Another Fine Night

Well, I've been trying to play fewer games on line late at night, but I still do.  And I had a great night of Scrabble.  I started playing Hearts, Risk, and Backgammon online at Pogo.com many many months ago.  I'm "competitive" at all of those, but each has problems.  I can honestly say that "dice hate me", which makes Risk and Backgammon miserable sometimes.  And I can't keep track of cards well enough to break past the mid rank of Hearts.

So I've been playing Scrabble for a few months, about one night per week.  No dice, no cards.  There is still the luck of the draw of the letters in Scrabble, but it seems random enough with so many letters that I'm not having a problem with that.  Plus, you get to use the good letters the other player uses. And I have a good vocabulary from reading lots of books...

Still, I got killed at first.  Scrabble uses a lot of specialty words.  Short ones like ZA and QI, and 7 letter words are bonuses.  It helped that I did Sunday crossword puzzles in ink for a couple decades.  While no crossword puzzles use ZA or QI, few scrabble players come across "sten" and "nene", so it works out.

So I guess I finally learned most of the 2-letter scrabble words (after being beaten to death with them at first).  And I was forced to start thinking of 7-letter words after being killed by the 50 point bonuses for using them (by my opponents).

Last night, I broke through the learning curve.  I won 12 games in a row!  Most were against real players, a couple were against the computer when no real players were available.  It may seem odd to any of you who play online games, because  computer players are generally considered easy to beat.  They drive ME nuts!  I can't beat the simplest chess program.  The Risk bots kill me routinely.  I can only beat real people!!!

I have no idea why.

It may be that when people think left/right, I think up/down. 

In Scrabble, I find it easy to make multiple word combinations.  Think of "ME", "LETS, and "EGG"  in a square of words.

Anyway, I beat players with 100 times my score. I have 140,000 points.   I asked one player who has 8 million points how she got them (after I crushed her in 3 games in a row).  She said she had been playing for 12 years.

Um,OK...

I don't plan to play Scrabble for 12 years...

I think I might try Clue next...  Achieving compentency at Scrabble has rendered the game boring.  Time to move on...