Celebrity Fiction Edition

Matt Tunnicliffe’s scorecard from the 2014 National Scrabble Championships. He wasn’t pleased with how he played.

TWO of the good guys in the game of scrabble – and two official Friends of The Lose – were playing in a best-of-5 final on Wednesday at the North American Scrabble Championships in Reno. Matthew “Muffin with Tentacle” Tunnicliffe defeated Jesse “Phonerz J. Magratheazaphod” Day 3-2 to win the championship in a series that was tight, tense, and suspenseful. It was something of a heartbreaking and excruciating loss for Phonerz, who lost one game in the series on the account of playing IR inadvertently late in the game, which isn’t a word and which Matt quickly challenged off. Scrabble is, like all sports and games and contests, often decided by mistakes, if not nearly always so. Everyone makes them from time to time, no matter how good they are.

I was watching this match streamed online while commuting, and I physically cringed when I saw my good friend and club mate Phonerz play IR. For a moment, I felt physically sick. I was sitting next to one of my regular commuting companions on the Caltrain, whose name I don’t even know, and she was startled when I yanked the earbuds out of my ears and facepalmed.

“What happened?”
“He played IR.”
“Uh, who did what?”
“Scrabble,” I said pointing to my phone. “It’s the nationals.”
“What does IR mean?”
“It doesn’t mean anything. It’s not a word.”
“I don’t get it.”
“It’s not a word. He lost the game because of it.”
“Do you like Words With Friends?”

Sigh.

Jesse handled the defeat with class, however, which means it will probably be safe for me to give him some shit the next time I see him. (And if it’s not safe, I think me and my bad ankle can outrun him and his bad knee.)

As for Matt, the scorecard at the top of the page should give you an idea of his sense of humour. He’s one of the funniest guys in scrabble, and possesses the heightened sense of absurdity that you’d expect from a guy who’s been rooting for the Ottawa Senators all his life. He’s contributed some factoids to this blog, and he gave me permission to reprint here two of his scrabble short stories.

These two stories chronicle battles between Matt and Nigel Richards, who has won everything in English-language scrabble, recently won the French championship after spending nine weeks learning the dictionary, and is presently studying the Klingon dictionary as our planet’s chosen rep for the Interplanetary Scrabble To The Death Festival. These stories also feature some dazzling construction of scrabble game boards, links to which are end the end of the stories, and they possess a sentiment very much in keeping with the ethos here at In Play Lose.

I thought this would be a good way to tip my cap to Matt for his performance in Reno. I, for one, welcome our new muffin overlord:

- - -

Nigel stole my mom's car
So yesterday I spent my Saturday the same way I spend most of my Saturdays: hustling Scrabble players at Confederation Park. This is how I buy my food for the week.
"You sure got a lot better when money was on the line," said my latest victim as she reluctantly handed over a crisp $10 bill.
"Yeah, well, what can I say? I play well under pressure."
The lady scowled and left. I pocketed the money and dreamed of the Arby's I would purchase with it on the way home. My first hot meal in a month!
"Anyone else up for a fun game of Scrabble?! Maybe make it interesting and put a couple bucks down?!"
A man emerged from behind the trees. "I'll play!" he said in a thick British accent. He was comically dressed: a top hat and monocle adorned his jolly face, and a royal blue overcoat barely covered his large gut. The pocketwatch and handlebar moustache completed the ensemble.
"Sure thing! You know the rules, right? Want to put a few bucks on the game?" I asked, hoping his wallet was as luxurious as his attire.
"Oh, why not?" he said, pulling out a velvet pocketbook. My eyes widened and stomach growled. "How about $100? I have no clue how much this Canadian currency is worth, anyways."
"Oh!" I said, trying not to gawk, "$100 is fine. Pocket change, really." I did not have $100. "Sure, I'll bet that much. Let's play!"
The fat English man sat down and we played. He was awful. Almost every one of his plays consisted of exactly two tiles. It was like he was fishing, but never hit anything. I did my best to play poorly, too. I didn't want to scare him off in case he was interested in more money games. Even playing my worst Scrabble, I beat him handily.
"Well done, old chap!" said the man. "I guess I have a lot to learn!"
"Yeah, thanks," I said, trying not to damage the $100 bill as I folded it and placed it in my sock. "Your best bet would be to stop playing only two tiles a turn. You'll never win that way."
"Oh, no, I'm sure I understand the strategy of Scrabble quite well," he said with a chuckle. "Two tiles a turn is fine!"
"Um... no. Trust me, you need to play more tiles. You'll never win that way." I said, forgetting that I was supposed to be convincing him to play more games with me.
"Well, we'll see," he replied. "How about another game, boyo? Higher stakes?"
I licked my lips. "Sure. What kind of stakes?"
He riffled through his pocketbook. "Oh I don't know. How does $5,000 sound?"
I almost fell off my chair. I had to take a second to calm down and collect myself. "F- five-thousand dollars sounds fine."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes!"
"Shake on it?"
We shook on it.
"Alright then."
At that moment, the man grabbed the front of his overcoat and pulled hard. The entire disguise came off. The fatness, the moustache, the British accent. It was all a ruse. The man who stood before me was Nigel Richards, beard and all. I almost barfed.
"Don't have $5,000, do you kid?" he said in his normal voice.
"W- well, I - I..."
"How about that red Mazda 3 you drove here in. That must be worth almost five gees."
"M - my mom's car?" I live in my mom's car when my bedroom at home needs to be fumigated.
"Yeah, that'll do, I guess. I already have five red cars, but I guess I can use that one as a lawn ornament. Bet you feel stupid for dissing my two-tiles-a-turn strategy now, eh? Well, ready to play?"
"Ohcrap..."

game on ...
 
———
Nigel stole my dad's car
Several months after my first incident with Nigel Richards, I finally convinced my parents to let me borrow my dad's car. You see, I had wagered my mom's car in a game of Scrabble with Nigel. Through some extraordinary circumstances, I lost that game. Just barely. My parents were quite pissed. They made me get a part-time job to pay to replace the car.
So I was driving to my new job one day, thinking about how unlucky I am. Seriously? How did he get 730-something points playing two tiles a turn? What a lucksack.
I tried to keep my mind on the road. If I crash my dad's car, my parents would kill me. No question.
I looked at the rear-view mirror, and then back at the road. Wait. Did I just see that? I looked again. Nothing. Whew. I looked a third time. There it was! A bearded man on a bicycle with a Scrabble board under is arm. Nigel!
"No!" I thought. I stepped on the gas and sped away. I was not interested in another encounter with that man.
After turning several blocks, I lost him. Whew. Eyes back on the road. There is was again! This time in front of me! How the hell did he catch up?! I sped past him and zoomed away at 120km/h. No way he could follow me on a bike with me driving that fast.
Then I heard the sirens. Crap! I guess I was going 120 in a 40 zone. I will never be able to pay this ticket. I make minimum wage at Wendy's! I pulled over to the curb and the police car did the same. The officer approached my car and I rolled down the window.
"Up for a game?" It was Nigel!
"What the? No! Get away from me!"
"Oh come on. I'm bored. Just one game of Scrabble?" he asked again.
"No! You took my mom's car! Now I have to work a crappy job to pay her back!"
"Well, tell you what. We'll play for the car. You win, you get your mom's Mazda back. I win, I get this lovely Toyota Venza. Sound fair?"
"No! This is my dad's car! And we both know what's going to happen! I'm going to have the game of my life. Getting all sorts of bingoes and scoring a ton of points, and then you're going to pull off some sort of ridiculous comeback and win out of nowhere. That's what's going to happen! So no, we aren't playing!"
"Oh come now. Tell you want. I'll sweeten the deal. I have to win AND get two triple-triple bingoes. Otherwise, you get the car back."
I thought about it. "Well... two triple-triples would be hard to get. Especially if I play super defensively... But no! I won't do it! You'll find a way to win!"
"I like your uniform, by the way. Wendy's makes good burgers. It's weird how "Trainee" is actually sewn onto your shirt there. Like you're forever a trainee. I mean, usually they put it on a nametag, but that stitching looks permanent. Weird."
"OPEN THE BOARD!"
So I sat down to play with Nigel, thinking there would be no way he could beat me AND get two triple-triple bingoes... 

game on ...

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.

Caro's Threshold of Misery

The LOSE has been busy here of late, cranking out a magazine at the office and writing up a draft of a new novel. But the LOSE took time out to travel to Las Vegas, where I participated in the National Scrabble Championships. And as resistant as I am to the idea, I will be a dutiful reporter here and go into some sort of detail about this tournament here in the coming days.

But before I do that, it's important to bring a concept into play here which was all of my gambler friends know about. This is a snippet from Mike Caro's "Threshold of Misery" theory, which I vaguely knew of in the past and was then reintroduced to by my good pal Jason Hlady up in Saskatchewan after I had a truly dreadful tournament in Albuquerque in 2009:

Few concepts have resonated with students more than Caro's Threshold of Misery. I continually receive letters, e-mails, and face to face thanks from both poker players and people in the "real world", telling me how much this simple truth has meant to them.

Here's how it goes: suppose you're a small to medium limit player, and you can envision yourself comfortably losing a maximum of $1,500 today. I'm not suggesting that you'll be happy about losing that much, just that you can comfortably handle it and that anything more will begin to feel uncomfortable.

Okay, now you find yourself down $500, then $1,100, then--before it registers, you've zoomed past $1,500 and are losing $1,800. You've entered dangerous territory. And it gets worse. And worse. Hours later, you find yourself losing $4,530. Now, your mind is numb. I believe that most people at this point can't mentally comprehend added losses. It all feels the same. You've crossed into Caro's Threshold of Misery, which is the point where mental and emotional pain is maximized and anything further won't register.
 
You must be aware when you cross that threshold, because beyond it decisions don't seem to matter. This is true in real life, too. When romances unravel or businesses fail, you might cross the Threshold of Misery and stop caring about making critical decisions. That's because the pain is already maximized and anything else that goes wrong can't add to the agony ... at these times, in poker and in life, the secret is to keep performing like you care.

How'd I do in Vegas? Well, I wouldn't be explaining the threshold of misery theory if it went well, now would I? This blog is intended to be an act of somewhat creative nonfiction, because truth is stranger than fiction. And I couldn't have invented this tournament in my head if I tried.

You May Already Be a Winner

The LOSE is back after a vacation, and after recovering from a vacation, because New Orleans was all that was advertised and then some. After that much food and that much alcohol and that much general abuse, my body seems to have responded by declaring a wildcat strike. I’ve been a little slow going here, and am only now just getting back up to speed.

This blog is an act of non-fiction, as such you should always remember that everything here is true, including the lies. Most especially the lies, in fact. But all stories, be they fictional or not, should have a compelling character at the center of it. Which we don’t in this case, since all we have is me, but we’ll pretend and see what comes. The main character of IN PLAY LOSE ventured to New Orleans not just to party like it’s 1999 but also to compete, and I found myself in a dangerous predicament that I’m decidedly unaccustomed to.

I was winning.

For those of you who don’t know me, let me explain my competitive pastime and passion: I play scrabble. I’m really good at it. I’m currently ranked about 56th in North America (although that number will drop slightly after my incompetent display at the Best of the Bay tournament this past weekend). So relatively speaking, I’m pretty good.

But what does that mean, actually? It means that, to be candid and somewhat boastful for the moment, I’m pretty much better at the game of scrabble than most people are good at anything. In the world, there are a very, very, VERY small number of people who are demonstratively better than I am. So, in that sense, I’m really good at this game.

But how good you are is relative not only to the general population but also to those who dare enter the same arena. The 12th man on the worst team in the NBA would mop the floor with the bushers playing pickup ball at the community center. Put him on the floor at the Staples Center or Madison Square Garden and he’ll most likely seem like he has no idea what he is doing. And for all of my relative aptitude at the game of scrabble, I’m also one of the least successful players of my level. I have won quite a few of the few shorter, 1-day tournaments we hold around the Bay Area, but I’ve never won a larger, multiple-day event in the more than 9 years that I’ve been playing.

Now, to be honest, this fact doesn’t really bother me that much. I’m not someone who wants to let a showing in one particular tournament define me. Regardless of whether you win a multiday (which has never happened for me), or you go 1-17 and finish last (which has ... sigh ...), you still have to play the next event. It’s a continous process, it’s open-ended and fluid by nature. Attaching too much weight or stock or value to one event doesn’t really make much sense. The game is still the same. (Shorter tournaments are much more susceptible to volatility and fluctuation, both in terms of the outcome of the game being affected by distribution of tiles and players getting a hot hand. A longer tournament mitigates some of those circumstances a bit, but not entirely.)

And I went to New Orleans mainly for the purposes of having a vacation and a party with some good friends of mine in a city I’ve always wanted to visit. The tournament seemed like little more than an excuse to do so, and my reward for spending 7½ hours cooped up in a cramped hotel meeting room playing a board game would be to have the opportunity to step outside the front door of the hotel, which was conveniently located on Bourbon St., and step into the veritable feast for the senses that is the French Quarter. Going into the tournament, I was far more intent on getting myself several platters of oystyrs on the half-shell, a Central Grocery muffuletta, and a Sazerac to swig than I was in winning the tourney. I had deëmphasized the tournament in my mind to the point where the actual results seemed somewhat irrelevant and caring about the result was a waste of energy. I was going to keep the tourney in perspective.

But then that stupid winning thing started happening, and I found myself starting to care. It’s really impossible not to care – you don’t get to be one of the best on the planet at something by not giving a shit. This is a competitive endeavour I’m talking about here, and one thing I’ve found to be true across the entire spectrum of competition is that those who are the best absolutely, positively hate losing. It’s pretty easy to detach and disengage from a tourney where you’re 8-8 after two days and have no hope of winning the thing. Success breeds pressure, it breeds expectations. The more that you win, the more important that it becomes that you win the next one.

So I got the hot hand on the first day of the Crescent City Open, took over first place after the 6th game and then found myself sitting at Table 1 for the 8th and final game of the day. (For non-scrabblers: the lower the table number, the better you’re doing in the event. I’ve been on the other end of that as well. At a tourney in Dallas, I was so bad on the first day that my table had an unlisted number and was located somewhere near Fort Worth.) I was so unaccustomed to being in this position that I couldn’t find my name in the standings or the table assignments posted on the wall. It didn’t even occur to me to look up at the top of the page, where the leaders’ names were printed.

And on the second day of the tournament, I lost a few games but so did everyone else, so I spent the majority of my day at Table 1 and finished the day with a 13-3 record, in first place overall and closing in on winning the biggest tournament of my career. It was a blast and I was having a great time, I was playing great and making good decisions and putting myself in position to win time and again. Playing the game in a style that I feel comfortable with, controlling the board and finding a good tempo to all that I was doing. But I wouldn’t go so far as to label it being in “the zone,” per sé. I’ve been in “the zone” on the basketball court before, where you get so focused and dialed in that pretty much every shot you chuck in the general vicinity of the backboard seems to somehow find the bottom of the net. “The zone” is surreal and somewhat otherworldly by nature, an altered state of higher consciousness. But this tournament didn’t feel like that all, actually. The New Orleans scrabble tournament, in fact, felt surprisingly normal as it was taking place. It felt – gasp! – like I actually knew what I was doing.

But it was a combination of factors – not the least of which being a food hangover from eating a steak the size of my head at Besh Steakhouse on Sunday night – which led to me waking at 4:15 a.m. on Monday morning, being hit with an enormous streak of angst, and struggling with physical discomfort for hours on end. The worst thing that excessive stress does to me is trigger migraine headaches. It also leads to enormous pains in my upper back which can sometimes last for days. I woke up on Monday and I was a complete, utter wreck. And the reason for this is obvious, of course – I wanted to win the tournament. Or, more appropriately, I didn’t want to lose the tournament. And there is a big, big difference between the two.

Like I said before, I’ve never one a multiday tournament before. The closest I’ve ever come before was at a tourney over Memorial Day weekend here in the Bay Area. It game down to the very last game, as myself and another woman were tied with 15-3 records. The game went very badly, as she got more than her share of the good tiles at the right times. This happens, of course, and scrabble is very much a game about managing chaos. You never have an idea of what you’re going to draw out of the bag, and all you can hope to do is prepare how to handle what does. And in this particular game, I was getting crushed and the game was growing short. I finally played a bingo and some other stuff to get within 70 points or so late in the game, to give myself at least a chance of winning, and out of the bag came KOOOSTU.

Blech. That rack is terrible.

And then my opponent put the word COLA on the board with the C on a TWS, in open space, and I had to do everything in my power to keep my eyebrows from arching straight off my forehead and launching into orbit, as I envisioned just how many cookouts I could have with the money I won after playing COOKOUTS for 95 points and I came back to win this game and win the tournament ...

And then she picked the tiles up and plays them somewhere else on the board and hits her clock. Sigh. That one stung a bit, to be close and fall short and very nearly have the miracle I needed to win fall from the sky.

The other time I was in position to win a multiday tournament was in San Luis Obispo and I was 10-1 with 5 games to go ... and promptly lost four out of the last five. There is a word for this sort of inept finishing, and that word would be “choke.” Because sometimes in scrabble you do, in fact, have games that you just can’t win, because you draw bad tiles and your opponent plays all the good ones, but not as many as games are truly unwinnable. Most of the time, it comes down to making mistakes, of which I made a boatload in that particularly disastrous series of games. It was a choke.

We all make mistakes, and the people who make the fewest mistakes are generally the ones who win. As the competition level is raised and the margin for error grows smaller, the mistakes aren’t always as obvious. Either that, or they’re exacerbated because they look so stupid. Think of the dropped pass in football, or the missed layup in basketball, or the routine grounder that goes between the shortstop’s legs. You’re thought when you see that sort of thing is “what the hell is wrong with that guy?” Mistakes do come in all sizes.

But all competitions are about who makes the fewest mistakes, in the end. And I’ve come over the course of playing 9 years to accept the fact that rarely do I lose because of bad luck. Most of the time I lose because of my flurry of incompetence. And the last thing I wanted to have happen in New Orleans was to succumb to my own propensity for self-destruction. I wasn’t afraid of losing. I was afraid of choking.

So I tried some visualization techniques to try and relax, somewhere during my 2nd or 3rd shower on this morning. At first I just repeated to myself, over and over, “I’m going to win today.” I would sometimes even say it aloud, and I mumbled it a few times while wandering alone about the French Quarter in the early hours. “I’m going to win today ... I’m going to win today ... but what if I don’t ... NO! STOP THINKING LIKE THAT! I’m going to win today.” I tried to imagine what it would be like to actually win, what the moment would be like and how I would react. Tried to picture it in my mind. But it all felt like an artificial construct. And “I’m going to win today,” was soon replaced with, “don’t blow it.”

And since my mind has an innate aptitude and ability for conjuring up worst-case scenarios, I’m then thinking about what will happen when I go 0-4 on Monday in New Orleans and blow the tournament and finish completely out of the money entirely. It could happen, you know? I’m playing some of the best players in the world, after all. They know what the fuck they’re doing and me? Me? I’m just a hack. I’m the guy who throws all the parties and jokes and clowns around, who is popular with the other players and isn’t afraid to laugh at himself. But no one takes me that seriously as a competitive player, and why should they? I’m really not that good!

Welcome to the vortex that is my mind.

The games start at 9:30 a.m., and by 9:15 I am a complete mess. I’m so stressed out that I can feel a migraine headache coming on. At any moment, I expect to feel a twinge over my right eye which will then explode into a seering sort of pain which can sometimes render me near blind. My neck and my back are killing me, this dull and constant ache which never abates. So much for being free and easy in The Big Easy.

I’m going to win today ... I’m going to win ... Oh, fuck, but what if I lose? It’s going to be so disappointing, and I’m always coming up short and it will be just another one of those times where I wasn’t quite good enough. At least I’ll have a good story, because all tales of woe and failure ultimately seem funny over time ... just don’t choke, don’t blow it. Lose because Jesse draws the fucking bag on you, which he only does on days that end in the letter Y. But what if I go 0-4 and gag on it? Especially because of all of the people that are rooting for me ... wait ...

I’d been posting status updates on my facebook page, and the response from friends elsewhere to news that I was leading the tournament in New Orleans was somewhat overwhelming. I had over 100 different people liking my statuses, or commenting, or sending me private messages or emails or texts, all of which told me that they were cheering for me, that they were following along with the standings online, and that they were all hoping I would win. And I really took that to heart. So many different people had wished me well, had been excited to see me succeeding. And I realized then that the reason I was so worried about losing was that I didn’t want to let them down.

Which is silly, of course. None of these people were going to see me any differently whether I went 4-0 or 0-4 on the last day of a scrabble tournament. It wasn’t going to change their opinion of me. Regardless of the result, you have to wake up the next morning and go on with your life.

And some people claim that they don’t care what people think, that all that matters to them is fulfillment of their individual goals. They want to win and be on top above all else. Well, OK, but guess what. That isn’t me! I don’t want to be that cold, calculating, win-at-all costs persona. I don’t want to be that narrow. I throw great parties. I make people laugh. I space out and do stupidly maddening things while playing scrabble, the sorts of things Top 50 players in North America shouldn’t do, but then miraculously scramble and still manage to win a lot of games in spite of myself. That’s just me. It’s who I am. I’m a spaz and a flake and a goof.

And people like that about me. In the moment, winning the tournament would feel great and losing would be an enormous downer, but it wouldn’t fundamentally change the way that I am. Nope. I’m one of the Good Guys who wears the white hats, and not one result was going to change that. In the end, being one of the Good Guys is more important to me, and I took the 100+ well-wishes from a wide cross-section of people – from scrabble experts to people who’ve never actually played a game of scrabble in their lives – as a life affirmation.

And so, when I sat down at 9:20 a.m. to prep for my first game of the day, I wrote across the top of my scoresheet, “you’ve already won!”

And I didn’t win, in the end, as if it really mattered. I went 2-2 on the last day to finish 15-5 and I wound up in 3rd place. The games that I lost didn’t go my way. Of course, in the moment, I was pissed when it became clear I wasn’t going to win. Who wouldn’t be pissed? We’re competitors, damn it. The game is fun, but winning is even more fun. The hardest part of it was playing three of my four games vs. three of my better friends on the planet, all of us knowing what knocking each other off would mean. It’s better sometimes to have an unknown enemy to whom you can assign all sorts of negative qualities and attributes, make them into some sort of evil beast who must destroyed for the good of all humanity. We love to beat our friends, just not as much when there is something on the line.

I didn’t win and it bothered me and then my head exploded into a full-on migraine which made it extremely difficult to do anything other than crawl under the blankets in my hotel bed. But after a good 2½ hour nap, two huge platters of oystyrs and a couple Jack Daniels on the rocks, I was fine. It was all good. Win or lose, I was still in New Orleans with my girlfriend and a bunch of great friends of mine, playing a game we’re all really good at and having a great time. What’s not to like about that?

I’ll win one eventually. Or maybe I won’t. I don’t know. It really doesn’t bother me that much. And, of course, having had such a great tournament in New Orleans, I promptly played another tournament this past weekend as was godfuckingterrible, reverting to my wildly inconsistent form which has plagued me in scrabble and pretty much everything else for that matter. The tournament this past weekend was the Best of the Bay championship tournament, which is also an excuse to have a day-long dinner party. I’m all about the parties. We all won, because we all got to eat and eat a lot.

And I would rather see a friend of mine win, which is what happened in New Orleans. The Good Guys win! And as a footnote to that San Luis Obispo debacle I spoke of earlier, I may have choked in the individual event but it wasn’t all bad. It was a California team tournament, North v. South, and we clobbered those clownshoes from the South. And we made a point of celebrating afterwards at a seafood joint in nearby Pismo Beach:

Yeah, that tourney turned out pretty well, didn’t it? In play EAT!

Laissez les bon temps roulez!

In Play LOSE is headed to New Orleans for a few days, the original reason for this trip being to play some silly board game 20 times over. But this is a vacation, first and foremost, and the results of the actual games don't really matter all that much.

To guard against caring, myself and several others have reinstituted our Kangaroo Court, and we shall fine each other freely for any acts of whining, compaining, or excessive caring about scrabble. Whatever fines are collected with be spent on festive beverages at the end of the tourney.

I have no expectations for the tournament itself, not having played a long event since April of last year. My hope is that I've forgotten how terrible I am at this game. But if do something particularly dumb and loseblogworthy, it may appear on this blog. The subject of losing at this game is something I've become quite an expert about over the past 9 years.

I think I also need a Saints hat, always having had a soft spot in my heart for the Saints, the club having developed a reputation for being lovable losers in the first 30+ years of their existence.

Laissez les bon temps roulez!  It's time for some fun. And a whole lot of liquor. I may lose at scrabble but I am going to win at life, although I may need some serious detox when this weekend is over ...