1st Thomas Reinke continued his push to repeat as club champion with another first-place finish, this time ending at 4-1 +241. He successfully fended off betty in the first round, 375-346, countering her opening CLOTTED with his own EASIEST. For those interested in useless trivia, that marks the seventh time Thomas has played that particular bingo. In the second round, he beat Bryan 403-341, bingoing twice with ONLIEST (a dialectal form of ONLY, so don't play ONLIER*) and MAFTIRS. After that, Thomas suffered his only defeat of the night at the hands of James, 394-396. Maybe if Thomas had scored more than 60 points for TRACHEAE, he could have won, hmmmmm? Simultaneously, he was playing Richard, and that game went better, with him winning 453-319. Richard had the nice find of NONENTRY, while Thomas played LESBIAN and LISTSERV (n. an email system that automatically sends messages to all subscribers). Eight-letter words ending in a V are rare (HALIEROV, MAZELTOV, STOTINOV, and TOLAJREV are the other four), but not as rare as similar seven-letter words (ISOGRIV being the only one) or nine-letter words (LEITMOTIV). In the final game, he managed to pull one out against Charles, 438-420. Facing certain defeat, and with only one tile remaining in the bag, he deftly played off a clunky J, deftly drew an even clunkier Q, and deftly played an unstoppable QUAIGHS to win.

2nd Charles Reinke went 3-1 +430, coming in second to his brother, which is basically the story of his entire life if we're being totally honest. His biggest win happened in the first game, as he beat Helen 511-280. His bingos were NUDISTS and BUTYRATE. In the second round, he gave James his only loss of the night, winning 465-368. James had bingos of ALTOIST and TETANOID (adj. resembling tetanus). Charles only bingoed once, with EARWORMS, but still got the decisive win. Similarly, he gave Gail her only loss of the night in round three, with the final score being 462-342. Charles bingoed with GUESSERS and a 96-point EXTREMES. There's an old saying: when you can bingo for 100-ish points, that gives you 100-ish points more than you had last turn. Charles turned on his trusty bingo cannon for the fourth game, bingoing four times, but it proved not to be trusty enough as he lost 420-438. He played AMPOULE, ALDERMAN, MEDIATES, and CAROLERS, but somehow that was not enough.

3rd Gail Salm got her start to the new club season off right, finishing in third place at 3-1 +137. In the first game, she beat Dave 375-305, preventing him from playing any bingos at all. She herself only bingoed once, with DIVESTS; deciding that bingoing once was not acceptable, she bingoed twice in her next three games. The first of those next games was a 391-310 win against Sue. Sue did bingo, with ROASTED, but as they (and the immutable laws of mathetmatics) say, two is more than one, and Gail played TREATING and SOFTENS. In the third round, she faced Charles and lost 342-462. Her bingos were RUINATES (not to be confused with URINATES) and HOTLINE. Charles extended that second one to HOTLINER for a lot of points, which somehow seems unfair because Gail did most of the legwork in the first place. Against Betty, she won 461-355, but more importantly, won five crinkly green rectangles worth of legal American currency for her triple-triple play of SPLINTER for 149. Don't spend all those crinkly green rectangles in one place!

Mark played the Word Of The Week, DACTYLIC (n. a verse containing dactylcs, a definition which doesn't help at all if you don't know what a dactyl is in the first place).