Gel on, Ashmore

Good evening friends,

I've spent at least five minutes sitting motionless (apart from the chewing of gum and turning round to read Craig's hilarious email from interjeet.singh@turban.com) trying to think of a clever and fluid way to introduce this latest episode of my blog, but I couldn't think of anything.

OK, I know it wasn't the best introduction you've ever seen, but I bet Matty will see the irony there :) Tonight WAS Scrabble Club night, as opposed to last week when I turned up at the club to find that I was the only one present, locked out and in the pouring rain. You see, Scrabble Nights are the 1st and 3rd Thursday nights in the month, and not every two week as I had originally believed. Most months it happens to be the same thing, but the guys who wrote the calendar decided that there would be 5 Thursdays in March... curses!

I'm going to give a short report on the evenings games, for posterities sake and after all, this is a diary of my life (of sorts), so why shouldn't I write about it! I arrived, as usual, a few minutes late (just so I don't have to help set up the tables and chairs teehee...), and readied myself to do battle over the multicoloured 15x15 gridded board. For those of you not in the know, (pretty much all of you I would imagine) Scrabble Night consists of 3 games, in which you usually play 3 different opponents, and John Ashmore, the highest rated player in the club, (see http://www.absp.org.uk) works out a handicap system for us to play by. The boards were ready, I had my scoresheet, pen, and custom rack, and a rattle of tiles signified that the games were underway!

Game 1: Dan vs Jill.
Due to the handicap system in place Jill was given a 17 points start, which naturally she jokily complained wasn't enough. Now it's a bit hard not to feel cocky when players start talking about you like that, so I felt as cocky as possible :) The game started nicely, my tiles weren't anything special but they were tolerable, and after I played QAT we were pretty even at 78-86. That was about as close as it got, unfortunately. "Here we go" I thought, as she slammed down PRANCED for 83 points, and promptly followed it up with JARRED for 60. Faced with a promising rack of ?EILNRU I decided it would be a good time to completely fall apart. I tried UNRILEd*, aLEURIN*, and fURLINE* before finally hitting upon one of the two only 7-letter words in the rack, URNLIkE (the other word was pURLINE but I didn't know it at the time). But by now the scoreline was 191-332 and there was nothing I could do as she swiftly replied with sHOUTED for 74. Even a late comeback with SERIATE for 71, and 2 further 30+ point plays did nothing to repair the damage, and it was with a heavy heart that I finally was hammered 373-523.

Game 2: Dan vs Daphne.
However, after a cuppa and a change of seats, things took a turn for the better I'm glad to say! I sniggered under my breath as my opponent opened with LEZ (24), and it took me a while but I finally found the only bonus from my rack, OESTRAL for 71. Now you have around a 1/12 chance of being able to open with a bingo (playing all your tiles), and that's if you know all 35000+ 7-letter words. Poor old Daphne found it necessary to have a bit of a whinge at this point, but who could blame her ;) But it was nothing compared to the strop which was incurred as a result of my second play, another bonus REDLINES (68). After her play of WAX for 66, the score was a respectable 139-111. Now I really like the moment when you can actually see a players spirit crack over the board. So I really enjoyed my third play, and third bonus in a row, ANOTHeR for 63. There was no coming back from this, especially when you are as peeved as she was :) Final score, 455-393, and a pleasing performance.

You could see that John Ashmore was getting a bit nervous. When I first joined the club, I was a nobody, and got beaten regularly by a lot of the people there, including the highest rated player in the club, John. But now I have a tournament victory under my belt, my rating is climbing again, and especially after pulling off a convincing win as I did in the second game, players there have started to take me a bit more seriously. So when it came to pairing up the players for the third and final round, instead of being paired up against John, which was a quite reasonable option, I was paired against Peter, someone who I hadn't met before. I took this (quietly) as a moral victory for me and chalked up a mark on my moral victory chalkboard with a smirk on my face.

So finally, Game 3, Dan vs Peter:
There was only one result in the offing for this game... after having watched me destroy his wife? girlfriend? and almost made her cry with frustration, he didn't expect to do too well. I approached the game with my usual professional manner of course :) Me to go first, bang - CENTRAL for 74 points, nicely followed up by OUABAINS for 61, and a bemused look on Peters face which I enjoyed a lot. I scored pretty consistently for the rest of the game with most plays in the 25-30 range, before finally twisting the knife late on the game with ELOINER (70) and FASTER (38) to run away with the game 429-334.

So all in all, a pretty successful night! 8 bonuses in 3 games, 1257 points scored (average of 419), and 1250 points scored against me (average of 416.6), and 2 wins out of 3!

Hopefully you're still with me at this point, perhaps you have skipped straight from "I arrived, as usual, a few minutes late...", and if you have I wouldn't blame you. But Scrabble, like all of my hobbies, is something I take seriously as I hope you appreciate, and the harder I work at it, the more I enjoy it! Perhaps this is also a good time to mention that if you did manage to stay with me throughout the main body of my report, I'm not always so arrogant I promise, but I am very competitive!

Now at some point in the day today, I happened to mention the phrase "Gel on", to my girlfriend, who upon hearing this proceeded to almost wet herself laughing at me, inbetween telling me that I talked utter rot and balderdash. Now I have been informed by a source of mine at work, that one of the latest words on the street is "Gel", meaning "to walk". We discussed this for a while, and it was also mentioned that instead of telling someone to "Oppit", you could tell them to "Gel on". People who know me will know that I am up to the minute streetwise and hip and cool and all that, so it's only natural that I should take such phrases as "Gel on" into my normal, working vocabulary. I think Lisa is just jealous of my "with it homies" mentality... yeah, that's it I reckon...

Somebody please tell me that "Gel on" is the word on the street right now? I would never live it down with my mates at the Scrabble Club if it wasn't... well that's not really true but oh well.

Nighty night :)

Danneh.