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.