Ntuple Indemnity

Edmonton: 9-5, +418. I’m a little disappointed; while I finished exactly as I was seeded (second in the eight-strong Division 2) and with another $60 in pocket money that made up for an overbudget weekend spent on Coltrane records and tickets to Elizabethtown and A History of Violence, the losses sustained were heavier than they should have been. As the only registrants in the top division were myself and U of A librarian Huguette Settle, a very strong player who has always hovered around my rating level for the past two years or so in spite of a more potent vocabulary than my own, we were moved down to the second division with a partial refund on our registration. The way the probabilistic Elo-style ratings work meant the two of us had to win practically all our games just to retain our positions in the NSA rat race.

Huguette did it in style and won the tournament with a 12-2 record, clinching the trophy three rounds before the end of the event. She went 2-0 against me, too – though she lost a turn challenging a particularly beautiful bingo of mine that I snuck in as part of an almost-comeback, ALIENEES down the O-column parallel to four other letters. She received a neat little trophy for her trouble, one that I thought would have looked nice on the mantlepiece next to Nemo and Mike Wazowski. Next time, Gadget, next time.

(Writing that, I was sure I’d honoured Dr. Claw in another post before now. I was right.)

Personal favourite play of the tournament: going out with aCQUIRER on a double word score for 90 points. I don’t think it was the highest-scoring play I made all weekend, but it was probably the coolest.

So not to obscure my other present thoughts with a surfeit of Scrabble-talk, I’ll make tonight’s update a two-parter.

It finally happened. After in excess of forty or fifty games in Edmonton and Sherwood Park, my undefeated record in the region fell off the rails tonight. I was hoping it would hold out at least until the tournament next weekend, but alas, it would not be so.

It wasn’t pretty. The wisdom that many a Scrabble-elder has passed me over the years is that if you fall way behind, open up the board. Too often, novice players get intimidated by an opponent who mounts an early lead, and succumb to the temptation to keep him or her from scoring; this is literally self-defeating, as doing it only keeps yourself from scoring. So the philosophy is to open the board, leave some gaps free, and set yourself up to plunk about thirty a turn with an occasional bingo for good measure.

There’s a very, very fine line between opening the board and being stupid, though, and it isn’t all that easy to discern between the two until all hundred tiles are out of the bag and the dust has settled. If it so happens that your opponent is the one drawing both blanks, two Ss, X, J and Z and capitalizes on every opening you were hoping to squat for yourself (as the gentleman across the table verily did tonight), then it may be some consolation to shrug and call it an unwinnable game where the tile gods screwed you for some karmic misconduct in a past life or tournament.

In the fashion of murdered spouse in a Cell Block Tango, I had it coming. I practically threw away a game on Thursday with a horrible play on my last rack that placed a Z on a triple line; it was a brain-fart of epic flatulence, and I only came back to win it because my opponent unwisely tried to play out with a phoney, which fed me an extra turn I didn’t deserve.

But as far as karmic imbalance goes, I did score a 550 that same night against an unfortunate newcomer, thanks to a last-minute ESQUIrE on a triple for 101 and a Z on his frozen rack. This is not my personal high – I once played a four-bingo 587 game, untimed, on a set that was missing an I – and my best tournament score remains 546, but this may be my new high score in club play. It was a casual sort of game also not under time constraints, so it only counts for so much, but oh well.

Aside from all that, I noticed – and you may have done the same – that I have been writing here less and less often. I’ve been busy, and telling the world how wonderful the Wallace & Gromit film was both times I saw it, and lamenting the tragedy of the Aardman warehouse fire that selfsame weekend (in my opinion, a neglected catastrophe), are among many relatively low-priority tasks that have been shunted aside in the face of more pressing issues. Some things are simply more important than others. Robert Bonfiglio is one such priority queue-jumper, as he is a master of his instrument outstanding beyond reach of all conceivable hyperbole, though I don’t have a CD to prove it because they sold out before I could get one.

The new Lemony Snicket is, contrary to my predictions, entitled The Penultimate Peril. Nobody knew this until less than a week ago, when it was leaked by a blogger who scored a copy early. (Don’t read the comments if you visit that post – they may contain spoilers. Don’t say I didn’t warn you, and definitely don’t say she didn’t warn you.) It’s still not too great a failure in state secrets to keep a title hidden from the public for that long when other, more powerful beings in the book business can’t even keep a firm lid on plot specifics like wizened wizards tumbling from lightning-struck astronomy towers. I’ll be picking up a copy tomorrow.

I’m reluctant to discuss my Calgary Flames at this point in the season lest I come out judgmental along either pole of the precarious axis of faith, but man, that 3-0 felt good.

First of all, to those of you displeased with Telus – bugger off, buddy. It’s indirectly on their account that I have come by a pass to an advance screening of Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit 7pm Wednesday. Yes, giving me free stuff is sufficient absolution of questioned corporate social responsibility, unless your name is Michael Eisner, and he’s not a factor as of last Friday.

“Is it just me, or is it a little odd to be ordering at a McDonald’s beside Bill Kinsella?”

– Shannon Burns, lunch after Round 15

This year’s Western Canadian Scrabble Championship was full of stories that non-tournament players should have no trouble appreciating, so I will relate some of them here lest they be trapped forever in the lore of the competitive circle.

In the upper reaches of Division 1 in the second of the two Early Bird tournaments that precede the main event, Albert Hahn and Jason Ubeika came within 11 points of shattering the world record for the highest-scoring game of Scrabble (that is, considering the aggregate scores of both players). Albert played five natural bingos and at one point held a seemingly insurmountable 200-point lead, but Jason fixed that with a quick 176-pointer, VARIANCE on a triple-triple – one of four bingos, assisted by drawing both blanks.

Nevertheless, Albert comes out just ahead, 566-531.

Then in the main WCSC tournament, again in the top division where the players are skilled enough to make good use of outrageously imbalanced entropic disturbances in the string-field called Luck, Mike Early played a triple-triple of his own – ANTEFIXA for 212 points, which vaulted him to the highest score ever recorded at a Calgary tournament, 647.

Calgary’s own Jesse Matthews, who vaulted right past me and landed in the expert zone in the span of only two or three years, took home the golden horse’s ass for the Most Outrageous Successful Phoney – and boy, did he ever deserve it. On the first day of the main event he opened with a 60-point play that can be called both a monstrosity and a panflute virtuoso: ZAMFIR*. (You might remember his work from the tail end of Kill Bill, Vol. 1.) Outrageous? Nay, I’d call it outstanding. What’s more, he snuck it right past Dean Saldanha – a former Canadian Championship finalist and one of the best players in the country, my age or otherwise – without so much as a hint of brow-furrowing suspicion.

My own performance at the WCSC was satisfactory, I’d say. For the second year in a row I was the bottom seed of twenty in Division 2, barely making it above the cutoff with a rating of 1204, a mere shadow of the 1399 that was dismantled piece by piece at New Orleans last year. Given my field of competition, I was statistically expected to win five games of seventeen, but I outperformed it with a record of 9-8 (-237) – well out of the prize money at tenth place, but respectable. My tournament rating is going to shoot back up to around the 1280 mark.

The negative point spread, in spite of a winning record, is courtesy of Michelle Davis from Texas, who obliterated me 542-262 thanks to four bingos of hers to none of mine. I had not the good fortune of doing likewise to anybody else, though my 300-287 victory over her husband Carl was also a story to remember, and not only because I won $20 for posting the lowest winning score in my group. In this one, I was forced to block off and outplay a substantially more potent rack at the end of the game, DEIOSZ?. No, he didn’t have room for DOZIESt, but I put him in a position where he only had one play that would guarantee a win (in an attempt to minimize what I thought would be my losses), and he missed it. We both went overtime.

I received another $20 for “Living on the Edge” and having the narrowest margin over three wins of all the players in the tournament – +2, +4, and +9 for a total of +15. I would have preferred to score some points instead of doodling around with meticulous endgame mathematics, but the money’s nice.

The 21 bingos of mine that stayed on the board included three yucky ones: AMOEBIA*, STHENIAE* and SENTRIED*. (NERDIEST, while semantically appropriate, did not hit the triple word score.)

Next tourney: right here in Edmonton, Alberta on the weekend of 22-23 October. I’ll be playing in Division 1, since the cutoff is only 1200; this tournament skews lower on the rating scale because of the clubs in the region consist primarily of newcomers who have never played in competition before. (That includes you, dear reader. If you have an interest in the game but fear that the jump from trouncing your mother in the living room is too steep, this is the one you want to hit. Start before all the other Edmontonians get really good.)

It’s Dave Wiegand in five. Going into the best-of-five ESPN final, it couldn’t have been closer by much – Wiegand stood at 21-7, +1074, while World Champion Panupol Sujjayakorn snagged the second spot with the same victory count and a +1000 spread.

Panupol took Game 1 with a calculated bingo-out, the 86-point SABERING – final score, 467-388. An early lead propelled him to another huge win, 463-349, in Game 2. Both were great games, the first in particular: I’m sure heads turned when Panupol closed up and grabbed a triple with DUPER in Move #10, instead of opening wide with the bingo UPREARED. A miss, or an example of inscrutable n-ply genius? I don’t know, but THERMOS was one hot-looking play.

Then Dave pulled a threepeat. Check out the beautiful find in Move #5 of Game 3, EULACHON on a double-double – the best of only two possible bingo words and a very limited number of positions to play them. (Actually, play through all the games if you can – there’s some overtly championship-level Scrabble on display from both sides of the board. Not many would spot all the minute strategic considerations at work, but the obscurity of the word-slinging is a sight to behold.)

I found Game 4 to be the most interesting, in part because it was the closest battle yet – step through it, and look at how the two players leapfrog each other in seventy-point bounds, both stopping only to dump and reload their racks. There’s a dramatic moment in Move #17 when Panupol, holding ILORTT?, sees the unplayable seven – TRIOLeT – and, according to the commentary, lays it on the board before pulling it back, realizing it made the SOWPODS-only TE#. How much of a strategic advantage it provided Wiegand, I’m not in a position to know, but the Oregonian held a lead to the end.

That was more of an evenly matched deciding game than Game 5, which was a huge run of luck for Dave; with two blanks and three bingos in his first four moves – LENSMEn, REENTERs and PARTING, all he had to do was shut down the lanes and grab the bonus squares, which he did in style. 539-331 and the 2005 National Scrabble Championship go to Dave Wiegand, though apparently the players scored it as a 529 without a recount (as clearly, none was necessary).

I’m wondering how much of the final will make it into the ESPN broadcast; last year’s matchup between Trey Wright and Dave Gibson only went to three, and I hear a good chunk of it was trimmed to make it into an hour with commercials. Here’s hoping Game 4 is the one they show in full, although I’m looking forward to seeing any of those televised should I manage to do so here in ESPN-less Canada, so as to get a sense of the pacing in this incredible series.

Subtract one or two divisions, and this is my life. It’s also an excellent Wall Street Journal piece by Scrabble’s patron journalist Stefan Fatsis. He captures the travails of losing game after game in Division 3 far better than this guy did in the same category last year when he, too, plummeted faster than a coyote in an Acme bat-suit. But for him, the real punishment came on Days 3 and 4 of the tournament, whilst Stefan is holding up well – breaking even at 9-9, +229 and ranked 59th of 135. He needs to be a lot further in the black to keep his rating, but if he doesn’t, more’s the chance I’ll get to play him come 2006 – that is, if I dig myself out of the hole without being too terribly befuddled by the gargantuan lexical overhaul that is moving in over the next few months.

In other news, this was a terrific story while it lasted, but I found the ending to be a little anticlimactic. I suppose we’re all in the mood for a melody. I’ve also been told that Billy Joel’s “Piano Man” is the most frequently requested cocktail piano tune, which is a reasonable hypothesis, but one that I have yet to test on a sufficiently large data set to substantiate with experimental observation.