Manhattan Scrabble Tournament

I spent the final full day of my holiday at a Scrabble tournament in the middle of Manhattan.

Whilst I often talk to people at baseball games about where I've come from and why I'm attending games, these are passing acquaintances of a couple of hours - except for Angelique at the Giants home park in San Francisco, of course.

So attending a Scrabble tournament is a different kind of event to go to, because I have something more direct in common with the other people at the tournament.  I actually know some of the people already, have heard of others, and sometimes they're heard of me, particularly as I post in Scrabble Snippetz and on the NASPA Facebook groups.

So, it was today, although it nearly wasn't!  For some reason, the alarms on my phone were really quiet and didn't wake me until I woke up naturally just before 9am - I needed to leave the hotel by 9.20am to ensure I got there, as I needed to take 3 different subway trains to get to the venue by 10am.

Cornelia Guest - Director and Organiser

Fortunately, I'd had a large dinner the night before at Virgil's, so I wasn't desperate for breakfast, and I'd read that there were breakfast things available at the venue, which actually belongs to the Honors Bridge Club, who seem to own/lease most of two floors of a building in the middle of Manhattan!  There's all the equipment for bridge, including tables, bidding boxes, signs and other things.

Cornelia Guest runs the regular Manhattan tournaments and she has borrowed the two rooms on the 12th floor space for Scrabble today.



There were only four of us in the Collins division, including Cornelia herself to even up the numbers as César del Solar, who'd signed up previously, was needed to even up numbers in the NWL divisions.

There's the four of us in the photo: Jason Keller, Cornelia Guest, me and Ayotunde Adeyeri.

It was an 8 game tournament, so we played a double round robin and then two final rounds to be determined by the computer after the 6th round was completed

I started against Ayotunde, and lost by not many, but didn't get any bonuses.  Next, I played Cornelia and lost again, but this time I did get RETAINER and SITTERS.  Third game, I played Jason, the highest rated of all of us - even higher than my fantasy rating.  This game went much better for me, getting PORTION, COJONES and TARDIER down to give me a win 472-432.

Then the repeats, where I started against Ayotunde and this went better too with DAWDLES (90), HOMY (65), BAUD (30), RESEATED (64) and SCRAPIE (91+5) in consecutive moves in the middle of the game helping me to a 526-436 win.  Cornelia was up next, and I had some nice words here too, with ORALISED (84, actually a phoney, but she did not challenge it!) and GUNMETAL (74), BIZ (56) early on in a row, with RENOVATE and FIGHTING later on en route to 537-373 win.  Then, it was Jason again, and it looked good early on as he bonused on his first turn before I put LEAZE for more (74).  Unfortunately, I had only SPACIOUS after that and Jason had more so I lost 403-556, leaving my record as 3-3 after the round robin, but it was close for the top 3.

I played Cornelia in the 7th game, going out with my only bonus of the game ELATION to win 418-299, which set up a final round decider between Jason and me where I had to win by 202 to win the tournament, which was unlikely.  In another close game, I had ENJOYERS (110) and NEURONE (69) on the way to a win, but only by 50 points, thus ending up level with Jason on 5 wins but behind on spread for a second place finish.  The final board is shown here.

All in all, an enjoyable day, and afterwards, I went to dinner at Benjamin Steak House, which looks posh, so I took my trousers with me, despite it still being 28C/82F even at 8pm at night.  It turned out there were plenty of other people wearing casual things too, so I was fine.  After dinner I took the train down to the 9/11 Memorial area, but disappointingly, it's all roped off with no access at that time of night (11.30pm!)  It was still hot.  It took me ages to get a 1 train back to the hotel, because I went into the station, found it was too hot, so went back outside again to cool down, but then the gate wouldn't let me into the station again as there's an 18 minute period that must elapse before you can use the same weekly pass at the same station.  If the station agent had been there in her hut, she could have let me in, but she didn't come back until my 18 minutes had expired and I could enter!