Bitter Cold Freezes Thomas Reinke's Heart Into an Unfeeling Mass of Scrabble Dominance

1st Thomas Reinke's normally kind nature was replaced by the single-minded purpose of winning games of Scrabble Brand Crossword Game as he went 4-0 +345. A closed board in his first game against Betty opened up enough at the end to let him play OSTEITIC (pertaining to OSTEITIS, bone inflammation) for the win. Thomas overcame in his second game Andy's wasteful opening rack of EINORT? to win 454-360, with the bingos of ABATTOIR, PROTEAS, and CINEAST (an enthusiAST of CINEma). In his third game he avoided the pitfalls of listening to his opponent, ignoring Aaron's utterance of "There are no bingos from the W" and bingoing out with WINSOMER to win by 5, 415-410. To be fair to Aaron, WINSOMER is a pretty stupid looking word. In the last game, Thomas could feel his heart unfreezing from the warm camaraderie of the room, and as quickly as possible dispatched Gail, 418-307, before the last of the ice shards melted away, leaving behind a dazed, confused, and undefeated Scrabbler.

2nd Charles Reinke was unaffected either positively or negatively by the bitter cold, going 4-1 +152 in his normal manner. His secret dreams of going undefeated were quickly dispelled by Peter, who bingoed out with FAILINGS to win 475-438, undoing Charles' WATERIER the previous turn. Despite the dismantling of his plans going into the evening, Charles recovered to win the rest of his games, starting with Bryan, against whom he won 433-366. This would normally be the time in the writeup to detail what kind of crazy bingos he played; sadly, his bingos were pedestrian by his standards, and do not earn any special mention. CUITTLE (v. to coax), played during a 2-on-1 against Dennis, isn't so bad I guess.

3rd Gail Salm's own dreams of going undefeated took a lot longer to be dispelled than Charles', as she won her first three contests before being bested by the unfeeling one in her final game. An opening 440-337 victory against Adrienne lead into a surprisingly close and hard-fought win against Buffy, 414-400. I say surprising, because normally when someone gets outbingoed 3-0, the point differential is a little larger. Just goes to show that bingos aren't the sole purpose of Scrabble, and playing to score every turn can sometimes be just as good. Right? Right. Gail picked up another 3-bingo game against Andy, winning big 423-296. The score would have been closer, but Andy was stymied by one of his racks near the end.

Aaron's DRACHMAE was chosen as word of the week. A DRACHMA is (or was, thanks to the Euro) a currency of Greece, and  pluralizes with either an S, E, or I.

Prepare yourself for an extremely long and tedious list of new bingos played this week:
ANODISE, by Helen.