Nasferatu

( OK, this one's only a nine... )

For the final RauHaus event at our comfy Connecticut digs, we decided to go big: $100 entry fee. Seven games. Three entire cows grilled up bulgogi-style.

It was an exciting finish, as five players (in a field of ten) entered the last round at 4-2. In the end, we crowned a new champ:

1. goldfishbw  5-2, +390
2. ftangredi  5-2, +241
3. key_lime_guy  4-3, +324
4. cheezchick  4-3, +283
5. wisemonkey  4-3, +236
6. Augustine Adda (who needs to get a dang LJ already)  4-3, +16
7. picopaco  4-3, -159
8. olaugh  2.5-4.5, -248
9. satireblank  2.5-4.5, -252
10. sr_orangepants  0-7, -831

Other prizes included most bingos (18) by Alyssa, most stylish bingo (GANGBANG) by Cecilia, and high game (597) by yours truly. Portions of the entry fee fund were spent on an array of housewarming gifts (including matching Monkey and Doggie baskets) for John and CeLe.

The final game at table #1 pitted me against Brad for all the marbles. It was a close game all the way which turned a bit ugly at the end, as my last rack of LMNQRWZ couldn't get the job done against his admittedly-not-all-that-much-prettier AEIIIRU. Congrats to Brad, who walked away with the biggest first prize ($400) in the history of the RauHaus events.

Thanks to all who've helped make these events so much fun. We're going to try to put our next one together this summer after we're all settled into our new digs in Baltimore.

Before......



( Would I clutter your Friends page just to show you OUTDoOR? )

Usually I'm not much for memes, but this one is pretty neat.

Here are the people I've played at least ten times:

winterene : 10-7. My most frequent opponent. At one point, we had a span of ten games where we exactly alternated wins and losses. Our last meeting was my lowest win ever, 324-320 in Orlando.

jigsawn : 6-10. We alternated wins and losses for our first six meetings. In the last of those games, I put up a 612, which is still my all-time high score in a tourney. Dave responded by beating my ass the next seven times in a row. Hopefully, I've now exorcised that demon, winning the last three between us.

Joe Weinike: 10-6. Our first 11 games came in just 4 tournaments: We played three times in Parsippany, then once in Stamford, then four times in Parsippany, then three times in Atlantic City. Most memorable moment: I played some baby bingo, then pulled EPOXYED from the bag as a natural, and played it for 108 (and a challenge).....but missed the spot where it would've scored 143!

anendlessnight : 7-7-1. A streaky matchup: I started 1-4 against Rob, then won six straight, then managed just a tie out of our last four.

Paul Avrin: 11-4. Another streaky one: I dropped three of our first four meetings and have gone 10-1 since.

gijoel666 : 6-8. In our first matchup I eked out a close win despite playing like a dumbass, due in no small part to an insanely lucky,  once-in-a-lifetime occurrence: Joel overdrew and I pulled the blank off his rack. Then he pretty much Shermanized me for a long stretch (which included 292- and 302-point wins for him), but I've taken our last three, including tournament-clinching wins in Poughkeepsie and NYC.

Lloyd Mills: 9-5. Another Weinike-esque oddity: our first seven matchups came in two tournaments, as we split four games in Parsippany and then played three times in Lake George (in the last three rounds, no less).

Jan Dixon: 7-7. At one point, she was my most frequent opponent, but we haven't played in almost three years now. Jan was the first "real expert" I played in my first-ever tourney in Division 1: Pigeon Forge, '04. I choked the game away.

wisemonkey : 7-5. For some reason, it doesn't feel like we've played this often.....and if I'd had to hazard a guess as to my record without looking it up, I'd probably have said something like 2-7. Most memorable moment: I blew a game by missing a baby blank out-bingo, partially due to the playing room being about 105 degrees, since it was July in Philly and the air conditioning was broken. I did not enjoy that tournament.

Steve Oliger: 5-7. I played him a lot earlier in my career, which partially explains my not-so-great record. I remember when I was fairly new and playing a bunch of Philly one-days, I was intimidated by Steve because he was the Big Scary Expert who always seemed to win those things. The time that I bested him twice to win my first Division 1 tourney was the first time I broke 1800.

Marjorie Schoneboom: 8-4. Always a pleasure to play her.....really, who does't like Marj? She once caught me napping and snuck SONLIER* by me. But I don't hold it against her. :-)

Bob Linn: 8-4. Most memorable moment: My one-tile, one-in-the-bag fish miraculously yielded the tile I needed, but Bob, seeing my last rack of AEISTTV, thought to himself "VATTIES isn't a word," and he didn't block the only place where STATIVE played. A miracle win. I have generally drawn very well against Bob.

Randy Greenspan: 4-7. Ugh. I don't know what it is about Randy that brings out the inner complete fucking retard in me, but I always play terribly against him. I can barely stand to Quackle my games against Randy, they're so uniformly ugly.

Larry Sherman: 7-4. Here's an oddity: I've played AMBERINA twice in my life....both against Larry, in separate Parsippany tournaments.

Verna Richards Berg: 8-2. Nothing terribly interesting has happened in our matches. In Division 2 in Stamford a few years back, I was a two-point loss to Verna and a Q-stick loss to Dave Engelhardt from going 14-0.

millcake16 : 3-7. Yeah, that's about what my record against Joey should be. In Chicago this year, I finally bucked the trend of my winning all of the Nationals games but Joey winning all of the other ones. First time we played, I got down JOEY for 50-some, much to his not-much-amusement, en route to a luckbox win. That was the highlight of an otherwise very forgettable New Orleans Nationals for me.


Other stuff:

Best undefeated records: Mitch Brook (9-0), Sam Rosin (6-0), Richard Buck (4-0), then a handful of 3-0s. I have been consistently and insanely lucky against Mitch, to the tune of a +1234 diff in those nine games. In one game against Mitch, my opening rack was SEJEANT, and I later pulled DUGONGS as a postbingo rack.

Worst undefeated records: Bizarrely, I've never started 0-4 against anyone. Currently, three opponents are in immediate danger of becoming my first, with 3-0 records against me: wallydraigle , sneakyofverb , and listeme .

I found these while sorting through a bunch of photos on the ol' hard drive......





So....who's got the better two-finger salute, Jeremy or Marlon? Both score highly in the "making Jasons laugh" category. I know I can't decide.

This past Saturday saw the continuation of the illustrious, prodigious, and never lugubrious RauHaus series. By popular demand, we expanded the tourney to the heretofore unheard-of total of seven games. Ten wordsmiths gathered from far-off lands such as Michigan, California, and Pluto to vie for a prize pool totaling somewhere between one hundred and six billion dollars.

After a slight delay owing to wicked traffic on the MassPike, round one got started around 1:15. Wackiness immediately ensued, as bottom seeds samantics, kangarau, and hector31 knocked off top seeds bbstenniz, key_lime_guy, and lordiceman, respectively. kangarau, in fact, got off to a blazing start, winning her first four games (her complaints of "not feeling sharp" notwithstanding) and threatening a runaway.

Things went smoothly until round 6, when it was determined that there was no practical way to do Swiss pairings without repeats. A desperate phone call to John Chew yielded the helpful advice that we should go to hell and stop bothering him during the Degrassi Junior High marathon. Failing to see how this related to tournament pairings, we opted to finish things off with two KotH rounds.

When all the dust had cleared, things looked like this:

1. key_lime_guy, 5-2, +379
2. Augustine Adda, 5-2, +62
3. spherulitic, 4-3, +384
4. kangarau, 4-3, -12
5. goldfishbw, 4-3, -33
6. cheezchick, 3-4, +98
7. lordiceman, 3-4, -108
8. hector31, 3-4, -426
9. bbstenniz, 2-5, -31
10. samantics, 2-5, -313

In other prize categories, Pookie took the gold for most stylish bingo, with HAVARTI; Lipe laid down the most bingos, with 16, and also had the highest individual game, with a 531; Conrad played the highest "TKR" word, with TRINKETS for 90ish; and yours truly had the highest per-game average, with 420.4 (edging out Alyssa by the narrow margin of exactly one point per game!).

Afterwards, as always, we were all treated to an amazing repast of various species of grilled meat prepared by the able hands of Pooie. Potables (and other substances of varying degrees of legality) were consumed enthusiastically, tiles were tossed, brains were fried, and even a few rogue games of Clabbers broke out before everyone (save those responsible few who had to work the next day) collapsed into heaps from the brand of sheer exhaustion only seen after such unfettered bacchanalia. Cool!

Well, heck, everyone else seems to enjoy posting their games so much, I reckoned it was about time I figured out how to do it. Here's one of my more enjoyable games from Orlando.

See me do battle with the redoubtable Joel Wapnick here.

First off, congratulations to everyone who did well in Orlando. Is it just me, or does the final top-three headshots collection on the standings page (Nigel, Brian, David) look like a pretty good start for a Scrabble Mount Rushmore?

As for my own performance, I have considerably less enthusiasm. I certainly didn't enter Orlando with any ridiculous delusions that I'd be walking away with 25 large in my pocket at the end. But my hot streak heading in at least made me feel that something similar to my 8th place finish in Phoenix wasn't so outlandish. So, yes, 12-16, 80th place is pretty goddamned hard to stomach.

Saturday was fine. Won five of seven to put myself right in early contention.

Then, the losses came. Lots of them. A veritable menagerie of losses, from the hopelessly mundane to the indescribably exotic.

I lost a one-point game where, despite some questionable pre-endgame choices, I still had a 75% chance of winning depending on the single last tile in the bag. I lost by 200 in a game where my opponent got to play solo Scrabble for a few turns at the beginning, when the first 17 tiles I drew were consonants. I lost with a 509 in a game where my opponent bingoed 4 times in his first 5 turns, and where my mad comeback fell short only because of his 50-point Z play on his last turn. I lost with just barely 300 points in a game in which I drew all the esses and blanks. I lost games where I never sniffed a lead, and I lost games where I watched helplessly as my early 100-point leads disappeared. I lost fun, exciting, memorable games, and I lost games that were 50 minutes of pure torture.

Yes, I did a lot of losing. It was just one of those tourneys where it seemed like every guess I made was wrong, every post-bingo rack had three I's on it, and every opponent arrived at the table with their A game fully operational.

Really, though, I should have seen it coming. Every time I go on a hot streak, I manage to convince myself that this time, I didn't just get lucky. This time, I've really figured things out. This time, I'm not giving the ratings points right back. This time, I've put shitty tournaments behind me forever. And what happens next? Yes, a run of shitty tournaments to bring me back to reality. Orlando, really, was my own personal 28-act morality play about the perils of Scrabble hybris.

Now, in spite of all that, let it not be said that I didn't have a good time. Four bad days playing Scrabble are, of course, better than four good days working, and this was no exception. The rental house we shared (thanks to Pookie's excellent prep work!) was beautiful, and generous quantities of food and libations were enthusiastically consumed. And, hey, a couple of the games were even fun.

Unfortunately, Orlando does kick off what's going to be a bit of a Scrabble hiatus for me, as real life will be making an unpleasant nuisance of itself in the coming year. I've got my oral board exams coming up in June, and given that I've generally been a lazy fuck for the past three years residency-wise (Scrabble is a not insignificant factor here), I've got ten months to whip my ass into shape, and every iota of mental energy I've been devoting to the game needs to get redirected to radiology. I'm semi-committed to Ira's (non-big-money) October tourney, and I'll probably still go to that one, but that's probably it for me in terms of tournaments for the next year or so.

Damn, I never know how to end these things. Here, enjoy some TMBG:

So......you probably know all (or at least most) of these words from playing Scrabble......but do you know what they mean?

Match the words from this list to the corresponding picture below:

CARCAJOU
FJELD
GLOGG
HATTERIA
JEZAIL
MONSTERA
NGWEE
NIGHTJAR
PULI
SHAKO
TREPHINE
ZAX

No pressure or anything, but Pookie got 'em all on the first try.

<fantasy baseball rant>

At last year's fantasy draft, I grabbed Bobby Jenks, Francisco Cordero, and Jose Valverde--a bullpen trio I figured would be solid but not spectacular--for the combined price of $27. That worked out as well as it possibly could have: Four months into the season, those three were first, third, and fourth in the majors in saves, and I had such a gargantuan lead in saves that I was able to trade Valverde for help elsewhere and coast by on two closers the rest of the way without surrendering first place in the category.

At this year's draft, I grabbed Trevor Hoffman, Jason Isringhausen, and Manny Corpas, also for the combined price of $27. So far, that's worked out as catastrophically as it could have: Corpas lost his job three weeks into the season, Isringhausen just got yanked this weekend, and Hoffman's still nominally the closer in San Diego only because the team's too polite to tell the old man to step aside.

So now I'm left with the unenviable choice between tearing the rest of my team apart to trade for three new closers (and to give some idea of the going rate in our league, Eric stinking Gagne recently was traded straight up for Cliff Lee) and just punting the saves category, a strategy which has absolutely never worked. Damn it.

</fantasy baseball rant>

Minor Scrabble frustration: In recent ISC games, I've had PHTHISIS and BOOJUMS ready to hit the board, only to have both blocked by baby bingos. Sometimes there's just no justice.