Mark came over last night and stayed for dinner and three games. I won all of them, and some interesting words were played. I averaged 447 and Mark 348. Here is the bingo breakdown:
| Craig | Mark |
| SAMOyED (78) | STILTED (76) |
| WATERMAN (78) | STEALERS (60) |
| FEINTEd (71) | STATELY (78) |
| CONAtIVE (63) | |
| SOLARIA (68) | |
| rEGENTAL (131) |
SAMOyED was an underlap making four additional words with SAMO. DAMOSEl would also have allowed me the same four-word underlap. In this game I won 418-412, only after I made sure that Mark couldn’t overtake me after I played ZONED for 30. He went out with VAGUEr, taking him to 402 + 10 from me.
In our final game I was way ahead and held great tiles and the blank. The board was open and I decided to open it some more, playing ZIG where the G was in third position on the bottom row. My new rack was AEELNT? and while I saw the eights that began with G easily, I still took the time to look for a triple-triple. The 3 × 3 anagram of GELATiNE and GALENiTE is LEGATiNE, yet that word slots an E at the end, making it easier to play a bingo on top of it. One should always look for a better play, even if one can score 131. I continued to look. It is harder for me to find bingos when I use the blank as the first letter, but in this case I found the suffix -AL first and then it appeared to me: rEGENTAL, which Mark challenged.
All of Mark’s bingos started with ST-.