Charles Reinke Loses Game, Still Lands in First

1st Charles Reinke regained some of the mojo he had misplaced the previous week and, thanks to the absence of any undefeated player, came in first place with a 4-1 +724 record. After triumphing in inter-twin contests five times in a row, he was handed a loss by his brother Thomas, 457-413. In typical twin fashion, both players had two bingos: RECOPIED and DARLING for Thomas, FORESTS and ENOLASE for Charles. This loss awakened in Charles a terrible wrath, and in a subsequent two-on-one match, he won both games by a combined 540 points. A 432-251 win over Betty Hasselkus saw just one bingo played between both players (Charles' ADAPTION), but that win seemed somewhat restrained compared to the fury unleashed on the adjacent board, where Charles unleashed a crushing total of 602 upon Barb Besadny. That final score is the second-highest of the current club season, behind Aaron Bader's 627 back in September. Four bingos of URINOSE, ASYNDETA, SERRANID, and CHLORITE were instrumental in allowing Charles to climb to such dizzying scoring heights.

2nd Andy Bohnsack also finished at 4-1 with a lesser, but still quite impressive, +452 cumulative. He got his one loss out of the way quickly, falling to Helen Flores 386-348 while Helen held him bingoless, a tough feat for any opponent of Andy's to accomplish. Helen got down GLACIERS herself for an ice-cold 74 points. The pain of zero bingos would not again be inflicted upon Andy's battle-scarred flesh, although a closely-fought 442-426 win over Susan Vergeront saw his only bingo (ABELINS) turn out to be phony. LESBIAN is the real word in those letters; Andy may have been thinking of AIBLINS or ABLINGS (both sticky S's) when he made his attempt. That victory would end up being by far Andy's closest win, and Thomas would do little to challenge his offensive firepower in the course of a 352-508 loss. In this case, the bingo counts clearly do not tell the whole story; Andy had his SMOOTHIE and CITADELS countered by Thomas' DIABASE and TURNSOLE.

3rd Aaron Bader went 3-1 +156 while lamenting the pedestrian-ness of his bingos. A low-scoring 368-344 win over Gail Salm had a decent amount of combined bingos (3), but was notable in that all of them (NEUROSIS, TENURIAL, REGRANTS) scored 59 points. Given that sub-60-point bingos account for just 1.4% of bingos played at our club, that is probably some kind of record. And not a record that you would especially want to be remembered for. Thankfully, not every bingo was so impotent; in a 406-332 victory against newcomer Joe Horowitz, Aaron got down LISENTE and AUNTLIER (anagram of Gail's earlier TENURIAL) for a whopping 68 points apiece! Sadly, Thomas Reinke spoiled a second player's undefeated night when he took Aaron down by a score of 421-380 which was notable only for some well-placed jokes over the word "GONADIAL".

We had two new players join us tonight, the largest torrent of newbies we've had in a while. Both of them quickly cast off the "newbie" shackles; Joe Horowitz went 2-2 +134 and Dave Kinzer (hailing from a distant land known as "Baraboo") went 2-1 +150. Joe deserves a "best start to Scrabble career" award for downing veteran tile-pusher Sue Goldstein 500-314 in his first game.

Charles' nine-letter FAYALITES, played against Bryan Benwitz was chosen as word of the week. Fayalite is helpfully defined as "a mineral". Further research resulted in glazed eyes for the editor, so no more insight into the elusive nature of fayalite can be provided at this time. However, it can be noted that FAYALITES is a nine-letter word made up entirely of two-letter words (FA, AY, YA, AL, LI, IT, TE, ES). ADENOSINE is a higher-probability word which shares this characteristic.