It Pays To Be A Dork

Literally. I'm $90 richer thanks to a Scrabble tournament on campus.

I saw the flyer on a bulletin board last Wednesday. It advertised a $10 entry fee and $100 to first place. I've been playing a lot of Scrabble lately, so I was all over it. I think my enthusiasm might have been a bit much, because I was the first person there by about 15 minutes.

I was glad to see they had the official Scrabble dictionary, because I went to a charity thing where they used some random dictionary. The turnout was pretty low, but they were thinking big and sent someone to buy extra boards just in case. The year before they had about 15 people, and they thought they might get closer to 30. I was pretty impressed by that, and figured more than 10 would be a big deal. In the end, 10 people played.

The people that did play were all very cool and friendly, so it was a lot of fun. I played pretty well and won the first round with two good plays, the bingo WINERIeS and my absolute favorite word in Scrabble, ZOEAE on a triple word score. Second game I won with two bingos, STILLEd and REAUDITs*, the second of which was no good, but neither me nor my opponent was sure about it (the correct play would have been pREAUDIT or EUpATRID, neither of which I knew) and it stayed. The last game was a really ugly board, so there weren't any stand-out plays.

Single elimination brackets (which don't really work so well for a game where luck plays such a big part) kept it to 3 games, so the whole thing lasted about 3 hours. And they had some really good homemade cookies. They also had homemade hummus and spinach and artichoke dip, but I had just eaten lunch and wasn't hungry. Which is disappointing, because everyone said they were both awesome.