Recapping an absolutely ridiculous Hood River Open

This is one of those tournament recaps where I sit down at my desk to start writing and attempt to synthesize my thoughts into some sort of cohesive narrative that makes sense and just think to myself, "Dear God. I have no idea where to even begin."

It was a chaotic weekend of Scrabble, if I'm being completely honest with you. More chaotic than just about any I can remember. Mind you, this was our eighth annual Hood River, and we've been through a lot over these eight years - we've survived a couple of blizzards, an upheaval in North American Scrabble, and also that whole global pandemic thing. We've seen pretty much everything. But this one was something else.

I should probably start by saying that, to quote one of the great masterpiece works of American cinema, I wasn't even supposed to be here today. I was looking forward to a relatively chill weekend of directing and cooking meals until about 11 a.m. Friday, when I got word that a player was dropping out of the tournament and I would need to step in at the last minute and play. OK, cool. I've played a Scrabble tournament before. I know how to do that. This'll be fine.

Spoiler alert: It was not fine.

Sometime during breakfast on the first day, I started to realize I wasn't feeling well. Gradually, my condition got worse and worse over the course of the day, to the point where it was a struggle even to sit upright in a chair for rounds 7 and 8 in the late afternoon. Also gradually, it started to become clear that I wasn't the only one getting sick. Something was going around, and almost half the inhabitants of Panorama Lodge ended up contracting something over the weekend ranging from "mild discomfort" to "reenacting that scene from 'The Exorcist.'"

Anyway, amazingly, we all lived to tell the tale. And perhaps even more amazingly, we all finished the tournament. All 20 players completed all 20 games - a total of 200 battles over the boards throughout the weekend. It's a (perhaps weirdly obsessive) point of pride I have that every Hood River Open dating back to 2018 has been full to capacity and that every single game has been completed - all 1,600 of them. But indeed, that streak continued on in 2026. And if it survived this weekend, then crikey, it can survive just about anything.

So, about the actual Scrabble: Hood River played host to an amazing field of players for the eighth year running, and there was some incredibly high-level play despite, well, *gestures at everything*. There were some great games, including both closed-board tactical battles and big high-scoring slugfests. There were an insane number of 9-letter bingos played, including REAEDIFYE and INERRABLE and CITATIONS and ARCHAIZED and BIPINNATE and PURIFIERS and DIABOLIST and TERPENOID and NEOTEINIA and PARTNERED and SIBILATES and INHAULERS and HOMILETIC. (And not all of those nines were played by Travis Chaney! Only most of them!) We even saw a single-game score of 710 from Peter Armstrong, which is both an all-time Hood River record and an all-time Pete best (not to be confused with Pete Best, the ex-Beatles drummer).

As for the race to the title, it was a pretty epic one. The tournament, like several other Hood Rivers before it, started out as Dave Wiegand's tournament to lose - and for a while, it looked like there was no chance of him doing so. Dr. Bing had a record of 11-1 at the Sunday lunch break, and there appeared to be little suspense remaining except the race for second place. But Dave was taken down a few pegs on Sunday afternoon, as Travis, Puneet Sharma, Bharath Balakrishnan, and Erickson Smith all got the best of him. A few of the guys who were in that race for second place began making a run at first - most notably Chris Lipe, who finished Sunday with 11.5 wins in 16 games, putting him a half-game up as we entered the final day.

...except Lipe was sick as a dog, which set up an absolutely absurd scene on Monday morning. As if taking down Dave Wiegand to win a star-studded Scrabble tournament wasn't hard enough already, Chris would now need to do it while practically crumpled up into a ball all morning, doing everything in his power just not to die.

And yet somehow he... did exactly that. After losing a close one in round 17 (sorry Chris - the blank was in the bag, I kept HISS and drew an incredibly lucky SlIGHTS to bingo out), he rattled off back-to-back wins in the absolutely pivotal rounds 18 and 19 against Carson Ip and Gunther Jacobi, respectively. When I informed him after round 19 that he was Gibsonized as Hood River champion, he opined that his performance was pretty much exactly the same as Michael Jordan's famous "Flu Game" from the 1997 NBA Finals. I was in no position to disagree.

Congratulations to Chris, who I'm pretty sure is still alive to read this. It's his first Hood River victory, and he is the seventh unique person to win at least one HORO title. Chris wins a cool $800 and an (in my opinion) even cooler wood-burned plaque. Props are also due to our runners up - second-place Alec Sjöholm, third-place Chris Grubb, and fourth-place Erickson Smith. Last but not least, Carson Ip went 12-8 and took home the class prize.

Thanks to... well, absolutely everybody. It's always a team effort to make these tournaments work - housing and feeding and accommodating 20-25 people and all their needs for a weekend-long vacation is a huge collaborative undertaking, and that was especially true this year. With illness sweeping a large swath of the field, those who remained mostly able-bodied really stepped up and did a tremendous job keeping things afloat. Really every single person contributed, and that's no exaggeration. Special shout-outs are due to Chris Cheng and Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, who stepped up and cooked dinner for everybody while I was passed out cold on Saturday night. There were also many, many players who came in clutch and washed more than their share of dishes. The ones I remember best are Chris Grubb, Carson, and David Whitley (though I'm undoubtedly forgetting some people, and I sincerely apologize, but my excuse is the aforementioned fact that I was passed out a lot).

This was... to put it lightly, an absolutely ridiculous Hood River. We've put on 8 of these things now, and we've never had one like this. Not even close. Typically in this space, I write a recap and then I cap it off with some concluding sentence like "We already can't wait for Hood River #9!" ... but you know what? In this case, I think we can wait. Yeah, we can totally wait. I think I can speak for just about everyone when I say, for now, y'know, it's just good to get home and get some rest. Take it easy, everybody.