Wedding week Scrabble

Mark and I played twenty games of Scrabble during our wedding week in Halifax and I won fifteen. One statistic that I had never reported before was average score. In our twenty games, I averaged 413 to Mark’s 366. I am very impressed with Mark’s bingo count, playing 26 to my 38. He increased his bingo percentage dramatically on this trip. I am disappointed in myself in that I played five phonies, although only two of them were desperation moves. Another was a mistaken case where I thought it was a legitimate word and would have left it on the board had my opponent played it. The final two were nine-letter words where each word, in my opinion, seemed plausible. Here is the bingo breakdown:

SALOPES was a desperation bingo in a game that I eventually lost, 403-358.

I thought sUNTANNER was acceptable, and never flinched when Mark pluralized it to make a later play. My rack had been ANNNTU?

In a game where I was behind by more than a hundred points, I played two end-of-game bingos in succession, SARDINE followed by NETBALL. Had I played SANDIER, the only other bingo that would have fit, I would not have been able to play NETBALL, as I hooked the N in NETBALL on top of the E in SARDINE and also hooked the A of NETBALL onto VOW, thus making AVOW: a perfect fit that sealed the win, 434-430.

I played NEGROSE believing it was an acceptable anagram after NEGROES was purged prior to the publication of the OSPD2. I was surprised to find out after returning home and checking my Scrabble resources to see that NEGROSE was never a word in the first place. Why did I mistakenly “recall” that NEGROSE was a word? I would have left it on the board had any opponent played it. In the same game, where I was more than a bingo ahead, I decided to fish off a clunky U in the hope of drawing the remaining A from a pool of around nine. I luckily did choose the A, and bingoed out with CALAMiTY to increase my winning spread 493-326. I doubt that I would have done this fishy U-drop in a tournament game unless I needed the spread points to clinch a prize.

I saw the legitimate anagram of SQUEALIER first, but knowing that the number of acceptable words ending in -ISER was already low, decided against it. I felt that the word I did play, the comparative form of SQUEALY, was a better bet, but it turns out that the base form of the adjective isn’t even acceptable. I should have stuck with my instincts and played EQUALISER.

EDUCTING was also a desperation bingo; I knew that EDUCE was a verb and that EDUCT was also acceptable, yet I was pretty sure that the latter wasn’t a verb. I did win that game, 398-370.

My favourite bingo of our wedding week was my last, IXOdiDS for 98.