Mark and I each won one game this past weekend. I averaged 417 and Mark 418. Here is the bingo breakdown:
| Craig | Mark |
| RETINUES (60) | AEGISEs (63) |
| SANITIZE (68) | VISITOr (81) |
| PALACEs (87) | SMILiER (82) |
| NONWHITE (78) | |
| ERASION (80) |
AEGISEs was a brilliant find; the rack AEEGIS? only yields that one bingo.
My final bingo was a lesson in end-of-game strategizing. I had the lead and did not risk losing by trying this out. I had the last S with bingo-prone tiles. I decided to fish off an F to make IF, exposing the bottom TWS row. My new rack was AINORSU. There were four tiles left in the bag. My tile tracking showed that there were three E’s unseen, and if I dumped my clunky U and picked an E, I could make ERASION and IFS. However, Mark was likely going to block this opportunity by playing any three-letter word adjacent to IF (but only on the right side of the F). There was an S on the lower left TWS so if I drew ERASION I could still make a bingo, SENSORIA. Thus I had two bingo lanes open. The likelihood of an E being the last tile in the bag increased when Mark played three tiles–LAD–which telegraphed to me that surely he would try to un-double or even un-triple his E’s if he had an abundance of them. I felt confident that after I played off my U that I would draw an E. Mark ended up not blocking my IFS hook, so I scored the higher play of ERASION (80) versus SENSORIA (77).