The Club met for the first meeting of its twenty-first season on Thursday 6 September. We were blest with 24 in attendance and that kept the rounds even all night. Here are some highlights I saw as I passed up and down the tables between games:
Dave Krook had two identical racks in his game against Mark Edelson. Dave’s magic rack was DEILRS?, and he bingo-ed with DERaILS and REDIaLS. Scrabble props to Dave for bingo-ing with anagrams of the same word. There must have been eleven A’s in that game.
The two Jasa [1], Broersma and Ubeika, played the same word three times. No blank was involved: Jason Ubeika, also known as Juju, or by the various Scrabble players of the world as Jasonu, played PIU twice. PIU across then followed by that ghastly IU dump PIU reading down from the same P. Jason Broersma, also known by the various Scrabble players of the world as Jasonb, played PIU in a separate spot elsewhere.
That’s the two P’s and three of the ghastly U’s being used to play PIU PIU and PIU. They could have tried for PHEW too.
Craig Rowland had a bingo-fest with eight rack-clearers. He opened with MISReLY on his first move against Shauna Petrie. His plan was to try to lure Shauna into a challenge by having her mistake his play as MISeRLY. Shauna held him, but was smart not to challenge. This was a risky play as Craig slotted the Y on the DLS. Any -ING extension to the TWS would yield an easy 45 points, but that never happened. He reasoned that it would be rare for a player to have ING sitting on his or her rack at that moment, and it would not be worth the 45 points in the end if either he or Shauna fished for it.
There are only a few bingo anagrams that look like misspellings of more common words. Some that come immediately to mind are STRONGYL/STRONGLY; FORAMEN/FOREMAN; GLOBINS/GOBLINS; SALVIAS/SALIVAS. However, since tabloids posted photos of Miley Cyrus inhaling hits of salvia from a bong, this word has now entered common parlance and all the kids are talking about it. Send in more “apparent anagram misspellings”.
Joseph Bowman celebrated his 44th birthday and gave two-dollar coins to all those players who scored 44 points in a turn. Congratulations to birthday-boy Joseph as well as all of the money winners: Steve, Yvonne, Andy, Sophia, Martyna and Joseph himself times two.
Craig
[1] The only acceptable plural of Jason