1st Thomas Reinke (his scoresheet anonymously amended with the personal title "loser" even though he only lost one game) came in first place with a 4-1 +257 record. He lived up to his "loser" title by losing to Bryan in the first round, 385-453. This despite his bingo trio of OLEATES, LENTOIDS, and STARETS (n. a spiritual adviser in the Eastern Orthodox Church, plural STARTSY. Rasputin, the famous Russian mystic, was kind of like a starets). After that history lesson, Thomas played two, Gail and Richard. He had a smooth go of it against Gail, scoring 501 and playing CAMPOREE, APERIENT, and FARINOSE. Things were a lot closer against Richard, but he managed to squeeze a bingo down on the last play of the game, SPIRTING, to win by 6, 372-366. Against Charles in the third round, he won 415-385 with an opening bingo of BASMATI and a later IGNITER. For his final act, he ventured into unknown territory and played a game of Collins with Mark. It must have went well for him using the British dictionary, because he won 441-363. A double-double NAIVETY for 108 really helped, as did his Collins-only find of EUOUAES*. A EUOUAE* is a Latin mnemonic for a Gregorian cadence, taken from the vowels in "saeculorum Amen". I thought we were supposed to be playing in English? If the idea of playing six-letter words with no consonants is appealing to you, talk to Aaron.

2nd Bryan Benwitz went 3-1 +597, averaging a quite high 489 points as well as 3 bingos per game. He failed to meet either of those averages while beating Thomas 453-385, "only" bingoing with SERIATE (fun bingo stats incoming: SERIATE has now been played at club 19 times, and is catching up to its anagram AERIEST, which has been played 20 times) and BROTHER. He picked up his statistical output against Helen in the next game, winning 523-313. He held Helen bingoless while keeping all the bingos for himself: ANTHROS (n. ANTHRO, short for anthropology), BRAINIER, STEADIES, and HIPLINE. Bryan lost 355-398 against Richard, with Richard's PRETERM (n. a child born prematurely) for 92 drawing an unsuccessful challenge and swinging the game in his favor. In the final game he unleashed the fury against Dennis, scoring 624 and bingoing five times. That means over a third of the tiles in the bag were used for his rack-clearing plays, which illustrates how hard it gets to bingo that often. Those bingos were TANYARD, ERODABLE, SACATON, DREDGING, and MONSTERA (n. a tropical American plant). If you weren't aware of the A extension to the end of MONSTER, consider yourself enlightened.

3rd Charles Reinke had a spread of +543 but came in third with his 3-1 record because of Bryan's even more ridiculous spread. A big chunk of his spread came right away with his 573-325 win versus Gail. Gail played RETINTS and SALTIRE, but it only slightly lessened the impact of Charles' CINEOLE, ARGENTUM, AUTHORS, and HONKIES (gasp, I thought this was a family-friendly writeup). A close game against Dennis ended in Charles' favor 384-352 as he drew the remainder of those ever-useful 4-point consonants at the end, leaving Dennis unable to score enough to catch up. Against Thomas, he played READOUTS, and SQUAMATE (n. any of an order of reptiles), but lost 385-415. The previously-unknown two-letter extension for SQUAMATE, DESQUAMATE (v. to come off in scales or flakes, like skin, isn't that disgusting?), which would have scored 60-ish points, went unplayed for the entire game. Another big chunk of spread came against Richard in the final round, as Charles won 579-286. He had three nice bingos, MATELOTE, BEGGARLY for 110 and the word-of-the-week SIDDURIM (n. SIDDUR, a Jewish prayer book). Before you get too congratulatory, let it be known that DRUIDISM would've been more points.

Congratulations to Helen for playing the last remaining unplayed word of 8 in the AEGINST rack, GENISTA. Someone has been reading the writeups!