Are We Even Surprised that Thomas Reinke Went Undefeated?

1st Thomas Reinke easily toppled all opponents who dared to stand in his way, finishing with a dominant 5-0 +588 record. All of his games were successes, but the two greatest successes happened simultaneously as he defeated both Buffy Hogan and Dennis Lloyd in a two-on-one match that probably should have been expanded to four-on-one just to make things more fair. A 479-330 win over buffy saw Thomas get down MANDORLA, CRATONS, and SNAILED; that performance was echoed in a 496-274 victory against Dennis wherein Thomas played SCALENI, KERNITES, and WAGONER as his bingos. If one could find a flaw in Thomas' immaculate show of Scrabble supremacy, it would be that his eighteen-game streak of scoring over 400 was broken when he narrowly bested his brother Charles, 341-330. The unusually low-scoring game also broke Charles' streak of twelve such games. Each twin was allowed one and only one bingo: REJOICES for Charles, TONLETS for Thomas.

2nd Dave Kinzer enjoyed easily the best night of his currently short Scrabble career, playing three games without experiencing the disappointment of a loss and averaging 408 points per game while doing it. However, the entire night was almost derailed in the first round when Dave escaped with an uncomfortably close 387-386 victory versus Mary Becker. It was the only game where Dave went without a bingo, and Mary's GROWTHS for 85 points was almost too much to overcome. This close win was followed by a win with a significantly larger cushion, 423-295 against Sue Goldstein. Dave was aided by a high-scoring bingo of TALKERS for 83. To round out his night of perfection, Dave bested Susan Vergeront 415-328, thanks in part to a nice find of GENTEEL. Then, having nothing left to prove, Dave vanished into the night without giving another player a (probably futile) chance to disrupt his perfect record.

3rd Aaron Bader nudged up his roughly 66% winning percentage on the year with a 3-1 +270 record. He played the highest-scoring bingo of the night, a 116-point WASHUPS, in a 457-273 win against Gail Salm. When your bingos score that much, it's okay if that's the only one you get in the game. His most closely-fought contest (although it wasn't really all that close) came against Joe Horowitz, 451-386. Again, Aaron got only one bingo (ENCODES), but scored enough points in other ways to negate Joe's ARRESTER and GUITARS. Paradoxically, it was one of Aaron's two-bingo games that he lost: a matchup against Thomas Reinke ended unfavorably for Aaron, 486-349, despite his M-themed bingos of MORENESS and METRIST. Thomas had TADPOLE and REJOICED in response. The lifetime series between the two now stands at 13 wins for Thomas, 11 for Aaron.

Roughly a year after we started playing with the updated dictionary, three new bingos were played: TRANNIE (Charles), MANDORLA (Thomas), and RADIOES (Lynda). In the category of utterly pointless minutia, there were four bingos played containing a J after only three such bingos were played in the entire month of February.