Friday, October 02, 2015

Scrabble tournament

Our annual company sportsfest kicked off last month and as a bit of a twist this year, three board games were included in the list of events. (Yes I know, these aren't sports, but our sportfest has evolved over the last few years and it no longer includes purely athletic events to make it more interesting and diverse and so that more people can participate.) These board games were chess, dama, and Scrabble. I wasn't really planning to join any of these events but when I checked our sign up sheet, I noticed that almost no one registered for Scrabble. I hadn't played this game since maybe the early 2000s so I wasn't too keen on signing up but I didn't want our department to be defaulted either so I decided to sign up anyway.

Thankfully, I did. The Scrabble tournament had three categories: Men, Women, and Open. And our team had only three players, including me. If I didn't sign up, we may have been defaulted in one category. If that happened, we would most likely have ended up in last place.

As it turned out, we didn't do much better than last place, finishing 6th out of 8 teams LOL. However, on a personal level, I am quite pleased that my scores were quite good. In the first round, I scored 157, landing in second place in my category. Unfortunately, the total score of our team fell short by 20 points and we ended up in the lower bracket, which meant we could only compete for 5th place. In the final round, I scored 172 which was a pretty decent score but it was only 3rd in my group, with my competitors scoring 195 and 176. There were only three of us - the fourth team didn't have someone to field in our category - but the unfortunate thing was that the player next to me opened the triple word score three times and the player after her (and before me) was able to play a word using the triple word score in each of those times. That allowed him to build a solid lead and often left my with very little options to score well. In the end, we beat the 7th place team by about 20 points and the 8th place team by around 50 points so I guess I did make some kind of positive contribution.

No comments: