate" before starting a game.
"Hey want to play a game?"
"Sure, you going to get upset if I resign?"
"Well that's my one condition."
"Well that's my one condition."
"You can't resign in scrabble."
"Well yes you can, but maybe we could work out a compromise."
"What's that?"
"I thought you were a lawyer or something? A compromise is an agreement between two or more parties..."
"What compromise are you offering?"
"I won't concede unless I get behind by 200 or more points."
"But you could still win."
"Exactly, I could resign that game and go win another..."
"You could come back and win that first one."
"Maybe if I came back with a bat and gave you a concussion so you couldn't score a single more point the whole rest of the game."
"Its possible to come back from that much down."
"Its possible to win the lottery. Its possible to survive being struck by lightning. Why don't you go buy some tickets and run around the parking lot with your aluminum bat" (Ok, maybe I just thought that last part really hard)

Unfortunately, he got a phone call from his teammates around then so we didn't get to finish the argument, let alone actually play any scrabble. I did however get to play two other pleasant people that evening: Cathy with a C (who claims she does not have enough time to read this blog even though she clearly has time to eat, sleep, and attend to personal grooming. Some people just have messed up priorities, I guess) and Regina (with a "G" I guess). Since Cathy does not read the blog, because she is is too busy stealing kittens from orphans and then selling them to support her expensive puffer fish addiction. (feel free to correct me in the response forum, busy lady bwahahahah) while Regina does, guess who gets their game lovingly described in detail? That's right, the once and future queen herself. Let me also take this opportunity to issue a correction. After some careful investigation (or at least trying to listen this time when it was described to me) it turns out that Regina is not a member of the oldest profession, but is instead some sort of go between for people at the university and other people who give them money called "grants or funding". Whatever, sounds like she is some sort of fancy pimp to me. So I bought her a stylish new hat with a huge feather on the side and hopefully once she receives this thoughtful gift we can put the earlier incident behind us. Anyways, we played a fun game with some neat words in it (well neat to scrabble geeks at least). More importantly, Regina is fun to play with for (at least) two reasons. She's my Shakespeare buddy so we have an informal agreement that if one of us plays a word like "wert" or "thous" we don't challenge it. Some of the Bard and his contemporaries lexicon has survived to make it into the scrabble "approved" word list and some has not. It is maddening to figure out the rhyme or reason of it so we both just let them go if we recognize them. She also is a really good sport about me chattering, not just about our game, but those on either side of us as well. My ideal game set up (since I know everyone is dying to know) is Regina playing across from me, with Louise on one side of me and Galen on the other. Louise because its fun to try and steal her tiles without her noticing and slapping my hand and Galen because she will try and hide her tiles from me so I can't comment or even make weird facial expressions about her plays. Speaking of weird facial expressions, I unfortunately have to go get some exercise before it gets too hot outside and I melt like the pasty container of vanilla ice cream that I am. Next time I will try to get back to that game with Regina (ambo?!?) and/or the creepiness of the I.S.C. and its "helpers".

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

From the Queen: So I've been promoted from "prostitute" to "pimp"? I actually prefer "madam." It would be even more accurate to say I work for the prostitutes who get grant money to do their research at the university. I'm not sure what that makes me. "Glorified servant even though I have a master's degree"? Hopefully not "fired" if one of them reads this!!

I can't wait to see what else you have to say for yourself about last night's game, in which I came back from a 159 point deficit to lose by only 81 points, mister professor person! :-)