Thomas Reinke Receives Visions, Wins Scrabble Games

1st Thomas Reinke looked into the future, saw the list of Scrabblers that he was destined to play, and thought to himself, "I can probably beat all those dudes, and I say dudes because they are all, in fact, of the dude gender", before unbidden visions of his dismantling of said dudes invaded his mind. With a sense of inevitability and a feeling of horror at the realization that his actions were not truly his own, he won his first game against Bryan, 479-347, aided by his "find" of AGATIZES (v. to convert into agate). This large-ish victory gave way to three tight contests in a row, with him winning by increasingly nail-biting margins of 21, 5, and 2 against Peter, Charles, and Andy. A timely "find" of LONGTIME was the difference against Peter, a timely endgame phony of (phony redacted) earned him the victory against Charles, and his opponent's "fourth round melancholy" during a tough endgame propelled him over Andy.

2nd Charles Reinke was denied yet another perfect evening by his eternal nemesis Thomas, but his 3-1 +262 record was still good for second place. You know what they say, though: if you're not first, you're last. Since we don't reserve paragraphs for last-place finishers, I think this particular section is finished.

3rd Andy Bohnsack came in third thanks to the mysterious inner-workings of the club website, which proclaims his 3-2 record to be better than Dennis' 2-1 record. Andy sustained a drubbing at the hands of suddenly-extremely-bingo-prone Peter in a two-on-one in the first round, 313-537. Never one to give up, he showed impressive resilience to beat his other opponent, Joe, 474-338, while playing the appropriate NEWBIES. A second-round duel against Buffy also ended in his favor, with him playing PROTEASE and SLIDDEN, an apparent past-participle of SLID. He concluded his three-game mini winning streak by prevailing over Dennis, playing the seasonally-appropriate SKIABLE and the never-appropriate-because-it's-not-a-word DISHORT. Kind reminder to club members: if you don't mark your phonies with quotes, the stats-entering person gets very confused and upset.

Extra bonus tidbit: relative newcomer Joe Horowitz achieved the rare "bingo-bango-bongo-bungo" in his game against Bryan, playing SPARING, ENTAILS, TWINKLED, and DETAILER over four consecutive turns.

New bingos: EGOTIZES (Peter), AIRBASES (Gail), AIRSOME (Bryan). Buffy's nice find of CHUTNEYS was chosen as word of the week, for no other reason that that the writer is very hungry right now.