I won all three last night, to take my record to 71-15. My lowest score was 471:
471-352 against John D. I played ONSTAGE (73), MATiNAL (67), ROOTLET (70) and LOVElIES (70). John played ENACTOR (72). With my first bingo rack I considered the potential for 9LW through an open -TI- and saw it: GESTATION. I was hoping to get it down but John made a move that obstructed the play.
474-275 against Charles. I played SHEAVING (67) and sERViNG (82). In this game I missed two bingos from racks that I had written down and pored over, each for quite a long time:
ADEELOS anagrams to ELODEAS, a word I have played before but just couldn’t see last night. As I arranged my tiles I said to myself that if only I had a T, I could make DESOLATE. That word is the most common of the three 8LW that builds through ELODEAS (the other two are ALBEDOES and SOMEDEAL). In the future, I wonder if I will recall this if I should encounter ADEELOS and my wish for a T.
ABDELSU anagrams to BELAUDS. It is a word I know, but couldn’t find. I kept arranging my tiles to form SUBDEAL. When I see SUB on my rack I always separate it as a prefix and work with the remaining letters. In this case, I will likely separate the SUB- prefix over the BE- prefix and form the nonword SUBDEAL again. When I do, I hope to remember that the phony anagrams to BELAUDS. My rack also contained the common suffix -ABLE but my remaining letters DSU didn’t combine to create a plausible word, whereas SUBDEAL seemed the most plausible and thus memorable of the phony creations. The 8LW made with those letters are AUDIBLES (the only one I could see immediately, but there wasn’t an available I), DURABLES, SLUGABED and SUBLATED.
527-333 against Valeria. I played INERtIA (67), CORNEREd (74) and AdULTING (70, through the d in CORNEREd). I also scored 62 for WIFTY played such:
| W | ||
| Q | I | |
| G | I | F |
| E | T | |
| N | Y | |
| E |
The W was on a DWS and the Y was on a TLS. Valeria played BRAISES (64).
While I was playing I noticed that many of my white-on-red injection-mould tiles had black ink stains on them. How did this happen? I can imagine: while I was at another board last week or whenever it must have been, someone tapped her or his pen onto the tile surfaces to count out the score. When I pulled out my tiles and noticed again and again more ink blots I grew annoyed and distracted from my game but let it pass to concentrate. Pen ink is impossible to wash off. I will try to clean them before next week.
[Update: I have just cleaned the tiles with Vim cleanser to remove the ink.]