Scrabblog

Midcities Scrabble Tournament

admin — Mon, 12 Jun 2006 15:59:22 +0000

Austin had a big showing in Midcities this weekend. Penn won division 4, Chad won division 3 and Iffy won division 1. Congratulations to all of them. The only division not won by an Austin Club player was my division and it was won by Austin (Bradley). I had a pretty mediocre showing (6-5) but I think I may have achieved my goal of breaking 1400 so that I can play in Division 3 at the US Open. I even ended on an high note with a 522 pt game that included bingoing with my opponents last name.

(not very low-prob)

That was probably the most interesting note about my tournament play. I did get away with a few phoney bingoes:

Not as fun as the one I got away with on ISC last night:

Hah!

Been a While

admin — Tue, 30 May 2006 21:25:15 +0000

I’ve been lazy on my posting. Didn’t make any updates on my horrible performance at Salado for the Texas Championship, or my more impressive one at the Dallas Open. I am planning to compete at the Midcities tournament next weekend so I’ll be studying for that. After that most likely I will avoid tournaments until the US OPEN in August.

The quartet has been performing again after spending some time getting our newest member up to speed on all of the songs. We’re also just a few steps away from getting the new CD printed. As with any project like that, it has some things we’d all love to spend another forty hours fixing, but we have to get it to the presses.

Abilene

admin — Wed, 18 Jan 2006 16:56:03 +0000

I played in Division 2 of the Abilene tourney this past weekend. The tournament was fun (translated: I placed 3rd) and I feel like I played better than I did in Dallas. I had three bingos challenged: BOOZIER, FANGLIKE, and CREOLISE; and I got away with several phonies of which only a few were intentional :). I gained a few rating points, and so did Chad. But big congrats to Gabe who gained 198 rating points with his 6-5 record.

Also, I noticed that cross-tables.com has a list of the top 20 rating increases for the last 12 months. Abilene results are not posted yet, but I made the list at number 10 with 403 and I might make it up to number 7 with the Abilene results.

WP-Tiles Plugin

admin — Fri, 16 Dec 2005 18:14:50 +0000

WP-Tiles is a plugin which will allow you to display tiles in your WordPress blog that look like those used in popular word games. It supports a function for use in templates and a custom tag for posts.

Example: AEINST_

Download the plugin as a zip file.

To install just unzip into your plugin directory and activate from the Plugins admin panel. More details in the readme file.

Compatible with WordPress 1.5. Not tested elsewhere. Post comments, bug reports and complaints as comments to this post.

WP-TILES

admin — Tue, 13 Dec 2005 23:25:04 +0000

I created a simple WordPress plugin to generate and pages. Still working out the bugs.

Here are some samples:

I’ll post some more about it later and create a download link for other WordPress users who are interested.

My Highest Score

admin — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 17:09:25 +0000

Played a game on ISC monday that set my all time high score: 625. Not sure what it was before, but this is my first 600 pt game. A triple-triple PINHEADS for 176 really helped.

HisWay Quartet in Marion

admin — Fri, 04 Nov 2005 17:26:12 +0000

The Quartet will be singing at Marion Country Church this Sunday.

More info: http://www.hiswayquartet.com/2005/10/20/marion-country-church/

Dallas Cross-Tables are Up

admin — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 18:11:38 +0000

Cross tables from the Dallas Tournament were posted. In my final accelerator tournament I managed to gain 177 rating points rising to 1367.

Be careful with your Q’s, X’s and W’s in Turkey

admin — Wed, 26 Oct 2005 17:57:50 +0000

A Turkish court just imposed fines enforcing a 1928 ban on letters not existing in the Turkish alphabet. These letters are used in the minority Kurdish alphabet and European Union pressure has caused some recent reforms, although they are slow to take effect. Looks like it wouldn’t affect Scrabble play though since it only applies to “signs, advertising, newspapers and official documents” according to the Reuters article.

New Naughty Threes

admin — Mon, 17 Oct 2005 16:06:07 +0000

Geoff tells me that there are new threes on the OWL2 that aren’t in the OSPD4 because they aren’t family friendly. This blog is uncensored so I’ll risk offending everyone here with them: HOS, LES, and POO. These threes are apparently on the Three to Four list I just posted.

I’ll get the new three list updated ASAP.

UPDATE: New updated two and three letter word list has been uploaded to the original post.