open up your purses and the boys will reimburse us

Yeah..... another Scrabble post.

See, I went through a spell for about a week and a half where all I could do was lose. I could blame the tile gods for doling out the cruddiest vowel-heavy racks, but I won't. I know that it was more than unlucky draws. I was playing like ass.
My biggest weakness as a competitive player is that I try too hard to bingo. I swing for the fences instead of settling for extra-base hits. I try to manage my rack to make it more bingo-prone, and I cast off undesirable tiles two or three at a time for nominal points. By the time my fishing bears fruit, I'm too far down for the bingo to do me any good. I have to learn to sacrifice some of those bingo-friendly tiles in the name of points.
I've been working on that lately, and I've been working on being more patient. It's done wonders, as I've turned my game around and got it right about where it belongs right now. I had to go on a massive winning streak to do it, but I'm there now.

I just had a game that was on the sensational side. I'm not as good as Kevin, but I think even he would be happy if he had a game like this. I had four very easy bingos. I didn't even have to work hard to get them, and they were pretty common (at least in Scrabble circles) words.
Very early in the game, I missed a relatively easy ENABLES, but one play later, the bingos began.

A lower case letter indicates the use of a blank. A letter in parentheses indicates that it was already on the board

• TRAINE(E)S 66 points


• (C)ErATINS 80 points


• INFARES 66 points


• FOAMERs 104 points (double-double)

Infares and foamers came back-to-back, but my next rack was CDILNUY. No bingo in there. No turkey for me.
I finished that game with 529 points, and I've got my rating almost where it should be.
Incidentally, if I had noticed that ENABLES was available, then my TRAINEES play wouldn't have been. There's no telling how the game would have panned out.
Sorry for geeking out on you guys again.

Lately, the Spaniards at work have been listening to the same mix CD a lot. It's latino music from the eighties, and some of them sound like very specific songs in English from the eighties. They aren't covers, but there's this one, for example, that sounds almost exactly like "The Painted Desert" by 10,000 Maniacs. I am, therefore listening to 10,000 Maniacs right now.

now playing:

10,000 Maniacs In My Tribe