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:

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

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Hah!

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

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.

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.

Starting a blog for all of my Scrabble® adventures. Hopefully this will be a useful and fun site for my fellow players. I plan to keep a good amount of news from the Scrabble® world mixed with useful links, puzzles and anything else I can think of.