This was the first time I had participated in the MWMST Early Bird. What we had all expected to be an eight-game tournament turned out to be only seven games, since the organizers realized that we had to leave the playing site earlier than expected. And then for those playing NWL in division one, one of the players unexpectedly didn’t show up, so we had a group of seven which meant that we each had a bye and in effect only played six games. So we paid for eight yet only played six.
I didn’t have a good tournament, only winning three:
01 SqUIRTY (72)* IXIAS (60) / ReNAILED (66) 374-361 Sharmaine Farini
I knew SqUIRTY was a phony when I played it yet believed I would get away with it. There are only three 7LW with that rack: cITRUSY, dRYSUIT and RUSTIlY yet saw none of them (although I knew two). I was too eager to get it down and figured Sharmaine wouldn’t challenge it if the bingo used the blank.
02 bye
03 SaLARIED (131) / GLORIAs (69) LASSIES (71) 371-410 Christopher Sykes
Chris wasted no time in getting the phonies down as his opening play was FROWED (34)*. I wasn’t entirely sure of it yet never held him on it since it gave me a nice comeback with FORBYE (28) which enabled me to dump my clunky B and Y. LASSIES opened up a triple-triple lane provided an 8LW had an L in third position. I easily found SaLARIED, yet there are three others, some of which I found as well: DALlIERS, DILAtERS and ISLAnDER. It’s not often that you find you have a choice in which triple-triple to play. The score after SaLARIED took me from 188 to 319, and Chris had 331 after his previous play LASSIES, so the game was within reach.
04 EGAlITE (80) / ATOMIEs (78) 431-295 Mitch Poplack
It was hard to find yet surprisingly the only bingo in AEEGIT? is EGAlITE.
05 TASERiNG (77) / TURNINGS (63) AdVERTS (68) 383-395 Vera Bigall
Vera played HALO one row from the right TWS lane and I wrote down HALON as a possible extension. I held an N and wondered if I might have won if I played a word to the bottom right TWS. I am kicking myself now over it because I doubted what occurred to me immediately (that HALO took an -N). Again I have to ask myself, why would I even consider a word such as HALON if I hadn’t seen it somewhere before, such as on a Scrabble list? Words like HALON or rear extensions to HALO do not just occur to me unless I had encountered them before.
06 bASTION (75) wANNESS (74) / none 389-296 Lynda Wise
Now this was a game I was trailing in until I got my second bingo down. I had an abundance of riches on my rack–the blank and three S’s–yet no vowels. This lasted over multiple turns. Not two or three but at least five turns where I could only build around vowels and burn S’s. I kept on drawing consonants, even when I played three tiles at a time. At one point I saw an E but I could not fit down DESSeRTS, DESTReSS, DiSSERTS, DiSTRESS or STRESSeD through it. I am glad I found bASTION as I needed a bingo that slotted the S in the middle of the word near the beginning, and that’s the only one with those tiles.
07 AlDOSES (83) RETITLED (80) / HAuLERS (76) AIGRETTE (80) CYANS (78) 344-457 Agnes Kramer
I was doomed to lose this from the start. I played first and had to trade four tiles. They were the first ones I drew out of the bag, as a precursor of the game to come: IIUU. Agnes then played her first bingo. She played her second bingo on her next move, so by then the score was 20-156. Early in this game I was burdened with duplicate clunky consonants: I had both B’s, both P’s and both V’s, each pair at the same time, which along with some of those other high-point consonants made some unwieldy racks. I played a B earlier, then after I dropped PREP (16) my replacement draw of three was UVV! I chose to exchange BUVV on my fourth turn. I did hold an A at that point and would have played VULVA if there was an open L. So after four turns, two of which I needed to exchange tiles, the score was 36-180. Agnes made a setup at the end of the game: she played SUQ one spot away from the centre right TWS. A clear path gave her the opportunity to play a short word that ended in S, had an S in the middle, or began with S. As I analyze the endgame I realize that I could have blocked any play of hers with the TWS by simply playing QI / ID (14), but I was not going to do that when I had an 80-point bingo RETITLED from the bottom centre TWS to the lower right corner. My late bingo emptied the bag so I knew her final rack, ACHNNSY, and could only wait for a huge play to come down. I was glad to have recovered as I did to eventually get two bingos down, especially with my second bingo as my penultimate move. I was fortunate to have the bottom TWS row still open to play it.
Mark on the other hand had a stellar tournament. He won his division, finishing 6-1 and he now has attained his peak rating of 1156. He is still vastly underrated, in my opinion. Here’s a photo of all the tournament winners:
