Believe it or not I finally went for a Scrabble tournament. Another tick of my list of things to do this year. And though I lost 3 out of 4 games (beginner lah...hehe)..I was still high at the end of the day. So high till I didn't mind waking MB up at 7am his time to go on and on about how my first two games were. Poor guy. Haha.
I expressed interest in the staff team 2 years ago but only this year the leader called us to tell us abt competitions. I was one of the newbies..never played in a competition before (does Inter Faculty Games count? Cos I got a silver for that when representing USP as an undergrad hehe). And talk about last min...K only told me on Thur that I shld play for the Public Service Games scrabble competition on Saturday...talk about being unprepared!!
My team mate MR actually knew many of the opponents since she's been to competitions before..like wow. The competitive Scrabble scene...amazing. There I was picturing a bunch of ppl only with my (mediocre) skills from my Literati days (Yahoo's version of the game). But these ppl are like HARDCORE. They memorise unheard of words...list after list...two letter words..three letter words...Z words...Q words..u name it, they know it. Yikes. I hadn't even memorised my short list when K gave me the 2007 list of updated words accepted by Collin's dictionary. Help my poor lil brain! Oh and surprisingly, there were many MEN and Malays (ok not being sexist or racist here..but just thought men would be more interested in like...chess..haha. and abt the Malay part..well...I guess I was just surprised to see they weren't a tiny minority.)
We had friendly opponents...I told my first opponent to be nice to me cos it was my first time...but he wasn't. sob sob. lol. (was hoping since MR knew him..he'd listen to her to be nice to me lol). Second game was really close and really a heartbreak...I was leading all the way with 2 bingo words then I opened up the board for my opponent to score 40 points on his 2nd last word. Ouch. So close..... My margin kept improving and that was really motivating. Won on the final game with a relatively easy opponent..I think they were there really just to have fun (or maybe just so that their organisation cld say they sent participants lol). My opponent was so heck care that she was just making tiny 3 letter words and not caring about winning (can't blame her..by that time we were all pretty tired and having headaches cos of the noise during breaks and well..we did have to use our brains on an early Sat morn haha). Actually we were both quite heck care till we were like taking our own sweet time, daring the other to challenge our words..no loss mah..we were only playing for the consolation prize haha. Anyway that was a pretty easy win for my team...and I guess that was what got us the consolation prize in our category ("losers" category lol). Yay anyway! :P
MR made me get up to get the prize..bleah..bullied for being the youngest in the team. I think I was one of the youngest in the whole competition in fact. So yeah, imagine playing against a bunch of Scrabble experts/veterans...it was scary at first, but really worth the experience. I'm really glad I went for it after wanting to try it for so long. Plus I came home with a (extremely yellow) CSC towel and t-shirt..even tho I'm not a civil servant...haha. It was pretty motivating when K emailed the whole team to congratulate us on our lil win..he even added good job since 2 out of 3 of us were beginners. Wee! Maybe next year we'll come home with a medal ;)
I expressed interest in the staff team 2 years ago but only this year the leader called us to tell us abt competitions. I was one of the newbies..never played in a competition before (does Inter Faculty Games count? Cos I got a silver for that when representing USP as an undergrad hehe). And talk about last min...K only told me on Thur that I shld play for the Public Service Games scrabble competition on Saturday...talk about being unprepared!!
My team mate MR actually knew many of the opponents since she's been to competitions before..like wow. The competitive Scrabble scene...amazing. There I was picturing a bunch of ppl only with my (mediocre) skills from my Literati days (Yahoo's version of the game). But these ppl are like HARDCORE. They memorise unheard of words...list after list...two letter words..three letter words...Z words...Q words..u name it, they know it. Yikes. I hadn't even memorised my short list when K gave me the 2007 list of updated words accepted by Collin's dictionary. Help my poor lil brain! Oh and surprisingly, there were many MEN and Malays (ok not being sexist or racist here..but just thought men would be more interested in like...chess..haha. and abt the Malay part..well...I guess I was just surprised to see they weren't a tiny minority.)
We had friendly opponents...I told my first opponent to be nice to me cos it was my first time...but he wasn't. sob sob. lol. (was hoping since MR knew him..he'd listen to her to be nice to me lol). Second game was really close and really a heartbreak...I was leading all the way with 2 bingo words then I opened up the board for my opponent to score 40 points on his 2nd last word. Ouch. So close..... My margin kept improving and that was really motivating. Won on the final game with a relatively easy opponent..I think they were there really just to have fun (or maybe just so that their organisation cld say they sent participants lol). My opponent was so heck care that she was just making tiny 3 letter words and not caring about winning (can't blame her..by that time we were all pretty tired and having headaches cos of the noise during breaks and well..we did have to use our brains on an early Sat morn haha). Actually we were both quite heck care till we were like taking our own sweet time, daring the other to challenge our words..no loss mah..we were only playing for the consolation prize haha. Anyway that was a pretty easy win for my team...and I guess that was what got us the consolation prize in our category ("losers" category lol). Yay anyway! :P
MR made me get up to get the prize..bleah..bullied for being the youngest in the team. I think I was one of the youngest in the whole competition in fact. So yeah, imagine playing against a bunch of Scrabble experts/veterans...it was scary at first, but really worth the experience. I'm really glad I went for it after wanting to try it for so long. Plus I came home with a (extremely yellow) CSC towel and t-shirt..even tho I'm not a civil servant...haha. It was pretty motivating when K emailed the whole team to congratulate us on our lil win..he even added good job since 2 out of 3 of us were beginners. Wee! Maybe next year we'll come home with a medal ;)
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