From: south@pop.dn.net (Charlie Southwell)
Date: Wed, 26 Nov 1997 18:12:54 -0500
Subject: Worldly Pleasures
Message-id: <v01540b01b0a256d513f2@[206.43.194.34]>

Some tournament notes:

I finally had the pleasure of meeting CGP-Meister Sherrie, as well as John Chew and Rich Baker. Congratulations and thanks to a great WSC team -- flawless word judging and between-rounds pairing from Paul, Rich, John, Rita and pinch-hitter JimK, and tireless everything from Laura Klein. Chew is a maniac in action: One hand burning up his Powerbook keyboard and the other shuffling scorecards while he's saying, "ZIFFIUS is good in OSW but not in OSPD." I think he was silently calculating pi to 6,000 places at the same time. Great to have on your team, but you feel like moss is growing on you by comparison.

Things generally went quite well, I thought, with the crowd being remarkably understanding about the necessary shift of a game from Saturday to Sunday. The food was very good, which goes a long way toward soothing the savage Scrabble breast. I do hope this was the last tourney of that size to be hand-paired after every round.

One aspect of the tournament structure that bothered me was the unvarying linearity of players' positioning at Tables 1 through 40.=7F=7F=7F=7F=7F=7F= Of course it makes sense to have the top performers competing in the limelight, and to be able to tell how well anyone is doing by where he's sitting, but it sure seems cold for those who are quickly sifted to the back of the room and stay there. They know far fewer contestants going in and often don't speak English well, and being ghettoized together doesn't help. I'm not sure what the fix might be, but they came farther and spent more to be here than most of the big names, and I hope something can be done next time to let them feel a bit more like part of the action.

Regrettably, I had so little free time that I could only torque a quick $15 out of Mr. Hill in one side game. But the old saying still holds: "Money won from Marlon is twice as sweet as money earned."

Out of all the exotic names that were called out every round, my favorite was Penny Downer. That's what we used to call a tab of bootleg Mexican phenobarbit=7Fa=7Fl.

All in all a great time, but I think I'll play in the next one -- if I can just remember where the hell I left those 150 rating points. . . .

Happy Thanksgiving --

Charlie