A rainy night last Wednesday brought out only eight players, so to even the playing field and with the two different lexicons I played Mark E. twice.
403-307 against Margaret. I played AREOlAE (61), the game’s only bingo. My rack was AAEEOR? and that was the only 7LW.
398-421 against Mark E. I played BATTIEST (83) and Mark played SENNITI (76)* and COOLEEs (86)*. I was vocally disappointed in myself for being so passive by letting those phonies go. With such small attendance in a quiet playing room, I am sure I was overheard by everyone. When Mark played SENNITI I never even held him, yet I kept thinking two things before he had drawn his replacement tiles: SENITI is the correct spelling and INTINES has no anagrams. So why didn’t I hold him? Once again I weakened under my own fallacious belief that my opponents only play legitimate words. I saw that Mark had a place for INTINES, hooking the S under EMO, but that would have slotted the I in the second position between two TWS squares. I thought that maybe Mark didn’t know that EMO took the S, so he tried SENNITI instead, hooking the S onto EX. I feel less disappointed in myself for letting COOLEEs go, as obviously both of us were confusing it with its homophones COOLIES and COULEES. Yet to allow SENNITI–I didn’t like it at all when I saw it yet let it go.
353-405 against Mark E. I played lEVERAGE (64) and ABLUENT (75) and Mark played InPOURS (72). My second bingo brought me within two points of Mark’s score, taking me to 347 to his 349, yet my play emptied the bag, and I drew GQ. There was only one place to play the Q, onto an I, and I knew Mark would take it on his next turn, scoring 2 for AI. Knowing the Q was still out, of the eight unseen tiles, the ones that would have helped me were AII, so if I drew the Q I had a 37½% chance that I could have played it. There was another spot to put down QI and there were two open U’s where, had I drawn the A, I could have played QUA (but in neither case could I have played QUAI). After I dropped the G for 6, my score remained at 353, while Mark nickel-and-dimed his way from 351 to 385, eventually getting twenty for my unplayed Q.