Leaving Las Vegas

This particular entry of IN PLAY LOSE was particularly difficult to write, even though I've tried to approach it with my usual absurdist intellectual bent. I am not in the mood to argue. So don't argue with me.

Since the LOSE was venturing to the losingest city on earth to play in the National Scrabble Championships, the results seemed almost appropriate. Las Vegas is a place where people lose like no other. They lose their money, their good sense, their inhibitions. It’s a vortex of a place, albeit a beautiful one for someone like me who loves architecture, design, and the art of the man-made world. Las Vegas at night really is gorgeous. I hadn’t been there in about 20 years all told. All places change over 20 years, but Vegas has changed 100 times over, a city that constantly tweaks and reinvents itself, looking to be everything for everybody and sometimes succeeding.

Before I talk about how I did, I should also point out that my opponents played very, very well. As the epigram of IN PLAY LOSE points out, no competitions are acts of solitaire. Whatever objectives you have are countered by the other side’s. There necessarily has to be a loser. Losing is, in fact, the default setting and you do all you can to avoid it. But sometimes you don’t do enough, and sometimes the other persons do more.

My biggest problem as a scrabble player is the same problem I’ve had with every other competitive activity that I’ve undertaken, which is that I’m streaky and maddeningly inconsistent. I’m your classic NBA swingman who averages 14 pts. a game – he scores 26 in one game and can’t miss, then scores 2 the next and looks completely lost and out of his element on the court. I’ve picked up, and given up, a litany of sports in my lifetime in which I had a natural aptitude but became SO DAMN FRUSTRATED with my inability to do them consistently well. Tennis immediately comes to mind. Golf is maybe a better example: I still remember teeing off on the 1st hole at my uncle’s charity golf tournament, having played maybe 10 rounds of golf in my life and having been added to field simply because they were short a player, and, in front of all those gathered, promptly unleashing a 305-yard drive in the dead center of the fairway that drew “oohs” and “aahs” and the odd “damn, I wish he was on my team” from the other players.

My drive off the second tee went 30 yards and killed a few worms.

I run hot and cold. More like Saharan and Antarctic. When things go well for me, they go really well. And when they don’t … you get the 2013 National Scrabble Championships in Las Vegas, which went as bad as tournament I’ve ever been a part of. In some ways, it was even worse than the 2009 tourney in Albuquerque where I went 1-17, simply because so much was at stake in Las Vegas, and to have such a dreadful tourney at a crucial time feels like a cruel twist of fate. People have attempted to comfort me by saying that this is part of the game, that bad tournaments just happen from time to time, but no one I know, at my level of the game, seems to have tournaments as bad I do. I would venture to say, in fact, that a good number of players, if subjected to the sorts of truly wretched outcomes I’ve had to endure, would have the same impulse – which is to quit.

It didn’t help that I was not in a good mindset going into the tournament. For a number of reasons I don’t want to go into, it hasn’t been a very good summer. It’s been a high-cost, high-stress, low-reward sort of summer. I frequently tell people that “if I get mad about scrabble, it’s not scrabble that is making me mad.” I need to have the proper sort of attitude to compete at a high level. I can’t just turn it on and off. I am not someone with deep, intense focus who can just block everything out. Things that affect me away from the board affect me over it. I’m not sure what the solution to this is.

One thing I am happy to report is a solution for a problem that came to the forefront on the third day of the tourney, when I realized that I couldn't read the board. This has been a developing issue here in 2013, and I've been dealing with it by sort of very quietly asking KC to read the menu to me whenever we go to a restaurant. Fortunately, my good pal David Whitley had an extra pair of reading glasses which he gave to me, and they make a big difference. I cannot attribute poor performance at scrabble to poor eyesight, but I doubt that it's helped. And for the rest of the tournament, at least I wasn't flying blind.

The game hasn’t been going very well lately – I’ve been in a steady slide ever since New Orleans and have lost some of my interest in playing. Deep down, I really didn’t want to play. There were times in recent weeks where I thought seriously about withdrawing from the tourney, simply because I was residing in such a terrible headspace and feeling like a bad tourney would be almost too much for me to handle upstairs.

Well, the time is here to handle it, I guess.

How does this happen? Well, obviously, I played terrible. My game obviously isn’t well-rounded enough to figure out how to get out some situations. This is easy to see in hindsight – but in the moment, of course, it’s utterly confounding. Everything is dependent upon making what seems like the right play – and when the move promptly blows up in your face, as you’ve just given your opponent a place to play their 80-point bingo and you’ve drawn IOUUV out of the bag, and this happens over and over again, you just wondering why the hell you’re even bothering. You can no longer tell the difference between a good play that didn't work and a bad one which was doomed from the start. The concept of the Threshold of Misery is important here – when it’s going real bad, the frustration multiplies exponentially and you reach the point where you’re no longer feeling as if you’re playing a game, but are simply hoping that some miracle will fall from the sky. That doesn’t end well. Trust me, I know.

There are three basic types of losses in competitive scrabble:

1) you make big mistakes
2) your opponent plays better than you
3) you draw poor tiles and have no real shot.

Most scrabblers I know respond to these in the corresponding ways:

1) “I can’t believe I played like an idiot! I’m so mad!”
2) “Well, (s)he made the plays. *Tip cap* They’re still a lucky bastard.”
3) *shrug* “Not much I could do about that one.”

I respond like this:

1) “OK, I won’t make that mistake again. I can learn from this.”
2) see response to #2 above
3) “I HATE THIS FUCKING GAME!!!! WHAT A FUCKING WASTE OF MY TIME!!!!!”

Most players hate the first type of loss. I hate the third. Perhaps I need to have my therapist explain to me why it is that such a loss of any sense of control affects me so much. There are probably some deep-seeded insecurity issues there. But whatever. This isn’t a self-help blog. The point is that all of the losses mentioned above happen, and they don’t necessarily occur in proportion. We call the third loss being “bagged,” and in Las Vegas I got bagged over and over and over again, to the point where I felt like I was watching my opponents play solitaire and absolutely nothing I was doing was making any difference in the outcome of the game. In theory, not only will you get bagged from time to time, but you’ll also do the bagging. I had one of those in my favour. (I would’ve had a second game with a lopsided scoreline in my favour, except that I just wanted to get the game over with, and didn’t look for any big plays at the end, because my opponent was miserable to the point of unpleasant and I just wanted to get away from him. But we’ll get into the concept of being a miserable opponent here in a minute.)

The third type of loss is primarily due to luck. Some of the tiles are good, and some are bad, and you’ll draw some of each over time. The standard line people like to spout is that “luck evens out.” The standard line is nonsense. Sure, over the course of 25,000 games I’ve played in the past 10 years, the tiles have probably evened out. But I haven’t played 25,000 games in the past 10 years at the National Scrabble Championships in Las Vegas. The bag of tiles has no memory and no sense of place. It could be in Las Vegas or on my livingroom table. Luck is not a mathematical or rational construct. It is a metaphorical one. And this is why we must fear metaphor – the greater symbolic value we attach to something, the greater the disappointment if it doesn’t turn out. And when you slap a label like “national championship” on a tournament, the metaphors run wild, the disappointment at a lack of success compounds, and it’s easy to feel like you’re just getting hosed repeatedly.

And when it comes to metaphor, I embrace too easily that which I should fear. I’m someone who makes metaphors out of everything around me. I have a ridiculously logical and rational mind coupled with the eye and the voice of a poet. Rarely does A=A to me. Often times, A=B and A=C. Should I see the world this way? Almost certainly not. It makes for an aptitude when it comes to literature (where the ability to render A=B is paramount), but also makes for a propensity to attach far too much meaning to events. This is particularly true of negative ones, since failure is complex and multifaceted. Why do you succeed? Well, you did what you were supposed to do! Why do you fail? Hmmm, it’s complicated … I was always naturally good at scrabble, the mechanics and mathematics and spatial awareness seeming to suit one area of my particular skillset. Unfortunately, the part where random chance comes into play drives me fucking mad as hatters. It sort of makes me wonder, in hindsight, why it is that I bother to play at all, given that the game has a rather large component of random chance which seems almost destined to make me crazy.

And I went crazy in Las Vegas. It almost killed me – and I’m dead serious when I say that. I very nearly had a nervous breakdown. I did manage to only break one pen somehow, and I probably would have smashed all of my equipment to smithereens if given the opportunity. The losses mounted and the frustration gathered and finally I reached the point where I just felt completely numb. I was zombified by the last day of the tourney. After the fact, I’m very rational about why I lost, and can look at outcomes with the appropriate amounts of humour and absurdity, but in the moment it eats me up inside.

I hated this tournament. I hated every minute of it. And right now I hate scrabble – but I hate the player and not the game.

I have no doubt that my girlfriend’s performance in the tournament was significantly and negatively impacted by the fact that she had to put up with me. I hate knowing that to be true. It’s absolutely unacceptable to me, as a person, to be causing such difficulties for someone who loves and cares about me. I was sullen, I was moody, I was smoking and was needing to be drunk all the time, I was uncoöperative and unresponsive. I was the sort of opponent people loathe to play against – the sort who stews in their own misery every time something goes wrong. In short, I was an absolutely TERRIBLE human being to be around for 5 days. Now, my friends all know that I’m ultracompetitive and that my frustration when I lose is all in the moment and my usual good humour will soon return, so they know not to take how I act to heart – but that shouldn’t even matter.

The bottom line is that I hate the way the game makes me feel.

And I really shouldn’t be partaking in any activities that do so. And now that one long weekend in Vegas has essentially managed to undo all that I’ve strived to accomplish and achieve in the game over the past five years (yes, it really was that bad a tourney), I need a break.

I threaten to quit scrabble all the time, but never do, and I’m not going to now either, even though saying “I Quit” aloud repeatedly in Las Vegas was about the only source of comfort and relief after awhile. I’ve managed to become so involved in the game on administrative and managerial levels that detangling myself from all of that is nearly impossible. And I still enjoy that aspect of the game, so I’ll run the tourney in San Francisco this fall and be involved on that level. I just need to not play for a while and focus my attention on doing something else – writing novels and telling stories, working on art projects and cookbooks and practicing mixology. But I need a hiatus from the game. It needs to become fun again, and stop being a soul-sucking vacuum.

The worst mistake I have made playing scrabble is defining myself by the results of the activity. That’s a somewhat natural reaction, however – the game offers so little in terms of tangible rewards that all you can really strive to do is achieve your own personal expectations and meet your own standards. I have ridiculously high expectations for myself in terms of wins and losses, but having the goal of not losing my mind should be easy enough to attain. I can do better than this, win or lose.