精神的に向上心のないものはばかだ

WSC Loss #6

2009-12-18T16:55:46Z

Round 18 vs drbing of the US. I've copied his notes and racks from his journal.

Play the game

That wraps up my nine WSC losses.

WSC Loss #9

2009-12-18T16:17:41Z

Round 23 against Craig Beevers of the UK. I make two extremely poor plays.

Play the game

WSC Loss #8

2009-12-11T15:06:18Z

Round 22 against Nigel Richards of New Zealand.

Play the game

WSC Loss #7

2009-12-10T20:01:14Z

Round 19 against Sherwin Rodrigues of India. (I'll come back to Loss #6 in Round 18 against drbing when he posts his version. I forgot what his second move was.)

Play the game

This seems like appropriate timing to announce that I'M GONNA PLAY iGate International IN JANUARY!!!!!!!!! I'm so excited!!!!!!!!!! HURRRRRRRRRRR

Sheets with which you highlight all of the # words in your Scrabble Friends and Family Dictionary

2009-12-10T19:58:58Z

Here are all of the British 2-9 letter words beginning with M, divided into which page they're on in the Collins Scrabble Dictionary Friends and Family Edition.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/scrabble/headwords/m.pdf

Let me know if you want the rest of the letters! Otherwise I will post them as I make them. I will post my scripts sometime too, or you can ask me to email them.

WSC Loss #5

2009-12-08T10:29:03Z

Round 15 against Nick Ball of the kinda United States. This was a great game except I blew major balls on one turn.

Play the game

WSC Loss #4

2009-12-07T04:37:45Z

Round 13 against Komol of Thailand. Big Miss #1!

Play the game

WSC Loss #3

2009-12-06T03:02:13Z

Round 4 against Jeff Grant of New Zealand.

Play the game

WSC Loss #2

2009-12-04T14:32:40Z

Round 2 against Michael Akonor of Ghana! He beeted# me so bad that I cannot remember what happened at the end of the game.

Play the game

World Scrabble Championship Losses

2009-12-03T18:01:14Z

Hi!

I'm going to post my World Scrabble Championship losses!

I played pretty well!

I can always play better so I look forward to the next one!

My first loss didn't take long to get to, it happened in round 1 against Ferdie!

Play the game -- Round 1 against Ferdie

Here are a few Quick Notes that make me look like a totally balling Collins player!

In the whole entire tournament I unsuccessfully challenged one British word, SPIRATED#, one American word, SEALABLE. I didn't accept any phonies.
In the last game of the tournament I played my best word it was TRICKLET# and it was natural through the R.
Excluding my penultimate game which was a complete disaster, in my losses, I missed no British bingos!

Oh noes!

In each of the two must-win games I lost late in the tournament, I made massive blunders by missing American sevens.

bring it!

2008-12-08T13:16:13Z

zero for four

jasonkb @ 2008-08-22T11:36:00

2008-08-22T15:37:26Z

I wrote a Master's thesis

jasonkb @ 2008-08-17T02:57:00

2008-08-17T08:00:00Z

1.6

Round 2 v Nigel at the 2007 WSC

I can't put into a blog entry what I want to say about Nigel. That's fitting, because it's entirely believable that he has never read a blog in his life. I'll try two sentences though. These two sentences have absolutely nothing to do with Scrabble. Nigel Richards: you are more awesome than any adjective. (hm, except STOCKPUNISHT#.) Nigel Richards: you are the man.

2.6

Looks like we left off before my first trip to a Scrabble club in March 2006. It was held in Oakland, at a dope family-run diner with nice grilled cheese sandwich. Cythia Pugsley directed (with Bruce Havens) and was mad nice to me. They were all so nice. I am very appreciative. Especially nurtural were Cythia, Mary Stevens, Irene Averell, and Isaac Apindi. In my first club game, I played eclaire* (unchllenged) and INEARTH. My oppo challenged INEARTH. All the while Cythia was kinda looking protectively at me, then after asked me who the creepy people staring at me through the window were. They were my parents.

The next month I played in my first tournament. You can check out my first NSA rating for a preview of how it went.

3.6

I can't quite say why, but remembering two things made me want to write about them.

I was frustrated and lonely in Japan; but I often succeeded in replacing that reality with contentness and motivation. It was raining. I put on swim trunks and took my bike out and biked around for an hour. Kyoto is a very nice place to bike. Biking in the rain is very nice. I had a nice bike; do you ever feel like, "hi 沙代, would see me now? If you could see me now, please tell me what you think awesome right!" On the way home, a sushi shop I had never noticed had a sign on the sidewalk that I almost ran into; I was like fuck you sign get out of the way OH MY GOD IT SAYS いなり寿司 FOR FUCKING CHEAP. It was a takeout sushi chain and today was their once-a-month inarizushi appreciation day. represent. I had saturated with water a half-hour ago so bewetted# their floor.

At Google's Mountain View campus, they have many free cafes. I had hit 14 of the 17, and had the three Crittenden ones yet to bag. I voyaged to the just-opened Pure Ingredient Cafe and got a thrilling meal. I remember particularly enjoying their juices that day. It was windy and there was a pianist playing in the nice courtyard. I sat in the nice courtyard and ate but something blew away and into a woman sitting alone a ways down on the same bench I was which was next to a pond-like piece. I guess I retrieved whatever blew away and said something about the wind! She smiled.

I finished eating. I went to get more food and ate somewhere else I could get a good view of the pianist, while going through emotions that would impel me to write about this lunchtime a year later on a blog. I had caught an eyeful of her Google badge and looked her up in Google's internal people directory and saw that she was a pretty new Googler in ads.

The story immediately jumps to a few weeks later. Leaving Cafe 150 with my group (statistical machine translation) I saw her entering the Cafe alone.

How often do people turn out to be exactly who you hoped they would be? By that point I no longer knew her name.

I don't like worrying about how people will comment, so I disabled comments. Boohai#! email is sweet, though.

Dear OSPD page 73,

2008-07-31T19:47:24Z

Fuck you.

Love,
Jason

Fives, Sevens, and Eights study sheets

2008-07-24T05:12:55Z

Here are my careworn Orlando preparation materials. Check out the fives.pdf, sevens.pdf, eights.pdf for printable study sheets. They are in playability order and include extensions; up to 3 letter extensions for the fives, and up to 7 letter extensions for sevens and eights.

http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/scrabble/study_sheets/

I highly recommend studying Scrabble words only while not on a computer. I think it's better for concentration and better for one's health.

Quackle 0.96

2008-07-23T08:06:45Z

http://quackle.org

Give it a go!

As part of its exhaustive testing, this new release did not pick my best play answer to my previous post, 1l (H)I.

Find the best play

2008-07-15T22:40:19Z

Find the best play, and define "best play" however you wish.

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated.php?u=1696#23

when I have AIIMRUY.

More speed games with olaugh

2007-09-12T05:54:27Z

5:00 minutes per side.

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=295
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=296
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=297
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=298
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=299
http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=300

Final tally:
jkb ola (score difference from quackle game from challenges or time)
386 499 (o+5)
455 445 (o+5, j+5)
547 419 (j+5)
363 453 ()
495 424 (j+31)
364 383 (j+19)

3-3 -13

jasonkb @ 2007-07-31T01:11:00

2007-07-31T09:04:31Z

1.5

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=89

olaugh and I play this Collins this weekend at cuthalion's house, with 2:30 per side. I finish with 1 second left, olaugh with 2. We taped it and will put a video on YouTube soon.

In one speed game that day, I played DRANTeD# and AUB(ER)GInE within 15 seconds of each other :-)

John played amazingly throughout. He was en fuego with Britishness. Some of his fastly# fielded fantasms included B(E)JaDING#, (W)OUBIT#, ZARN(E)C#, and FOOTRAS#.

2.5

I lost my OSPD4 today so I will briefly write about all of my past OSPDs.

My first Official Scrabble Player's Dictionary exposure was my family's First Edition OSPD during our coffee-table games. When I was young I couldn't really believe that such a dictionary existed so the oddity of it never had a chance to fully hit me. As I got into high school I would look into it to verify shit while we played the one or two games that we played a year. My last quibble with it was when I insisted that HANDER is a word, because it's one who hands. Now it is a word, but it's still not one who hands.

I bought a green OSPD at the same time I bought Everything Scrabble. I forgot it when my family took me on a week trip to see colleges in Southern California so we stopped at a Barnes and Noble near Cal Tech to buy another one so I wouldn't miss a week of reading it. I somehow lost that one a week later, and had already lost my first green OSPD before then, so I picked up another Identical Green OSPD #3 from the local Barnes and Noble.

This one lasted a long time. I was in my third year of high school and had a lot of down time on BART and at lunch time, so I always kept my OSPD in my backpack and pulled it out whenever I had time. I always started from a pseudorandom spot. At some point, I subconsciously realized that I was wasting a lot of time putting it into and out of my backpack, and that some days I was forgetting it, so I started storing it in the right pocket of my shorts where it was both quick-drawable and unforgettable. I didn't properly calculate the physical stresses that would be put on it in the pocket, however, and eventually it sheared in half. So I had two dictionary halves to cart around, and about 8 pages in the middle that had to be very carefully handled during pocket transferals.

During my first year at MIT I realized that I was rereading some pages for what legitimately felt like a double-digit-th time, so I started writing the words and alphagrams I had trouble remembering at the top of each page once I had thoroughly surveyed it. I finished most of pages by the time the OSPD3 became obsolete. I intended to cherish this rent dictionary for a long time, so it could be included in the Scrabble Hall of Fame when it opened, but at the beginning of my sophomore year I left it on a couch in a public lounge of my dorm and never saw it again.

My mother had gotten me a red OSPD4 after the Nationals that year. That one lasted me until today.

3.5

I was helped out greatly by Bin today, so I will start to finish up her story. She is the person I sat in the vicinity of during that crazy underground MIT tour I went on right before starting classes. Back then I was pretty naive when telling Chinese, Japanese, Korean, Vietnamese, and Thai people apart so I really couldn't tell. But I could tell her personality kicked ass and she was attractive. Anyway, I kept reading my dictionary during that story.

All the freshmen moved into the dorm rooms they'd be in for the summer and she ended up living on the same hall as me. I tried to smile at her as often as I could, and ended up looking at her more routinely than I should have. I guess she noticed, and we talked some, I aided with a physics problem or two, and one night some peepul were watching a movie in the same lounge in which my dictionary jolled its last words and she said I should watch too! I was unwilling to do so, for reasons that confuse me now, but I agreed to as long as I kept my alphagram sheets with me and could study while watching.

jasonkb @ 2007-07-27T03:32:00

2007-07-27T10:55:05Z

1.4

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=75

Brian kicks my ass in the penultimate round in Dallas this year. I made two large mistakes: I should have played UHLAN and (N)IDI. Still, I liked some parts: My opening exchange is perfect, and my E(EL) fish threatened NONROYAL and NONMORAL, which set up a big Z spot if I could draw ZA after my bingo. (And keeps the tiles to play ZOEA, but I never saw that possibility until Brian played it.) I should have stopped fishing after EEL because I started hemorrhaging spread, but I was extremely low on time.

2.4

After my brief observation of the Oakland tournament, I kept studying. I bought an OSPD and started reading random parts of it. I kept playing on playsite.com, then found isc.ro, and started playing on there. My first game was a 25 minute game against a helper, that I won by very much. I learned the AEINST and AEIRST stems using Lexpert, and also looked at a few tens of the most probable seven letter words. I remember AEOLIAN being the first obscure word that I was able to solve the alphagram of. That moment brought a lot of glee. I also kept studying my three-letter word list that had all hooks of twos. This list didn't have bad words because Everything Scrabble didn't have them. I did not realize this for a long time.

I went to the Oakland club some time in March.

3.4

書く気はない、ごめんな

jasonkb @ 2007-07-26T02:23:00

2007-07-26T10:31:06Z

1.3

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=73

Joey Mallick kicks my ass in round 9 in the Phoenix Nationals. I should have played REQUIN and WHUMP, but I like my correct endgame. In most of my games in Phoenix I made about one big and one medium mistake.

2.3

One day I visited the NSA website in earnest and noticed they had just started putting up a Word of the Day. As in, yesterday had featured the first word of the day. These were really the first crazy words I learned, and ALSIKE is definitely one of my most memorable words. This was also back in the day when Chew put in personal commentary for each word. Like, for TAHR, we got: "Notes: The tahrs are wild goats which form the genus Hemitragus. The only other words which end in -HR are BUHR, LEHR and KIESELGUHR, all of which take an -S." And for PUTSCH, "Notes: PUTSCH is one of only ten words which end in -SCH. The others are BORSCH, FLYSCH, HAMANTASCH, KIRSCH, KITSCH, (KAFFEE)KLATSCH, and (LUFT)MENSCH. The only back hooks possible with any of them are BORSCH-T and KITSCH-Y, since the plurals are mostly in -ES except for HAMANTASCHEN, LUFTMENSCHEN and MENSCHEN/MENSCHES."

I also saw on the tournament calendar that the upcoming March weekend in 2003 featured a one-day tournament in Oakland. That's like really close by! My dad and I stopped by on the way to pick up my mom, coming back from Japan, at Oakland airport.

Oakland tournaments were held in a family-run diner. When I entered, I saw a lot of people playing Scrabble. I found Lester, although I do not recall if I recognized him as Lester. I saw Lester play LENDABLE$ and draw a challenge. What an amazing level of play, and I had seen it in real life! It felt like I could never reach that ability, but it would certainly be lame to conclude so without making a try. I pretty quickly scampered out and onto the airport. I already knew I had a lot to learn, but more and more I was becoming excited to learn as much as I could.

3.3

I'd rather look up LUFTMENSCH right now than write down memories.

OED:
An impractical visionary.

1966 New Society 12 May 11/2 Americans, children of the soil, have become traders in air, advertising men, luftmenschen.

Oh. I started sending out a "jasonkb's nine-letter word of the day" to all residents who live on my hall in my dormitory. This was during the Spring semester of my freshman year. There are approximately forty people who live on my hall, a mix of 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th year undergraduates. That was a very bad semester, but this was certainly one thing I did right, because I picked some pretty dope words.

I wish I had a list of all of my nine-letter words of the day, but I managed to not keep track of any of them. They were pretty dope, and always included OED definition and citation. I probably sent out about 50 total. From the early days all I can recall are FRUITERER, CRAZYWEED, WHALEBONE, PERENNATE. I saw last week that fruiterer is breathtakingly used in an early chapter of The Great Gatsby.

That year I covered my (yellow) dorm room wall near my desk with interesting words that I didn't know that came up on jumbletime. They were abundant, I got up to about 1000 words written in permanent marker. One was WHITHERSOEVER, which I got to steal in anagrams from Trey when he visited for the NSSC. That was the high point of that semester.

jasonkb @ 2007-07-25T01:56:00

2007-07-25T09:46:59Z

1.2

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=71
Last round of Dover this January; the winner won the tournament. GEEZ is one of my most favorite plays I have ever made. I think about that decision when I'm down because it makes me happier.

2.2

I bought Everything Scrabble, and read the interesting parts. Edley talks about how to find high scoring plays, learn words, and get better. The real-life game positions part at the end really looked exciting so I saved it for the end. I wrote down all the three letter hooks I didn't know on index cards from the list in the back of that book. I guess I had learned the twos by then =P

I found rodzilla on games.com's Scrabble, and his userinfo said something like "National Scrabble Association: www.scrabbleassociation.com". I asked him if he worked for the NSA and somehow his answer confirmed my understanding that he was an NSA employee. I followed him around and observed his games whenever I could. He once played OILSEED and I thought that was brilliant.

I do not remember much from playing on games.com, except that I started out at the lower ranks of ratings on that site and gradually moved up. The only play I remember making was ERECTIL(E), where the E was from a horizontal word on row 8, and the game was about half way through and neither of us had played in the upper half of the board. (The board was like that crazy Logan-Kramer game for second place at a past Nationals.) It was the most self-describing play I have ever made.

I just remembered that I played Literati occasionally with my brother in the year before he got me Word Freak. He won all of our games by a large amount. The only rack I remember from that time was when I found a play that used all of my letters, except it was a wrong plural of OASIS. I rarely used all of my letters.

3.2

This section will get very boring if I stay chronological, or if I write about incidents and details I don't particularly care about.

The day before that game with Joey, Emily and I went to buy tickets for a Grizzly Bear and The Dirty Projectors concert. The family of one of the kids of the Scrabble team I coached once took me to this tasty Thai restaurant that is near Fenway. We ate there on the way because she likes Thai food. This made her two for two ordering pad thai at Thai restaurants. She's now four for four.

At the MFA, where the concert was eventually held, we learned they had just sold out tickets. Bummer.

We proceeded to the featured gallery of the day: lots of French fashion from top designers. She likes French things. There was some crazy shit; our most discussed selection was a set that made its models look like they just walked out of hell. Or something; that is probably not what I thought then, but that is all I can really say to describe how moresque these clothes were. They also had on them printed the date of the French revolution.

That night, after she napped, the MIT rink was open for skating, and we went skating. In circles, like most people think of when they think of going skating.

Skating in circles was really weird for lotsa reasons: I hadn't ice skated at all since I stopped playing hockey; I can count on one hand the number of times I've worn ice skates that were not goalie skates (Emily didn't understand how they could differ; goalie skates are really solid and have longer and flatter blades. To which she said, "like speed skates?", and I guess so. I then learned that her dad used to speed skate in Korea, which is ridiculous because speed skating is really cool); and skating in circles is two sea changes away from playing ice hockey goalie (first, you're skating at all, second, and then you're fucking skating in a circle).

I found a broken goalie stick on the bench next to the rink, and a puck on the goal outside the rink. Emily didn't want them. I took both home, slept, then went to that Scrabble tournament.

For continuity, Emily was the roommate of the anonymous Asian girl mentioned yesterday. I think Emily was sitting next to her that night, although apparently I did not really notice.

~Appendix~

Gallimaufry!

olaugh, your translation of the title as "Those who do not improve their hearts and minds are fools" is excellent. It is a puzzling sentence to me, however, in the context of its Soseki novel, Kokoro. Even if this utterance is utterly abstruse, the way in which Soseki describes its delivery is unmistakably powerful, and I like it.

I want to write about my life

2007-07-24T09:43:31Z

Daily Menu
~A Scrabble Game~
~About me and Scrabble~
~A trip through a memory~

1.1

http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated/annotated.php?u=66
This was the clinching game of the 2006 BAT. (Rod nicely gave me his racks, so they are correct.) I made a huge mistake when I played EVE at the end. I played very differently than I play Scrabble nowadays. My plays of ALULA and COW are stylistically very weird for me now. I remember I missed QUByTE, and maybe I missed more things. But this game is a special memory.

2.1

Just before my 16th birthday, my brother, who is now 26 and taking the New York Bar tomorrow, said that some journalist who wrote a book about tournament Scrabble came to give a talk about the book at the University of Pennsylvania. He sent me a copy of it for that birthday, which was 4 January 2003, and it arrived at the end of that month.

I let it bum around for a few days and I started reading. It was very good. I stayed up until 1 or 2 am, which then was quite late for me, reading. After I finished it that week I reread it, and when that was done I reread my favorite parts. Stefan wrote so that I could keep enjoying his moments and get caught up in him achieving his goals and making the most of his challenges. I started playing Scrabble on games.com because that's where a Google search must have taken me. I was not a good Scrabble player, and it took me a long time to bother to learn the two letter words; I found the NSA's NSC coverage before I learned them all. I know because I learned the shocking XU from seeing a picture of it on a Panupol Sujjayakorn board.

I was in my third year of high school, at Berkeley High School. After school I went to Barnes and Noble, and was extremely pleased to find a copy of Edley and Williams's Everything Scrabble. I started reading how to get better.

3.1

It was dark when flew into Massachusetts to go to school. Actually, it wasn't, but I didn't want to take a cab because I don't like spending money on them but my mom had told me to take one so I struck a deal with myself and allowed myself to be coerced into taking a group shuttle into town. I was the first one. It took forever to fill up. We got to Boston then MIT and it was dark. I wheeled my bags to my dorm and was shown to my room.

Aaron Bader emailed me the next day. Sherrie told him my email address and he suggested we go to the Lexington club together because I told Sherrie that I planned to go. I remember his email said that he wasn't at my level but that he'd like to play together with just me at MIT if I wouldn't mind. We coordinated and went to the club.

There was a very large roller coaster outside of my window during that week. I did not ride on it, but nevertheless, I was impressed. It was impressive.

I went on a tour of MIT's crazy places put on by a bunch of hackers. It includes rooftops and underground tunnels and storytelling. At one of the storytellings I sat next to a cute Asian girl. I read my dictionary while we waited for the story to start. I hoped she would notice and think this was cool?

~Appendix~

I have a long bike ride home every day, and I spend most of my time playing in my memories. During this time I wish that I would write the memorable ones down in a journal, but I never do! I hope I do now!