A Scrabbly interlude

As most of you know, I'm a bit of a Scrabble fiend and play the game with some serious aplomb. (Holly adds: John is being quite modest here and is actually a competitive Scrabble player of some repute. He has played in the Canadian National Championships and various other international tournaments and done very, very well.) This past Saturday, the Ottawa Scrabble Club held a fun one-day tournament for local players. Not a lot of prize money or anything, but the real prize was getting to play a few games against Ottawa's best.

I ended up finishing second and essentially getting my money back for the day, but the highlight came in game 1. It was my turn to play and the board looked like this:



I was up 242-190 and just breathed a huge sigh of relief. Why? I spotted what will probably stand as the best play I will ever make in a game of Scrabble and my opponent played FRET without taking the space that I needed.

Or spaces, I guess. The word I slapped down was ZEITGEIST through the T of RANT and the E of EXED, tripling the Z and using all my tiles. 95 huge points for me. Check it:


9-letter plays are rare to begin with. 9-letter plays through disconnected letters on the board that don't have -ING, -ERS or other prefixes and suffixes are very rare. Plus it had a Z in it. Plus the Z was in the perfect spot. Ah, serendipity.

A friend of mine at the club here once had a computer play itself enough times that 1 billion "optimal plays" were spat out...he made a gigantic database out of these to help him study. ZEITGEIST turned up 49 times in a billion plays, so now the challenge is to make a 9-letter play that was played 48 or fewer times. MICROBREW, LAZZARONE, SAXITOXIN, BROADBEAN and KATABATIC are some of those rare words and now I have my sights set on them.

I know this has nothing to do with either of our kids...until I brainwash them into playing a mean game of Scrabble themselves:):)