Serious Scrabble is practically equivalent to 100 meter run while sporting Scrabble is tantamount to a loping cross-country excursion. Each has its own preparation routine. Getting ready for rivalry requires gathering a broad information base of the multitude of changes of two and three-letter words and the variable word spellings changing things to action words and descriptors to modifiers generally under the tension cooker imperative of all-consuming eyes scrutinizing each subtlety for a defect or slip up and the pervasive clock shooting its direction through unremitting beating of its stop-go button for a terminal 25-minute rush to a careless completion. There is the ceaseless danger of the essential test that impels in excess of a modest piece of self-uncertainty about the unwavering quality of one’s own information base of reliable data, the pool of individual helpful jargon.
Then there is the stomach-agitating, awesome vulnerability of having the option to choose the spot on blend from the plenty of potential outcomes. It involves monitoring the quantity of accessible letters and presents the never-wanted yet consistently project lexicon essential choice to change existing tiles for the vulnerability taken care of at the expense of a valuable turn. However there is no assurance that the change will be gainful. The repetitive inquiry looms, Do I keep the conviction of what I have, or would it be a good idea for me to pick the vulnerability of what is behind entryway number three? Is the prize for this 25 minutes of distress worth the psychological misery, the nervousness, the convoluted path to a platform position in Dante’s serious Hellfire, and the pressure of potentially losing a round of scholarly vigorous exercise? Do we discard the chess-like clock; take out the reference books, and let neologisms and obsolescence’s dance energetically in my mind? I favor the tourist detour where I can comfortable scrutinize the leading body of 441 conceivable outcomes and gently play with the words previously played and dully re-scramble the assortment of commitments that wait in the domain of all prospects balanced on my rack.
I partake in the choice of requiring a commonly pleasant mid-day break of cold-pack chicken parts from Yak’s while conjuring better approaches to establish Z’s and X’s on quad esteem squares with a schedule as my main clock. We favor the social benefit of connecting with my cordial rival with delicate interrogatives like, Watch got now? Then she grins wanly and she shows me that her J, K, two D’s and Q without a U are challenging to merge with her two O’s. I solace her with the unfulfilling truth that everything she could manage with that wreck is DODO and DOJO, yet something different on the board could help. We share a leg and a wing each. She calmly changes her letters and I play ZEUGMA with the Z on a fourfold letter reward square and the M on a twofold word for a cool 96 places. Yet, her difference in letters earned her a Bingo worth 128 added to her generally huge aggregate. We were both cheerful.