Not sure if I screwed this up.

So I'm playing a scrabolous game with Nate. He had just played JOG hanging over the bottom triple word:



I was holding ROASTED, which I saw I could play along the left to make STAG. But if I could bingo by hooking my S onto JOG instead then it would be a 100+ point play. I couldn't find an anagram, though, so I did this:



I think it's the first time I've been holding a playable bingo and not played it. And I burned my E,R, and S. My reasoning was: it was worth almost as much as the bingo would have been (60 vs. 66, if I recall); leaving JOGS open would risk most of my bingo points anyway if Nate was holding an S; and I could land my D on the double letter and leave myself with A and T on my rack.



And Nate makes a play on a whole different triple as I draw...another bingo!



Not a very valuable or safe one, admittedly. But still pretty lucky. I think I may have not made the best choice with DOERS, but since I lucked out and didn't get punished for it at all, I'm afraid it might encourage bad habits.

Update: I ran the board past Quackle. DOATERS and TROADES are both valid. None of the AIs recommended DOERS.

Update: Also since Quackle counts tiles for you, I noted that at the time I was deciding whether to play DOERS, I was holding the fourth and final S. You'd think I would have thought to count those since blocking JOGS was a big part of my calculus. I'm an idiot.

Noob of All Trades

I have non-baseball stuff I want to post. While there's no technical barrier to creating a "*n00b" blog for each of my new enthusiasms as they come up, I don't want to mess with my technorate scores and affect my ad rates.

So I've decided instead to embroaden the scope of this here blog to include any topic on which I am a clueless nooby. Which for the time being is probably going to be stuff related to Scrabble or comics or bikes or whatnot, and who knows what all else in the future!

For example, here's some crap I made for playing Scrabble, both PDF files: a score sheet, and a 2- and 3-letter word cheat sheet (from the SOWPODS word list). There are two per page, and they line up if you want to do a score sheet on one side and the cheat sheet on the other.

The score sheet is designed for two player games where each player records their rack for each move, folding the edge of the paper over to obscure the rack columns. That way you have a full record of a game played in real life, and can record it later in something like Quackle and have it tell you all the 100+ point bingos your stupid ass missed. It's great!