Recapping a weekend tournament in Vancouver, BC
It's always a special occasion when we get the chance to head north of the border and play a tournament with our friends in Vancouver. It's a beautiful city, with a vibrant local community of players, and there's always a weekend of spirited competition that awaits there. This weekend was absolutely no exception to any of the above.
This past Saturday and Sunday in Vancouver - well, in the suburb of Burnaby, to be precise - the CoCo and WGPO co-hosted a weekend tournament. Six CSW players, including three Vancouver locals and three visitors from nearby Washington, descended upon the Bonsor Recreation Complex, a cool super-venue that played host to everything from pickleball to youth soccer tournaments to chess clubs to our quaint little Scrabble event. All in all, we played 14 games of Scrabble over two days. It was fun to get out there and compete.
...although, if I'm being completely honest, it wasn't much of a competition, at least not for first place, anyway. We were all pretty much dominated from start to finish by Alec Sjöholm, whose name I'm making sure I spell correctly, umlaut and everything. Hell, after a performance like this, he's earned the right to any punctuation mark he wants. He can have an ampersand or a pound sign or a friggin' interrobang. Alec won 6.5 out of 8 games on the first day, then rattled off three more wins to start Sunday morning. I sat down to play him in round 12 and joked, "OK, sure, all I need to do to stop you now is blow you out three times in a row." This, dear reader, did not happen. Alec whomped me by 151 right away, and the race was over. The guy was Gibsonized with two rounds to play, having hardly broken a sweat.
That set up a race for second place, which promised to be a tight one between myself and Jesse Matthews. At the lunch break on Sunday, we were each 7-5 with very similar spreads, which put us in a situation where we'd play twice with a cash spot on the line. I was fortunate to squeak out hard-fought victories in both rounds 13 and 14, meaning I had captured second once the dust settled. It was Alec at 11.5 wins, then me at 9 and Jesse at 7 in the end.
Although, really, shoutouts are due to every single player who joined us in Vancouver this weekend. Let's give kudos to Alec, who annihilated us all and took home the title; to Jesse, whose performance this weekend prepared him for what's sure to be an epic week as the lead commentator at the Causeway Challenge in Bangkok; to Chris Williams, who took on the challenging double whammy of both directing this weekend and playing, and handled both with aplomb; to Eric Fox, who spent the weekend both at the Scrabble board and on his laptop creating a Scrabble lexicon for an obscure Native American language for some unknown reason; and to Abayomi Brown, who joined us this weekend for his first Scrabble tournament on North American soil - welcome!
It was an enjoyable weekend with an enjoyable crowd of humans. Thanks to Vancouver for being a great host city as always, and to the local Scrabble community there for making everyone, locals and intruders like me alike, feel welcome. I already can't wait to see everyone from the British Columbia gang again next time.