Mark and I played four games this past weekend and I won all of them:
379-367. This game started out with me drawing the blank and then Mark picked the Z. I believe this was my first opening draw of a blank and Z. In my thousands of games I recall opening picks of two blanks (in a game against Joel Wapnick), an X and Y pick (where Mark drew the X first) and the ultimate caboose draw where I drew the Y and my opponent picked the Z. Odds are that those opening draws will occur at some time. My bingos were SAVoURS (80) and SCREENER (72) and Mark played sTORIED (67). Mark had a grand comeback, where the score before his bingo outplay was 379-262. In order to block the triple-triple lane, where any bingo would have won the game for him–not just a 3 × 3–I played IVY for 9. That left only one bingo lane open, onto which he dropped sTORIED, and then he got twice the value of my remaining tiles, which included the Q. I knew that he could not win the game even if I had to eat the Q. There were in fact two openings for me to play the Q, and if I did so he would not have earned an additional twenty points for it, but the threat of a triple-triple was still possible. There ended up being no 3 × 3 words in that IVY lane but two TWS 8LW that would have fit there (DEVIaTOR and OVEReDIT).
372-358. I played MASTHEAD (65) and NARCEin (85) and Mark played VERSION (77).
421-351. In our draw to see who would be playing first, I chose a W and then Mark picked a V. I played HERBIEST (64) and zILLION (65) and Mark played OPENEST (66). All the 7LW with IILLNO? are ?ILLION words: bILLION, jILLION, mILLION, pILLION and zILLION. I was leaning towards jILLION or zILLION since the bingo lane placed the word parallel to the right TWS row. When Mark played an A just prior to my bingo turn, I felt safer making the blank a z. I ended up picking the last A in my replacement draw, yet never capitalized on a parallel TWS overlap. There was another bingo lane that I could have used, provided I found an 8LW ending in -A. I didn’t even look for it since I had ?ILLION staring me in the face, yet the word was pOLLINIA. One of my racks was BIIINR? and I was hoping to get the opportunity to play BIRIaNI, yet there was no opening. The only 8LW with that rack is its plural. I played two tiles at the end of the game and emptied the bag: the final two letters were X and Z. I managed to play them both.
425-342. I played RENDABLE (74)* and ALIMeNTS (83) and Mark played SOaRING (66). I believed my phony bingo was acceptable yet the only acceptable suffix is with -IBLE. The anagrams of RENDIBLE are BEDLINER and LINEBRED. My rack was BLENDER / REBLEND but there was no place for either.