The most exciting news of the day was the great finishes at the 2015 North American SCRABBLE Championship by Thomas and Charles Reinke. In a tough field of over 300 competitors, Thomas attained a highly coveted spot in the quarterfiles where only the top 8 competitors were able to compete for the overall championship. He finished 7th and won $500. Charles competed with the rest of the pack and finished 7th, making him 15th overall, good enough for the Class B prize of $200. Thomas and Charles leave with shiny peak ratings of 1930 and 1931 respectively, putting them both squarely in the top 40 players in North America.

If you want to follow some of their games see:

Thomas vs. Kenji:  http://event.scrabbleplayers.org/cgi-bin/showgcg.pl?id=/nsc2015/3;turn=0

Thomas vs. Panupol: http://event.scrabbleplayers.org/cgi-bin/showgcg.pl?id=/nsc2015/18;turn=0

Thomas vs. Jesse Day: http://event.scrabbleplayers.org/cgi-bin/showgcg.pl?id=/nsc2015/22;turn=0   and  http://event.scrabbleplayers.org/cgi-bin/showgcg.pl?id=/nsc2015/23;turn=0

You can watch the video of Thomas playing Jessie here: http://www.twitch.tv/ggslive/v/9673302

Live streaming video coverage of the finals with Matthew Tunnicliffe and Jesse Day was excellent and a recording can be found here: http://www.twitch.tv/ggslive/v/9795136 

Meanwhile, back in Madison...

Twelve of us met in the church to play some low stakes scrabble, each of us looking forward to not taking our usual Reinke scrabble poundings. 

First place went to Peter Schmiedicke who was undefeated, going 4-0 vs. the Reinkeless field. He had the high average of the night at 444 and averaged a session leading 2 bingos per game He also had the high game of 535 against Helen, who could be heard vehemently complaining that Peter's 91 point play of RESPACE was in fact a word. 

Second place went to Bryan Benwitz who went 3-1 +247 losing only to Peter the Defeater. He hand the nice find of SENARIUS (singular of SENARII, which is a Greek or Latin verse)

Third place went to Lynda Finn who went 3-1 +172 losing only to Peter the Defeater.

Fourth place went to Mary Becker who went 3-1 +112. Her only loss was to to Lynda, which means whe was transitively defeated by Peter the Defeater who she did not have the opportunity to play.

Gail is Bingo Queen with 9 bonuses, including the beautiful PEREONS and MINIVER. Dave Gilligan gets the word of the week with the lovely SCULLERY which is a room where kitchen utensils are cleaned and stored. Runner up for WOTW goes to Helen with COLTISH which not only scored 100 points, but a challenge as well.