Good News, Bad News

Good news I went to the Scrabble Open Tournament for masters anyway, despite having a tight schedule (hence the long blog hiatus) and being ill-prepared.
Bad news I was thrashed like no body’s business – including one by a 75-year-old lady and one by a 10-year-old boy (He has a 1400+ rating, mind you; mine’s 1200+).

Good news I achieved my targeted number of wins out of 20 rounds.
Bad news My target was a miserly humble 1 after I made a fantastic four straight losses met better players in the first four rounds.

Good news At the end, I still managed to win 7 out of 20 rounds. I’m truly happy. Could’ve gotten a lot worse.
Bad news I keep being somewhere at the bottom of the league as plenty of people have won more than 7 rounds.

Good news Looking back, I could (or maybe not) have won at least (or at most) 2 more rounds if I hadn’t been so unlucky to have 7 vowels at one time, lose my turn to exchange tiles, and still come out with 6 vowels. I also have an uncanny knack to take ‘U’s and ‘I’s. There’s only 4 ‘U’s in a bag, and I manage to have 3 on my rack. What are the chances that I can’t get better letters like ‘H’ or ‘W’? The high-scoring letters like ‘J’, ‘K’, ‘Q’, ‘X’ and ‘Z’, most of the times, remained as elusive as ever from my fingers.
Bad news It’s utterly no point that you could, or you were close; you didn’t. Period.

Good Bad news There’s something called Scrabble betting too! I was told it ran into hundred plus ringgit.
Bad Good news I wasn’t good enough for anyone to bet on =( because they did not think I was going to win, which, sadly is true.

Good news I met quite a lot of people, played with opponents from different countries. Lisa here flew in all the way from Korea, and we had 3 very interesting games. I think my game with Ng Chee Eng was the best of all the 20. I lost, but somehow it felt great to have a “proper” game not bothered by a string of vowels and consonants when you need them the least.
Bad news I didn’t get to play with so many opponents. I wish I did. I wish I could.

Good news I have put my best foot forward in all the games.
Bad news I keep wondering if I had better tiles, would things have changed. It is entirely wrong to say that I would win if I had better tiles. I mean, I know fully well that that depends on your arsenal of vocabulary. Seriously speaking, I don’t mind losing if I had better tiles. But to lose due to poor luck, I don’t know what to think.

Good news I have learned plenty of new 3-letter words, make bingoes, look for anagrams and memorise hooks.
Bad news What I knew before the tourney wasn’t enough. Someone even played the word AMARANTH for bingo. Can you believe it? AMARANTH? Who in their right mind knows the word AMARANTH?

I shall end this with a quote, when I blurted out, literally, at the sight of the stupefying word.

“AMA – what?”