BINGOS GALORE
Singapore
7-8 September 2000
The inaugural Singapore Mind Sports Olympiad (MSO) has added another premier event to our annual Scrabble calendar. Attracting regional participation, the most notable player must surely be Nigel Richards from New Zealand. Described as the 'Tiger Woods' of Scrabble, it is a feather in the organisers' cap that they were able to draw someone of his calibre to play in the event. Other notable foreign guests were Amnuay Ploysangnam from Thailand, and a host of top Malaysian players.
Kibitzing any game of Nigel Richards' guarantees a lesson in vocabulary, and the following game from his Round 3 match against Malaysian Jocelyn Lor (herself no mean player) is typical.
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Blanks: M13=I; N11=U |
Jocelyn would have been delighted to lay down the bingo, DRIFTED, on her first move. A statistic quoted at the lecture on Scrabble given at the Foyer earlier that day was that 66% of player who score the first bingo go on to win the game. This was not to be in this match - Nigel subsequently found EXCITANT (a stimulant), INCORPSE (an archaic term meaning to incorporate), POULAiNE (a long, pointed shoe-toe) and TALCIEST (being the most talc-like). One can only imagine the sort of bed-time reading Nigel does.
Local number one, Tony Sim, was pleased to beat Nigel in their match. This was accomplished with no less than four bingos in Tony's first six moves! Tony had ONERIER (more ornery), TAEDIUM (an obsolete spelling of tedium), FILLINGS and OPERATED. Nigel had only one bingo, IRRITANT, which I am sure must be below his per game average for bingos. Nevertheless, he had four moves with scores not less than 40 points - CONVO (an Australian colloquialism for a conversation) for 42 points, ZERK (a grease fitting, apparently named after its inventor) for 54 points, NIX for 55 points and HIEMAL (a Shakespearean adjective meaning wintery) 47 points. In addition, no move of both players was less than 24 points (except Tony's going-out move). The final score - Tony 494 and Nigel 442.
Tony has taken the spirit of the MSO to heart, and he also signed up to play in the Othello and Mastermind Singapore Open tournaments. We local Scrabblers were delighted to find that he had expertise not just in Scrabble, but in Mastermind as well, performing splendidly to take the gold medal in the event. As Tony is not a regular Mastermind player, there must be something in being good at one intellectual sport that can be exported and applied in other games and situations.
After picking up the Master Mind gold medal en passant, Tony continued in the Scrabble Masters in top form. Despite Tony's string of victories, Nigel did not falter and both ended up with 17 wins, a clear 2.5 points ahead of third-placed Singaporean, Quek Sim Ho.
Although both had the same number of wins, Nigel was the clear winner with his 2216 spread, compared to Tony's 1273. So the Gold Medal went to Nigel, the Silver to Tony and the Bronze to Quek who had 14.5 wins. Leading the 14-pointers, A. Ganesh from Malaysia was fourth.
- High Game - Amnuay Ploysangngam, 567 points
- High Word - Tony Sim, STEAMIER 140 points
- Pwee Keng Ho
Scrabble Association
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