SOWPODS UK INTEGRATION
At present in the UK, as most of you may be aware, 2001 is a transition year in the run-up to the complete adoption of SOWPODS (or World Dictionary as it is known in the UK) on 1st Jan 2002. I thought it would be informative to document how the transition is occurring.
In ABSP-rated tournaments the following scenario applies:
If player X and player Y agree on the same word source there is no problem. If player X wishes to play to OSW4 and player Y wishes to play to SOWPODS, then until 30th June player X prevails, whereupon from July 1st if the same situation arises then player Y prevails until New Year's Day 2002 when the whole thing becomes history.
There are arguments that SOWPODS games should not be rated due to the virtual non-availability of OSPD3 and MWNCD10 to the vast majority of ABSP members.
However, a new word source known as OSWI (Official Scrabble Words International) is now in print and available for distribution across the country. This contains everything in OSW4 and TWL98. For ABSP tournaments, Chambers is the only authority for words longer than 9 letters.
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SCRABBLE ON THE AIRWAVES
Allan Simmons, longtime editor and publisher of "Onwords" magazine and one of the UK's top players for the last fifteen years or so, will be appearing on LBC. London residents will enjoy his appearance on the talk radio channel, situated at 1152 on the medium wave, at some point between 3.30pm and 7pm of Sunday 25th March. He will be talking about his favourite game with popular broadcaster and former MP Gyles Brandreth. For those who do not live in London you can listen to Allan and Gyles over the internet at http://www.lbc.co.uk.
Gyles has a strong Scrabble connection himself - in 1971 he placed a small advertisement in the Personal Column of The Times announcing the first ever UK National Scrabble Championship. Within days, hundreds replied from around the country, including the official PR team from manufacturer Spear's Games. Happily the two were able to work together to establish the annual competition which will celebrate its thirtieth anniversary this year.
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NOTABLE PERFORMANCES
UK:
Paul Allan of Glasgow SC put in a very strong performance to take first place at the Scottish Masters on March 10-11 2001 with 9 wins out of 11. Allan Simmons was second with 8 wins, having lost heavily to Paul on day one in a key game. Only Allan Simmons, Neil Scott and Raymond Tate ventured into the World Dictionary.
| Scottish Masters, Mar 10-11 2001 |
| 1 |
Paul Allan |
9 |
+739 |
| 2 |
Allan Simmons |
8 |
+423 |
| 3 |
Neil Scott |
7 |
+182 |
| 4 |
Alan Sinclair |
6 |
+328 |
| 5 |
Simon Gillam |
6 |
+144 |
| 6 |
Alan Georgeson |
6 |
-51 |
| 7 |
Wilma Warwick |
5 |
+347 |
| 8 |
Raymond Tate |
5 |
-218 |
| 9 |
Marion Keatings |
5 |
-240 |
| 10 |
Kate Surtees |
4 |
-304 |
| 11 |
Tom Wilson |
4 |
-796 |
| 12 |
Ricky Zinger |
1 |
-574 |
US:
In the San Francisco Bay Area Scrabble Scene, John C Green Jnr recently changed the South Bay Bragging Rights $3 tournaments to a single section Swiss. This allowed for low rated players to have a shot at some very strong players.
Courtesy of this new setup a remarkable upset occurred in January. Dion Dizon (708) beat John Ozag (1732), a difference of 1024 rating points. Astonishing stuff... does anyone know of a bigger upset? Send claims to us.
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TILE GLUT
There was an interesting situation in the March tournament in Minneapolis, MN a couple of weeks ago.
In round 4 on Saturday 3rd March, Intermediate division, two players began a game. After a few turns, a third Y appeared. They thought it odd but continued playing, until a second Z showed up! Then they called the for Tim Adamson the co-tournament director. He checked and found that their bag contained two full sets of Providence-green tiles! It is believe that this happened because someone filled the bag using a net, not realizing tiles were already in the bag.
The logistical problems with finishing out the game are obvious! Would there be time to play 200 tiles? Would there be space for them on the board? What if you got stuck with 2 Qs and 3 Vs? What if both players scored over 600?
It is the responsibility of both players to check their equipment before the game. It is hard to imagine how neither player noticed there were 200 tiles just by holding the bag. However, the Offical rules are unclear on how to proceed when there are too many tiles.
The NSA Official Tournament Rules I.B states:
Confirming the number of tiles
Before each game, confirm that there are 100 tiles, with the letter distribution as shown on the side of the board. Replace a defective set or notify a Director. If you later discover that there are missing tiles, and they cannot be found, the game proceeds with the tile pool as is.
The decision of the tournament directors was to ask the two players if they would agree to end the game and replay it after the Saturday session ended. They agreed, and that was done. Had the players involved not been able to stay afterwards, or if it had happened on the second day with no time to replay, the decision might have been to allow both to play until their clocks ran out, then stop the game at that point.
I take the stance that every effort should be made to continue the game. Taking time to reconstruct some sort of set would probably be less disruptive than replaying it. This makeshift set may have 3 Y's, but that fact doesn't favor either player. Cancelling the game would probably favor the person losing. That doesn't seem fair.
Having a time limit could lead to one player deliberately slowing down or even stopping playing when he/she is ahead till the clock runs out. In the 'continuation' solution the players would do battle until the board eventually got jammed. This is bound to happen fairly soon on a 225 square board with 200 tiles including 2 each of Q's and Z's and 4 each of C's and V's.
Have your say.
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SAME TIME, SAME PLACE, SAME RACK!
There was a strange occurence on Wednesday 7 March 2001 during a meet at Club #44, Los Angeles. While Ira Cohen was bingoing with RUBACES$, at the very same time on another table Bruce D'Ambrosio was bingoing with SUBRACE$. Those words are the only two 7 letter bingos available from that rack. What are the chances of that happening?
Spooky simultaneous racks in LA.
Well, on the ball as ever, MSO's number-cruncher has pounded out the answer. If RUBACES is played at some atomic instant in a fifteen game tournament/meeting, the chance that, if there are fourteen other games going on at once, someone plays RUBACES or SUBRACE in the next five seconds is of the order of 1 in 80,000.
If we assume that there are fifteen games taking place at once and people play three games in a meeting that night, then the chance of there being such a coincidence in a particular meeting is about 1 in 550. Of course, the chance of people spotting it when it happens is not very high.
For the sake of completeness the 8 letter bingos playable from the rack in question are: ARBUSCLE$, CORBEAUS#, CUDBEARS, SUBRACES$ and UNBRACES.
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