I am holding ADEHNRV against Shah at club last night. Apparently I'm sort of in idle mode. Do-de-do, I'm thinking about the board, the rack, the lack of sevens on it. The lack of playable eights. But I'm doing it idly.

Okay, so I better play something before morning. There is a pretty decent scoring place for HAND. "ERV is not so bad a leave," I tell myself. "Hm, there's an open O on the board. An OVER word would score pretty well there."

Oh.

I play overhand, smoothly, like I'd seen it all along and was just looking for something better. As Bob Linn would say, "Would you rather play that or play the bingo?"

(In another game, SAG was on the board out in the open, and I was happily thinking of its hooks, happily greedily. But I "forgot" about the S hook. Excellent expert mind I had last night.)

I woke up with a headache, but that's not very interesting. The FUN thing is that my headache intruded on my dream enough that it converted regular advils into Scrabble tile advils, which my enthusiasm (and pain?) caused me to take six of.

Real life people at this point: my dream daughter said, "that's lame."

My real life husband said, when I told him about the dream advils: "Not a bingo then."

I've been playing a little bit of boggle again, in my "spare" time. It's good for me. For one thing, I remember where I came from in this Scrabble world. I didn't even know Scrabble existed way back then. I played with this person kablooey on word racer and this person bricap at tangle, and I didn't think ANYTHING of the fact that they also played that slow boring word game called Scrabble. Until I tried it, and I realized how amazing it was.

I remember going to my first club session. I had been accused of cheating at boggle, oh, a million times over the years. I was so used to it that when I played a "weird" word in my first real-life Scrabble game I kind of winced, thinking my opponent would accuse me of using a solver or something. Then I suddenly realized that it wasn't going to be like that in Scrabble EVER.

Boggle doesn't have complexity. It just has pure word finding. Word finding and word knowing. And I still have a fierce joyful fun when my brain heats up and I can see all the possibilities and I could care less whether it has complexity at that point. I just find the words.

The current official standings in the J and M Championship of the World: him 17, me 16. I would be more worried, but this is a best-of-36,500 series. I think my chances are still okay.

The series includes both TWL and Collins, home and club. Speed games don't go in the official standings.

His average score is higher than mine. I think that's because he's more pragmatic than I am. I'm slightly more likely to go for the gusto if I see a sliver of a chance at the end. Usually I find that the sliver is more like the glimmer of fool's gold.

**

Club yesterday was a blast. I won the coveted $3 prize for high word containing the letters G and H -- AND I won the $3 prize for last session's M and J word. $6 bucks, ladies and gentlemen. There's real money to be made in this game! I went 2 and 3. I have yet to dare to look at the scoresheets to see where things went wrong, although I already know I missed at least one nice endgame solution against K.C. K.C. gets solider and solider as time goes on. Watch out for her. Laura has decided to make Scrabble less of a priority in her life. Since then, she has been winning like a fiend. Hmph.

After the first three games, I went outside to take a phone call to discuss child custody stuff. This doesn't mean anything is wrong. When you are part of a parenting team with your ex-spouse, and when your child's situation doesn't fit the "normal and expected" custody formulas, you spend time on the phone. There's no way around it.

When I came back inside, I was: thirsty, hungry, sweaty, and hyper. I'm curious to see how my games were affected. I THINK I played more creatively than usual in those last two games. That's how it felt.

It's not just about strategic ability and word knowledge. Players are living creatures, not scrabble devices. The other stuff in their heads -- it matters.

So in one of my games, I am down by 80 after my opponent's play that has left one in the bag. I have tracked correctly, and I know that there is a blank still unseen to me, along with some other pretty stuff.

Here's where my opponent does something unusual. He shows me the tiles he drew, deliberately, one of which is the blank. He says something like "I was SURE you had it."

Now I'm looking at the situation. In the unseen pool are many outbingos. He's perfectly capable of finding any of them. If I don't KNOW he has the blank... ergh. I go through several iterations of "if I play this, he does this." Finally I just decide to be pragmatic and take out the lines. Spread matters, neh?

He says, after my play, "nice, you did block my bingo." The thing is -- I can't see what he's talking about. I mean, of all the possible combos, he has the one for which I couldn't find a solution. "See, I must suck," I say to myself. He plays, I play out, we tally up.

"You blocked ________," he says. "Hrm," I think. "I don't think that's a word," I think. "No one thinks that's a word," I think.

Later it occurs to me that if I had played without knowing he had the blank, I would have had a better spread than before I started the pragmatic sequence.

Even later I'm reminded that in my deliberations I had seen NO one-tile play that gave me anything remotely winnable. (Lexpert later confirms this.) So the pragmatic play was right anyway.

We are home from Baltimore. I had a great time. I wish I had won more games, to say the least, but I'm very glad we went, very glad to see friends we hadn't seen in a long time, glad to play real players in real games. I made mistakes, some excruciatingly crucial ones. I let several phony bingos stay on the board and didn't try any of my own. (In other words, I played a bit hesitantly, I think.) I have to risk more.

In the very first game against John O'Laughlin, I missed a couple of key plays, one of which would have blocked his very lovely SYNKARYA, which I had to learn the hard way (at the laptop judge) but which I will never forget! He smashed me by 300 points and went on to win the whole thing. Congrats to him, for sure. Somehow John (my John) and I BOTH missed the announcements that Saturday's start time had changed by an hour and forfeited our first games of the day. That was very horrible.

John (my John) had a very nice tournament after worrying that he didn't belong in that division. Sheesh, I say.

I got to play Kenji for the first time and didn't totally embarrass myself (although John came up after the game and pointed out the bingo I missed at the end).

I did totally embarrass myself against Sammy (in fact, I swore him to secrecy about it), but I will admit that the hideous error was basically blowing a C-stick. I could trot out the old "I was short on time and tired" blah blah blah, but I deserved to lose that one, pure and simple.

So I had a great time.

We're considering starting a DC SOWPODS League. Doesn't that sound like a superhero organization? Like tights and a cape should be required? Yes, I think so.