This is me at the 6th Canadian National Scrabble Championships!

Thanks to Ann Chow for the photo. Maybe I should have taken a picture... but I was a bit busy! Playing the 1995 Scrabble® World Champion, David Boys!

One of the reasons we write blogs, or write period, is so we don't have to repeat ourselves. I've already recounted my Scrabble Nationals experience to a few people so I have the benefit of some rehearsal. I'm also pretty sure I'll still be telling this story to someone in the not-too-distant future.

In short, this was probably the most up-and-down tournament in my life. Get this: Won my first 4 in a row, then lost 5 in a row, won 1, lost 5, won the last 3. Such a streak-fest, it was bizarre. Because you move up the tables as you do better, I think I may have had some of the biggest range in going up and down the "ladder" of this tournament. The neatest coincidence: Ann Chow came to see the tournament with her friend Peter, who since he's a club member and they needed someone, was asked to annotate a game... which happened to be MY game, against David Boys! They left after that game. So they were there for the high point of my tournament. With Peter right beside me, watching me make some really questionable plays.

Speaking of which, two most painful "misses" that cost me games:

1. Missing SMARTEN (but seeing MARTENS and SARMENT) against Zev Kaufman. A pretty tough player, also really nice, he commiserated with my bingo miss and said "you always miss the obvious ones...". And he knows his stuff, and when he asks you about good plays, he asks for them as Alphagrams (letters in alphabetical order) so he can try to work them out.

2. Saw EROTICAL but it didn't make sense to me as a word, and I thought I'd seen it in wordlists as EROTICA having no back hooks. Would have been a 90-pt Double Double.

So I'm kicking myself. Sometimes I wonder if I should be kicking myself more: good players (in anything) sometimes take losing pretty hard but it's what makes them winners. Then again, something in me tries really hard to be a jerk about stuff, especially stuff like this, I mean c'mon, it's a board game.

Anyway, I looked back at my stats today and realized many of the most memorable games were the last of the streaks:

1. In the last game of the 4 game win streak, against Sue Tremblay, I played a Triple-Triple, GALATEAS for 140 pts. I triple-tripled at the Canadian Nationals! (I might actually have weird stats for triple-triples: I had 3 games with Triple-Triples in them in the 30 games of the 2004 US Nationals, 2 by me and 1 against me; that seemed weird enough, but then I had 2 triple-triple games AGAIN in the 2007 Vancouver Tournament over 14 games, and SHOULD have had one played against me by Mike Baker, who missed ORGANICS; weird thing again, the only other time I'd played Mike up to that point, he'd triple-tripled against me through a Y... "I thought who's going to triple-triple with a Y as the second letter?", and he slaps down MYCELIAN... in Vancouver I thought the same thing: "G as the third letter?"...).

2. Last game of the 5 game win streak was a loss to Tony Leah, 470-462. The score almost says it all, but I gave him a real scare when I played WATAP with W on the triple letter, hooking T onto ENURE and hitting the double word for 42 points. I actually thought I'd won but he had the good stuff to go out and squeak out the win. Oddly enough, Marilyn Murray from our club played Adam Logan (the reigning Champ who just repeated this year) beside me and lost by 2.

3. Can I call it a streak? The one game between the 10 losses was against Geoffrey Newman, a young guy who won a junior spot in this Nationals by winning it in the Early Bird Tournament on the Friday. A neat start: he bingos with aBSOLVe to start. I play JERK, hooking R to form ABSOLVER which now can take an S at the Triple Word spot. Geoffrey plays AGO (and KA) to block the obvious big play, but then I play just the S for ABSOLVERS and SAGO for 51 points. So with 2 turns and 5 tiles I'd pretty much caught up to an opening bingo. Then I just drew the bag after that, and Geoffrey drew crap.

4. Last game of 5-game losing streak II was against Sary Karanofsy from Montreal. She bingoed 5 times, I bingoed once, and still I only lost by 51.

5. Actually, I lied... last game of the tournament was pretty straightforward. However, the first win of the 3 was a really tight board and my tracking came into play in "willing" a win against Joan Buma (she really wanted it too): I made just the right plays to score and also stop her from going out with the letters she had. That was right after the 5-bingoer, so I was pretty spent after that and was probably at risk of a heart attack.

So overall, the tournament was a great learning experience. I think I'll study next time. And maybe not take the red-eye flight over.

I'm so grateful to everyone who's been supportive of my Scrabble exploits and bringing it to this stage of making the cut for the Canadian Nationals. When I got back to the office, the group had pitched in the get me the standard Scrabble mug. It's big! That was so wonderful of them to do that. They also did a crossword card thing-y with their names criss-crossed and saying Welcome Back. As a group, they were genuinely interested and tracked along with the CNSC website. Sometimes that group of women is quite awesome...

Oh yeah, it was also great to have the Nationals in Toronto and to be able to spend time with the family. Here's a picture of my nephew Griffin. Ain't he a little charmer?!

It was also cool on Tuesday night to hang out with Jonathan, Ann (Happy Birthday again!) and my brother Hin at Dangerous Dan's, a hardcore meat place. Pictured here is the dessert I got with my meal, a fried Mars bar (yes, there was one in there. We think).