Div. 1 in Salado this past weekend featured an unusual collective finish: in a 12-player division, we had one player at 9-4, three at 8-5, and five at 7-6. So 3/4 of the field finished over .500, but only one player won even 9 games.

I finished 8-5, but came in fourth with an unusually weak spread, around +250. This was not helped by losing the opener to Cree by 270...for some reason, I felt like I was having a bad tournament much of the time and not just a mediocre one, despite losing only 6 rating points. Not really a lot of close games; either I was running in mud or my opponents were most of the time. I didn't play terribly most of the time, but didn't play focused or inspired, I thought - didn't feel like I had my A game. Maybe Phoenix next week will bring that out of me, or not...we'll see.

Post-Salado, Texas has seven players over 1800. (Eight if you count Winter, and the NASPA site does, but he doesn't play here any more than he does elsewhere; really, he travels so much that no state should be able to claim him. EDIT: However, Winter himself states below that he's Texan for life, and that's good enough for me. So eight it is.) California has eight, and New York and Massachusetts have seven each.

I've now played 911 tournament games (cross-tables lists 887, but for some reason the last WSC still isn't on there). Over 1/9 of my games all-time have been against just three opponents: Mike Early, Chris Cree and Darrell Day. The next four on the list combine for 94 games. If you don't count Collins play, I suspect my opponent list is among the least diverse of anyone who's played as many games as I have or more.

http://sports.espn.go.com/los-angeles/ncf/news/story?id=4888515

13-year-olds, dude.

1) If there were no prize money in Scrabble, would you play as many tournaments as you do now, fewer tournaments, or none at all?

2) How would you expect players of various skills - novice, intermediate, expert - to answer this question?

Wonder if anyone's tried this. Might especially be useful in enticing folks to play up if you have a tourney with sharply graduated entry fees. Thoughts?

EFFING#

Read and enjoyed nigelbo's CGP post. Dovetails a little bit with another Nigel's explanation of why he doesn't bother with postmortems or analyzing games after the fact: "Every game is different anyway" (I paraphrase, forget the exact quote). I used to analyze tournament games a lot, but at this point I find myself drifting closer to Nigel Richards's view. Postmortems are fine as an exercise and I don't mind them, but I rarely learn anything from after-the-fact analysis of a given game that turns out to be useful in a future game.

To state the obvious, it seems like a lot of folks are looking, whether in expert advice or in quantification efforts, for magic bullets or rules of thumb. But ultimately there are none - human vs. human Scrabble doesn't work that way, as the CGP post discussed. It seems to me that one reason we don't have a teaching culture in the way some other games do is that it's damn hard to formulate Scrabble advice beyond the basics in a way that players with lesser understanding or experience won't just misapply. But then maybe that's not so different from something else I know about: As a guitar teacher, I can show a student technical things, talk about theory, expose him to new styles and sounds that might expand his vocabulary. I can give him the raw materials and point him to sources where he can find what he's looking for if I don't have it myself. But I can't make my student a true musician, no matter how hard I try; that's up to him to unlock, and it has damn little to do with how well he plays his scales in the practice room.

Fast start? Check - 9-0 +1000 something on Saturday. In pole position very near the end? Check - 12-2, one game and spread up on second with two to play. Lost last X games and didn't finish first? Check - lost both of the last two and finished third. Beat Chris Cree? Check. Lost to Darrell Day? Check. It's Groundhog Day...again...

I did NOT see that coming: In the final game against Orry Swift for first, how many points do you think I finished with? Whatever you just guessed, it's lower than that. 225! I rock. My second-lowest score ever (lowest was a 220 game way back in the 2004 Austin tournament)...this after having five 500+ games and a big average and spread throughout. And to really frost this cake, in the final round of last year's event, I was playing for third place, and my very high-rated opponent scored 226 against me. Ree-diculous.

Yet again, gotta say, I continue to feel quite sure there's nothing to the trend of heartbreaking finishes. I'm sleeping fine, feeling sharp enough, equanimity's as good as ever and I don't feel psyched out by recent history much at all (really). These aren't horrible meltdowns - I'm sure some of the late losses over the past year Nigel Richards would have won, but I'm playing about the same when things are going well as when they're not. (Yes, I have more difficult opponents near the end of tournaments by virtue of being at or near the top, but in most cases it's no one I haven't beaten many times before.)

Felt good to get away and play a tournament this weekend. Good to see Orry break 2000; he's a fantastic player. Also good to see Matt Hodge break 1900 for the first time...I went up 31 points to 1970, so now my rating and my birth year match, which I'm sure Joey Millcake has a) achieved before and b) knows the exact dates and tournaments when the numbers matched.

A rack from coffee-shop games yesterday: EHHNOT?

What letter(s) on the board would allow me to play an eight?

CHIINU?? has one (OWL2) solution.