Recapping a weekend of 1-day tournaments in Seattle
We're in the midst of a whirlwind fall season of Scrabble, both for the CoCo as an organization and for Jennifer and myself personally. A week ago, we were on one coast, running a 1-day tournament in Virginia; now, we're on the other, and we just finished up a pair of 1-days here at home in Seattle. The action just keeps coming. We'll sleep when we're dead... or something like that.
Anyway, anticipation of death notwithstanding, we had a great time hosting a weekend of Scrabble and meals and other merriment with a group of players this weekend. We had 10 people join us for a 7-game tournament on Saturday, a different 10 for a second tournament on Sunday, and all sorts of fun times throughout. As always, the competition over the boards was fierce. Let's dive right into it.
On Saturday, the name of the game was trying to compete with top seed Alec Sjöholm, and we all largely struggled. Alec won his first game by 145 to open the tournament in first place, and from that moment on, we were all chasing him from behind. Conrad Bassett-Bouchard briefly snuck into the top spot after a big win in round 2, and Eric Fox grabbed first place in round 5, when he beat Alec head to head and moved to 4-1 with a better spread. But Alec would not be denied - he topped Bharath Balakrishnan 504-361 in the sixth game, then Conrad 488-450 in the deciding seventh. Meanwhile, Eric took a couple of late setbacks and moved back to the middle of the pack. The final standings saw Alec in first place at 6-1, Bharath 5-2, and Conrad in third place with the highest spread of the 4-3s.
Sunday brought a clean slate for everyone. We swapped out Conrad and myself, swapped in Jennifer and Walker Willingham, and everyone's records reset to 0-0. What happened next was... well, Alec started piling up wins again, but he wasn't the only one. Chris Grubb, Luke Yu, and Bharath all started 2-0 alongside Alec, and Chris pulled out a hard-fought 432-399 win against Alec head to head in round 3. After five rounds, there were four players at 4-1 - Alec, Chris, Luke, and a surging Ruth Hamilton. Alec beat Chris and Luke beat Ruth in the sixth game, setting up a showdown between Alec and Luke for all the marbles. It was a matchup of the top seed and defending champion and 2074-rated powerhouse against a high schooler playing his third-ever Scrabble tournament... but Luke pulled the upset! He landed a couple of bingos early, got out to a solid lead, and held on to win it all. By a 459-426 final score, it was Luke's game and Luke's tournament.
Congratulations to all of this weekend's winners - Alec, Bharath, Conrad, and class prize winner Luke on Saturday, plus Luke, Alec, Chris, and Ruth who captured the class prize on Sunday. And many thanks go out to everyone who attended, played, helped out around the house, gave people rides, picked up takeout for dinner, and so forth - the weekend was a total team effort. (And honestly, thanks most of all to everyone who helped me get dinner on the table on Friday night after I burned the ever-living @$%& out of my hand and was basically incapacitated for several hours. Y'all are the real MVPs.)
And of course... what happens next is, we look ahead to the next stop on our whirlwind fall Scrabble tour. It's almost time to head to Minneapolis! We've got a great field of 40ish players joining us for the North American Collins Championship (NACC), which unbelievably is almost upon us. The games get underway in 10 days. It's gonna be the biggest, baddest CSW-only event in the Western Hemisphere this year, and it's coming right up. We can't wait to see you all then.