Scrabble, of course

Coffeehousing is a scrabble tactic to distract one's opponent. I used to be a scrabble addict and I only "coffeehoused" during friendly matches. And yes, scrabble is considered a sport by those addicted to it.

It used to be fun but when it got serious I did not want to be drawn deeper into it. Oh, there were times I went to sleep with letters floating in my head, automatically anagramming every time I spot a seven-letter word and reviewing every game I played. I even memorized the two and three letter wordlist most of which I do not know the meaning of.

I was introduced to scrabble by an uncle, Joemol, and was brought to the competitive level courtesy of Pigeon.

It was a puzzle for me at first why I fell out of love with the game. Lisa A indirectly answered my question when she said, "Engineers excel at scrabble because they tend to look for the highest point they could make out of every move. Writers (referring to moi) tend to look for the most beautiful word in the rack." Very true.

Who doesn't want to win all the time anyway? In order to do so, one has to be good in calculating, add to the equation the number of tiles left in the bag, the probabilities and so on and so forth. Not exactly my favorite subject.

Also one has to keep an updated word stock. Yup! You have to memorize all the words that are "playable" even if you will never find an opportunity to use those words outside of the 11x11 board. And if the scrabble gods decide to delete a word from the list, well you have to do the same. Well, there is the luck of the draw but it will not always assure you of a win.

It started to get crazy for me when these words started appearing on the board UNFAIRS, TAENIAE, PEAG, VAREC, ZEBRASS, EUOI. And when my opponents challenged common words and placed an unheard of mix of letters, that gave me the go signal. Imagine SOME top scrabble players challenging TROD and placing PEAG. Insane!

Don't get me wrong, I admire a lot of scrabble players. Kudos to NASCAP, SCAPI and BBCS.

But I choose not to go through what I think is a futile exercise of memorizing words that mean zilch to me. Occasionally I still play on the 11x11. But not as enthusiastic as before.