1st Bryan Benwitz romped in the absence of a certain pair of high-scoring experts, going 4-0 +320. His first game was also his lowest-scoring, a 389-308 win against Gail Salm where he played the nice find of NITCHIE (its anagram, ICHNITE, also would have been a nice find). Gail had LIMNERS to even up the bingo count despite the loss. Bryan moved on to win a tough game against Dave Gilligan 436-394, again persevering through a game where his opponent got the same amount of bingos as he did (FISTULAE and DEXTERS for Bryan, AROINTS and STRIVED for Dave). Those skills of perseverence were put to the ultimate test in the next game against Betty Hasselkus, where Bryan was out-bingoed two (ORANGES, DEVOTION) to one (UNFRAMED) yet prevailed 413-385. This hardly shatters the conventional "bingoing is good" wisdom, but it does make one think, doesn't it? Bryan put a cap on his undefeated club session with a much larger margin of victory than his previous three games, beating Helen Flores 438-309 and playing DIPTERON and ENFORCE in the process.

2nd Aaron Bader went 3-1 +92 and scored above 400 in all his games, bringing his streak of consecutive 400-point games to...seven. He started off with a tight 441-436 victory over Mark Kenas. The fact that the played in the Collins dictionary was not apparent from their bingo lists, which contained only "conventional" words: ENIGMAS and WOORALI for Aaron vs. LENTOID and STOWAGE for Mark. Aaron then went up against Mark Kenas in round two, defeating him 487-375 thanks to bingos of ENTRANT and STOCCATI (which is not good in any dictionary except for "the dictionary of phonies that Aaron has played"). After that big win, Aaron squared off against Mark Kenas and again scored in the upper 400's, winning 477-452. However, this game was again marred by a total phony of FORECAT, to go with LOURIEST# (LOURY doesn't compare in our dictionary) and SQUALENE. Aaron went into the last round looking for the perfect 4-0, but was turned away from this goal by a rust-free Mark Kenas, 416-466. All this despite getting three bingos (NEUTRAL, RESPRANG, and TATSOIS) to Mark's single BEWHORING#.

Betty's TUTORAGE was picked as word of the week.