Here We Come A-Quackling

You will be happy to know that, contrary to what you might have thought from the lack of activity from this blog, that the Scrabble couple has not:

• died (old Scrabble players never die, they just constantly draw a blank.)
• retired from Scrabble (perish the thought!)
• broken up (ditto!)

We've just been incredibly busy. So, a quick update on our doings:

1. Elyria: Ah, the Burning River Blowout. Always a fun tournament. Heather finished first, 11-4 with a +666 spread. (Yes, 666. I'm not quite sure what to make of it, either.) My record also included a 4 and 11, although not quite in the same position. It was enough to make me wonder if I shouldn't be out campaigning with Pete Zeigler instead of playing Scrabble. Heather goes from 1037 to 1061. I meanwhile go from 900 to (eeeghh) 829. Sigh. 829. Alas.

2. Rocky River Local Club Tournament (aka Stockjobber:) How does a Scrabble player celebrate his birthday? With a Scrabble tournament, of course. Initially, this was supposed to be an unrated, just-for-fun tournament, but at the last minute, Dan Stock asked if we wanted to make it a local club tournament. A good time was had by all. I played decently, if predictably, losing to the aforementioned Mr. Ziegler, Jeff Clark, Mauren Kennerk (no good draws whatsoever); Heidi Nemeth, and Kevin McCarthy. (Let's just say this about my game with Kevin: Some day, somewhere, someone will play the word CLOGGIER on you. You will think you should challenge it. Don't.) However, I did manage to beat Cecilia Huber twice, which I consider an accomplishment as I consider Cecilia a pretty strong player (whom I had never to this point managed to beat in a tournament.) I gain six ratings points.

Meanwhile, Heather is awesome (but I could have told you that), beating both Messrs. Zeigler and McCarthy despite being significantly lower ranked than them, and gaining ten ratings points.

3. Battle Creek Cereal Bowl: I go 3 and 4 in Division C, for those of you keeping score at home.

Meanwhile, Heather gets "knocked up" to Division B as the tenth seeded player in a 10-person division. This does not deter her from going 6-1 (or 6 and Knapp, if you like) and winning the division. And picking up 150 ratings points. And getting to 1220. And no longer being a novice. And having a boyfrend who randomly exclaims for the rest of the weekend, "1220! Do you realize what you just did?!"

OK. So one half of the Scrabble couple has this game down pat.

That would leave me. I am absolutely thrilled for Heather and couldn't be prouder. I would like to eschew mediocrity.

So, here's the thing. It's not that I think my word knowledge is lacking. While I woudn't pretend my word knowledge is stellar compared to even midlevel players, I am satisfied with my studying and my learning words. It seems my strategy is off.

Enter Quackle. Quackle is a program where you enter your racks, your plays, and your opponent's plays, and the computer suggests what it would have done. The hope is you learn why. It's very interesting -- and a little intimidating. It's not so bad when you see words you didn't know (for instance, I had no problem in having missed SUASION the other day -- I didn't know the word) but it is a little scary when you realize the plays you missed wth words you know.

Anyway, I just started. One of the challenges is that you have to keep track of your racks so that you can tell the computer what you have, and it can tell you what you missed. I started doing that tonight at club, and have already noticed that it tends to focus your mind for both looking at your rack and tile tracking. Anyone else noticed this?

As a side benefit, I'm also hoping this wil allow me to provide a slightly better overview of my games for this blog when I play in the Cleveland Classic this weekend. (Heather has a friend visiting in Ann Arbor and will thus be unable to attend. I will miss her, and will probably have to fill my Saturday night...I don't know, perhaps blogging about how I did???) It's fifteen games, which makes me really happy. I like the longer form tournaments.

PS: Speaking of which, it was decided tonight: The Scrabble Couple is headed for Albany. What better place to spend New Years? :)

Division Multiplication

I've been thinking lately about the multiplication of divisions.

No, I'm not talking math-ese (I haven't taken math since high school! You do not want me talking math-ese).

But...with a tourney coming up so soon, my thoughts have been on where exactly I'll end up seeded in the whole melee of players. Yesterday, all evidence indicated I'd be first seed in Division 3 of 3, but divisions are like Michigan and Ohio weather...wait five minutes. They'll change.

I'm now fourth seed in Division 3 of 4.

Makes me much happier :) I've never had to deal with the trickiness of being first seed in a division, but I don't really want to. As first seed, I might have been more statistically likely to win money, but the consequences if I have an off game or two are far more severe. (Not to mention that in any given tournament, I'm there personally for fun and for rating points, not for money!) I'd consider - for me personally - a tournament to be far more successful if I gained rating points but didn't finish in the money than if I won money but lost rating points because my performance wasn't statistically up to expectations.

And if an off game or two exists for you, and you're one of the top seeds, you might miss out on both the money and the rating jump. Also, in any given tournament, it's likely that there are one or two people whose rating might be equal to or lesser than yours - that, for whatever reason, you don't have a consistent record of winning against.

There are several players I can think of about whom this is true in my case. Michael is one of them! For whatever reason, although I am fairly consistent in wins when we're hanging out at Starbucks and playing endless games on weekends (we've calculated that I've won just over 60% of the games we play in this context), the record reverses in tournaments. The same percentage is just about true in tourneys - except, there, it's Michael who statistically comes out ahead.

So if I need to win 6 of 7 games in a tournament because I'm near the top of the division, and Michael's one of the people I have to play - I know that either I have to pull out a win that is historically somewhat unlikely, or else I can't lose any other game in the tournament!

Middle-of-the-pack is just about right for me in terms of division placement. I'm the underdog and don't need to have a brilliant performance. If I place well, it's a pleasant surprise and an equally pleasant rating boost; if I don't, it's okay because statistics never expected it of me in the first place.

There then comes the question: how tightly packed is the division? By that I mean (and I think this is what Michael's going to do a post on when he emerges from the Great Swamp of Private Practice Law Must-Do's, so I won't go into it too in-depth here) what's everyone else in the division rated? Are everyone's ratings close together, as in the division I'll play in in Battle Creek if nothing changes? We're all within about 200 rating points of each other there, from 935-1184. This is great in that anyone, statistically, has a chance to place well if they perform just a little beyond what probability predicts they will! It's not the greatest for rating point gain - you've got no really high-ranked players who would raise your performance rating whether you win or lose the game(s) against them. But it's a fun, evenly matched division in which there should be a lot of really down-to-the-wire good games!

Anyone have any preferences as to where they like to be seeded? Why do you like it there?

Gregorian Scrabbler

It's such a pretty day outside - and a Scrabble tourney is so close....

(please, by the way, register for Battle Creek, everyone! I know, I know, it's a one-day, but Carol's tournaments are so cool....and Idon'twannabefirstseedinadivision!!!!!!!!)

/end rant

...that I thought I'd share a wonderful creation of mine. This creation, while not particularly up for any Song of the Year awards or anything (pity, that) promises to instill a certain set of Scrabble words into the minds of all who choose to learn it. I've not yet found a tune for it, so it's not quite a song....more like a chant. Thought I'd share nonetheless. I call it "The Vowel Dump Song" :

AEON, AGIO, AKEE, ALEE
AMIE AMIA ANOA ASEA and AWEE
EIDE - EMEU - ILEA - MEOU!

NAOI, OBIA, ODEA, OGEE in OHIA
(the state in which you do not want to die-a)
OUZO, RAIA, TOEA, UVEA
(these are tiles you do not want to see-a)
AALII, AECIA, AERIE, AIOLI
(too many vowel dumps, if you ask me)
AREAE, AUREI, OIDIA, OORIE, URAEI!
(we're done with vowels too soon - oh my!)



Weirdly enough, this song and its accompanying rhymes for some of the lines have put many of the vowel dumps in my head. It's kinda neat to know more ways to get rid of weird tiles!

Dan at the Rocky River Club taught me that the LATRINE stem takes any consonant or vowel in the phrase MOVING FUNNY SPICES. I always remember that KA takes any consonant in BETSY'S FEET to form a 3-letter word.

Anyone have any other cool ways to remember sets of words?! I love mnemonics!

Franklin, My Dear, I Don't Give a Damn

I have a Franklin. WOW, most Scrabble players would say - awesome! Anagramming at your fingertips, fun word games, ability to play the games at various skill levels - so cool! A Franklin is a hand-held computerized device which is supposed to let you (among other things) type a rack into it and press enter and have it give you all the anagrams of the letters in that rack. Instant bingo-finder, right?! Should save you a lot of time and mental anguish thinking about just what was in that tricky rack last game. I have this to say about the device:

Devil, thy name is Franklin.

More likely, the proper conclusion is: Hello, my name is Heather, and I am completely inept at technology of any kind.

But really - this thing is giving me fits. It's built off the wrong dictionary (the OSPD instead of TWL), so I know it won't have all the possible words in it. But I should be able to get most of them, right?! And my Franklin has four keys - BUILD, PATTERN, GAMES, and SKILL. How hard can four keys be to figure out?!

I want the anagramming function. That is all I would really ever require a Franklin to do, when push comes to shove - just anagram things for me if I can't be right by a computer to type in the racks. For this purpose, the BUILD key seems most likely to give me what I want. Press BUILD, type in the rack - and I get a bunch of random words, of varying length. Some have 7 letters, some don't - but it seems like this is trying to act like a spellcheck, because for a rack of DENTUV? it gives me things like UNDOES. "Here," it says, "this word has a few of your letters! I have deemed it necessary to tell you there are no more words besides this! Be complaint-free, and know that I am FRANKLIN!!!"

Thanks, Franklin. You get the seat of honor right on the floor somewhere-or-other while I turn to my trusty computer to solve all my anagramming woes. And the computer knows just what I need, after a fascinating day at club in Rocky River. I not only played three fascinating games, I also got a bye to roam around during one game and watch everyone else play - oh the racks I saw! oh the interestingness! oh the bingos! The computer tells me within a few seconds about some of my greater curiosities that day:

DENTUV? ---->DUVETYN, VAUNTED

ADEGIST ----> AGISTED

And by the way....not only can you be disgruntled, you can be DEGLNRT? ---> GRUNTLED. (I am so...gruntled...to find out there's a word in there!???!!?? What the heck?)

Oh darn....this would have been good, especially in a game against Michael (which it was): AJNRST? ---> JURANTS.

And with regard to a rack Michael and I were toying with - ANRRST? - RANTERS as well as ERRANTS are both good.

I had been looking at this rack forever....DEIINST - INDITES (saw that!!!! didn't think it could be spelled like that!!!) and TINEIDS are both good.

And a random one I saw someone miss at club as I was walking around: BDEILNS ----> BINDLES.

That is nine - count 'em, nine - bingos the computer did quickly while the Franklin did not seem inclined to do them at all. Franklin, the COMPUTER'S being friends with me.......

Well, finally the Franklin (like other beings that go randomly, confusingly, and dramatically antipathetic on innocent people for no good reason) decided it thought it might like me again. It just has rules for our interactions that it didn't want to tell me about, but it got angry when I didn't know about and follow these rules.

So apparently, if I type in the rack and THEN press BUILD, it will give me the anagrams I desire. CLEAR will get me to a screen to type in a new rack, and the random square at the lower right of the keyboard is the blank. Maybe I'm not so bad at technology after all?!?! Or at least - the Franklin has decided to be my friend again. Let's see how long this lasts!

Give Me Lists or Give Me Death

The promised Michael-and-Heather-post about our solution to the Scrabble HPOWNC issue will appear sometime this weekend :) Until then, I thought I'd regale you with a tale of yet another method of studying...perhaps we could call this the "Plan B: List" Method.

Michael wrote about his distaste for studying and quest to find a method more orderly than flash cards. I know a lot of people say flash cards work...but for me, Miss Neat Freak over here, there were few things appealing about having a million flash cards around to take flying leaps off my desk and get stuck under my chair and in crannies around my room and to take up oodles of space. (Except, of course, for the times when I could steal Michael's flash cards and bring them along with us on journeys to Scrabble tournaments - yay shamelessly mooching off my boyfriend's long hours of toil creating easily accessible knowledge!! Slightly ashamed to say I never paid attention to how - or if - he organized them, though :-P)

Anyway - I was never the flash card girl, or actually the anti-studying girl either. I like school! I might end up going for a Ph.D! I always got my kicks out of studying for academic competitions - memorizing speeches for public speaking competitions, studying lists of words for spelling bees - that was my gig, and I was pretty good at it, if I do say so myself. I never needed to see the word - I could just visualize what I was spelling in my head as if it were typed there, and I'd spell it while it was up there on the "computer screen" of sorts in my head.

So when Michael and I became members of the NSA, and I saw a bunch of lists in our membership packets, I was SO sold. Here's everything a beginning Scrabble player needs to get going on the millions of words out there! 2's, 3's, Blockers, J/Q/X/Z 4's, Quasi-Proper Names That Are Actually Good, The Poo List, the Top 10 Bingo Stems (everything from SATINE to SANTER and IRONES), 4's-That-Can-Be-Formed-From-3's....lemme at 'em!!!!!!!

Tedious though it may sound to some, I love my lists. I'll look at them and I'll say words to myself, I'll write the list out again by hand (writing puts things into memory for me), I'll write just the members of the list that I'm having trouble remembering - it's great. I've learned the 2's, most of the 3's, and the Top 10 Stems from this method so far.

Is this everything?! Heck no. Is it something?! Yeah, for sure, and it's all served me well. I may not be studying the obscure 7's and 8's yet, but I'm learning more probable words that show up on my rack a whole heck of a lot more often than things like RESOJETS, for example (I will forever remember that word because the commentators said someone - and I forget who, because I wasn't an avid Scrabble player yet - missed it as an out play in the televised Nationals a few years ago.)

These lists may take me a long time to get through - like I've said, I hardly ever have time to study! But they'll take a good while. The question once I'm through with them, of course, will be - what then?! Zyzzyva, AnaHack, more lists, ???

Here's a question for any who care to weigh in: are these lists enough to tackle at one time, or should I simultaneously be studying some of the more bizarre words?! I don't pretend at all to know what I'm doing, and I know all the list stuff is probably extremely basic and taken for granted by most halfway-decently-ranked Scrabblers.

I know I'll have to probably break from my precious lists one day. But don't worry. I won't go into list-withdrawal shock. Despite the title of my post - there are far cooler ways to die.

Scrabble HPOWNCs

...no, there's no six-letter word in that. You can stop trying now. (Of course, I don't rule out the possibility that some Division 1 player is now going to email me or comment that I'm wrong and there is in fact some term meaning "a rare Asian type of shrub that grows only in May under a full moon" or something in there...)

It's funny to note that there are certain areas of the United States that are quite hoppin' parties of wild and craziness (HPOWNCs) for Scrabble. The funny thing is, the Scrabble HPOWNCs are not always HPOWNCs in other respects. You'd think that an area which was accommodating enough of diverse interests to have a Scrabble scene would have a lot of other stuff going on, too. But instead, Scrabble hotspots are places like....

...Michigan. Okay, Michigan's got Ann Arbor, which I can say firsthand is cool and probably as cool as a college town could ever get. But Scrabble tournaments are never IN Ann Arbor! Instead, they're in the boonies of Farmington, Fenton, and even places this native Michigander has never heard of, like Ortonville. These places are cheap, I'm sure - and I'm not trying to say that our wonderful MI directors pick bad venues. Only that....other than Ann Arbor, sedate places like these are all Michigan's got!

...Ohio. Michiganders, 'nuff said, right?! Who ever finds a wealth of fascinating and diverse entertainment in Ohio?! Just a couple months ago, I swore up and down (even directly in front of my wonderful native Ohioan boyfriend) that I would never ever live in Ohio. Of course, look at me now - and I even actually really like it! But am I gonna end up permanently in Ohio?! You are all allowed to deliver to me a very swift kick to the head if I do in fact, because maybe that will restore my sanity. There are so many completely boring parts of Ohio...yet so many Scrabble tournaments!

...Texas. Okay, none of my exes live in Texas, and I've actually never been there. I love warm weather and would not mind ultimately residing in a place where snow and subzero temps are completely alien. But 110 degrees and even above?! I think it's just as bad to not be able to go outside because of the cold, as it would be to not be able to go outside because of the heat!

...North Carolina. This one for me holds the allure of "I've never been there and I've never heard anyone say anything bad about it." But I've never heard anyone say anything good, either! What on earth is in fact in North Carolina?! Apparently Scrabble tournaments...and....c'mon, help me out here! Anyone? anyone?

....California. I like Cali. Lots of stuff going on if you're in the right places. But those places aren't always where tourneys are, and are expensive as all get-out, because you like Cali but so does everyone else...and I don't see the point of the random extraneous isolated suburbs because you now have all this money that you can't do anything with because you're not around any cool place to spend it!

Where Scrabble Tournaments Are Not:

-Chicago. This one makes me sad. I'd probably be very happy in Chicago, but then again I'd get to go to - what, one or two tourneys a year?! CLNOOU!!!! Chicago has such a wide variety of stuff going on...you'd think there'd be some nerdy wordy people around??

-New York. Except Albany (Michael and I are totally going this year, btw - anybody else?!! We've never been and are deathly curious). Another cool place you'd think would have a better Scrabble scene than it does.

-Iowa. This makes me sad, too, only because I might go to the University of Iowa for a PhD in speech path eventually. And when/if I do, what am I supposed to do about Scrabble?! Go to a big city like Chicago for my Scrabble fix?! Oh, wait...can't....nothing there! I do imagine getting a PhD would take up a good bit of my time, but not so much that I'd want to/have to give up what is currently probably my favorite hobby that I've ever had.

-etc.

It's just kind of funny, if you think about it. So...as a Scrabble tourney player who wants to continue playing avidly, but who probably does not want to live in either Michigan or Ohio for the rest of her life....what on earth does one do?!?

And there, my dear readers, is where I shall leave you hanging, wondering where on earth I'm going with all this.

....Stay tuned for the answer in an upcoming post from Michael and Heather.......

-

Awwww....little Scrabblers!!!!

I'm not talking in the title about the kids and teens who take the Scrabble world by storm here. (If you think about it, those players can hardly be deemed "little Scrabblers" - they might be younger than most of us, but a lot of them know a lot more words and use a lot more complex strategy than other players who might be older. Hence, their skill at the game cannot be called "little").

Instead, I'm referring to you and me and all other people, at the point where we just start(ed) getting into the world of tournament Scrabble and began to figure out what we needed to do to be ready for those first and second-ever tournaments. What a daunting task it was, right?!

Just about a year ago, I was a very little Scrabbler myself. (Being rated just over 1000 now, some might make a compelling case that I still am, lol). When Michael first brought up the idea that we should enter a tournament, I was all for it. I'd played pretty avidly in the University of Michigan Scrabble Club for a few years and played one of my college roommates pretty frequently when we'd lived together. But I knew I wasn't all that good. I don't think I ever won a game against my roommate. And one member of the U of M Scrabble Club liked to make high-scoring plays while providing a "friendly neighborhood reminder to watch your triples!"

I was always so confused by that. I found a place to make a word! I like the word! You're telling me I should find a way to keep you away from the Triple Word Score (TWS)....AND play a word?!?

When Michael and I decided to enter the tournament scene....something told me I'd need to learn how to watch my triples around this neighborhood of probably-scarily-good people. I didn't trust them not to know how to keep ME away from triples. Such was my first introduction to the concept of Scrabble strategy.

I will be the first to admit I do not study Scrabble as much as I should. Michael may spend an hour or two per day with Zyzzyva...I'm lucky if I get two to three hours studying in a week. (I don't use Zyzzyva, either...but my actual studying methods are a whole 'nother post.) But I also know that there was a point in my Scrabble "career" when all I was really concentrating on was keeping people away from triples and making neat words with 2-4 letters. My rating was in the 7-800 range then. I knew all the twos, some of the threes, and almost none of the strategy.

Then came along a foreign concept to both Michael and me, brought to us by Flossie, a very nice woman from Michael's Scrabble club: "When in doubt, use more tiles rather than fewer in a turn. You'll see more tiles that way, have a better chance at getting the power tiles...."

[note to non-Scrabblers: there are ten power tiles: J (8 points), Q (10pts), X (8pts), Z (10pts), four S's (1pt each), and two blanks, which can be turned into any letter you want (0 pts). These are called power tiles because you have the potential to score a lot of points with them if you use them well]

"....and that way you'll have a better chance at winning."

I was intrigued. That concept became "The Flossie Principle" to Michael and me, and we began trying to incorporate it into our games as best we could. Using the Flossie Principle seemed to raise our scores and lessen the time it took to finish a game (which was a good thing, because - I'm ashamed to say - initially one or the other of us was frequently overtime).

The Flossie Principle was also, for me, a wake-up call: Hey! That actually made sense! What, you mean there're other things you can do besides studying and keeping your opponent away from the triples to give yourself a better chance of winning?! I'd never really put deep thought into each of my plays in a Scrabble game before. Maybe I should?

So, before my next tournament (in Rocky River, OH in February '08) I studied when I could and then decided I was going to do a little experiment: Let's see what the effect on my game is of really thinking about my plays! Here were some of the ideas I considered:

-Does my opponent seem ready to bingo soon? If so, can I block possibly advantageous places to put it?

-Are there any power tiles I think my opponent has? If so, can I block any good places to put them?
(Example: putting a Z on a triple letter score (TLS) next to an A and putting an A of your own below the Z to form ZA, ZA, and an acceptable two like AL or AN. This would be a 64-point play and would be a huge chance for your opponent to greatly shorten your lead or to lengthen his/her own!)

-Are my letters absolutely atrocious? (Examples: AIOOUWV or CDGKQVY - no easily-formed words there, even if there are random tiles on the board you can make words through). If so, the best option IS to change some of them and take the lost turn. (It took me a while to convince myself of this - I never wanted to lose a turn!

-Do I have a significant lead? If so, I might want to start closing down the board - making it tough for my opponent to bingo and possibly catch up with me. Am I significantly behind? Then I want the board open, open, open so I can bingo and catch up!

-I want to track tiles as closely as I can! That way, I know which power tiles or even higher-pointed tiles are gone, and I might have a fighting chance of figuring out what my opponent has at the end of the game if I'm a REALLY good tracker (which I'm not usually, yet :-P )

Funny to say I had never considered ideas such as this...but after my first tournament of doing so, my rating rose from 791-859, my largest jump so far. (It's worth noting that I started in September 2006 with a rating of 740 - so in the six months prior, my rating had only gone up 51 points). I decided to keep strategizing - and my rating has jumped about 200 points in the six months after. I THINK. I know why :)

It's important to note here that I am in no way saying strategy alone is the way to approach and to play Scrabble. Word knowledge is vital, and you can see Michael's post below for one method of heightening that for yourself.

I also do not claim to be anything close to a strategy guru. One example of my lacks in strategy showed in my game against George V at Tuesday's club tourney: George had (as expected) a pretty commanding lead. But I had pretty good tiles, and had had a few 7-letter bingos I couldn't fit on the board recently. Maybe I could catch up a little bit still? For the life of me, though, I couldn't think of any 8's that would fit either, even though there were several inviting-looking potential hooks out there.

It was almost the end of the game when George played a W four spaces away from the TWS on the right in the middle (if I had a board in front of me, I could give you the number and letter corresponding to the space, but I'm not snappy enough to remember that offhand yet :) I thought, okay, free triple if I can't find a bingo. Not that that was going to give me all that many points with the letters I had, but maybe I could still bingo on the next turn. So I played WORE 21 - three letters of mine gone to the play, four left - and reached in the tile bag to find only two letters remaining. I had only six letters and couldn't bingo now, since for the 50-point bonus of a bingo you have to have used seven letters from your rack. My hopes of catching up a bit were gone - I hadn't tracked well enough to know there were only two in the bag. Nicely played, George :)

George, of course, knew exactly what he was doing - his reasoning (which I found out after the game when I talked to him) was that if I'd wanted to open things up to possibly bingo, I'd play two letters next to the W and end just before the TWS, making a low-pointed play but the possibility of a high-pointed one on the next turn. But then he'd probably have a tile that would fit right on the TWS, and would make a word going vertically from it - likely blocking any bingo I'd have to put there. If I played three tiles instead of two (which I did), I wouldn't be able to bingo on the last turn anyway and he'd have nothing to worry about.

We all learn something new every day, and my favorite new thing that day was that expert strategy tactic! There are always new words and new strategies to learn. But my point is that if you make a conscious effort to include both new words and better strategy in each game you play, you might be pleasantly surprised at the results. Even little Scrabblers might be astounded at the speed with which they "grow up!"