1st anniversary of studying Scrabble

.

365 days after starting preparing for the Championships 2009 I reached following marks:

5000 top 7's
5000 top 8's
plus
all 7-pointers
all 8-pointers with one D/G
all 9-pointers with DD, DG or GG

Altogether I've learnt some 13000 7- and 8-letter words.

Will that be enough?
Will I be able to find a word I know when faced with pressure?
Can my opponents outsmart me by keeping the board tight?
Will luck play a significant part in my games?

Questions over questions.

One is for sure:
after this Championship I'm taking a break from studying words.

I deserve it, n'est-ce pas?

and the winner is...

Not exactly English and not exactly professional Scrabble.
1st place for me in the Koscian Open in Polish Scrabble.

This is my 3rd Championship title in the Koscian Open.
Titles #1 and #2 came in 2006 and 2007.

This has been my last tournament in Koscian - I'm gonna let the locals win the title :)




More about the friendly city of Koscian:
http://www.koscian.pl/

global crisis

I got fired today.
Reason : reduction of workplaces due to department restructure.

I've been working with the company for 4,5 years. I started as a CSR, then I became a Supervisor, then I worked in the IT in the Analysis Department.

And now for the good news:
3 months of paid vacation
2-months' pay extra
and...
a whole lot of time to learn new words

1019

How do you call Scrabble games with a combined score of more than 1000 points? Millennia?



If so than this is my first ever millennium. It happened today in a game I played with my greatest rival in fight for the title of the Polish English Scrabble Champion - Rafal.

555

101 days before the Championships the Good Fortune struck again. I was playing a Scrabble game on http://www.isc.ro/ and then this happened.

.

After exchanging 2 tiles on the first move, I played 5 high scoring moves in a row:

(O)NERIEST for 77

QI for 64

TOURNEY(S) for 76

(E)NTAILED for 70

UPSIdeS for 70

ZIN for 44 and AFORE for 43 saw me finish the game on move 14.

Final score: 555:378 for me.

.

Can you get luckier than that?

I could have, had I not missed bingo #5 on my rack ...

MIAOUIN(G) for 78 on move 9 :)

the numbers

On day 288 of my preparations for the WSC 2009 I reached following marks:

• 1000 questions in cardbox 8
• 5000 alphagrams in all cardboxes
• 8000 words in all (70 % of them are 7's, 30% are 8's)

I now know:

• 17 % of all 7's
• 6 % of all 8's
• 3000 most probable 7's
• 2000 most probable 8's

another 3000 are words added to cardbox by using other criteria than probability (e.g. all 7-point words, words ending with -aed etc.)

I just figured out there are only 112 days left until the Scrabble Championships in Warsaw.

• 288+112 makes 400
• this means I started preparing exactly 400 days before the tournament

I'm sure nothing can go wrong now :)

literaxx word square

More about word squares:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_square