there's lots of things happening at each and every scrabble tourn...







Odkazy:

The 2011 Czech National Scrabble Championship

Kadaň, CZ, Sat-Sun Nov 26^th & 27^th 2011

 

 

Yippee – let's go! I have qualified for the championship, and remembering what a lot of fun it was a year ago when I qualified for the first time, I couldn't now wait. Last year I ended up 3 – 8 and 28^th of 32 – hopefully this was the fate of a newcomer – and oh well, among the qualified championship élite and this year I'm gonna aim higher! Although among this 32 best players, the qualified élite, even the last-but-one place is nothing to be ashamed of.

 

The only drawback to this year's championship was that the scrabble association hasn't gotten a contribution from Mattel this time. So we had to pay for accommodation, the co-organizer having asked for a substantial discount for us.

This co-organizer was an ardent player from the bottom of the chart – Viktor Hagenhofer, and we'd better call him the main organizer. His company, that's to say, sponsored this championship, proving it can as well be done without Mattel.

 

Kadaň being on the other side of the republic, though, I have to spend a night in Prague. Or maybe even two nights – one on the way back, too. It would have been possible to spend them right in Kadaň, of course – but that way I would have to pay even more for accommodation. I preferred to spend the night in Prague from where there's a nice train connection to Kadaň, and on top of that, my cousin is kindly going to put me up for both the night before and after the championship and we're gonna have an opportunity to spend some good time together.

 

We did, indeed – as always. But he took my breath away – as we were sitting in a pub drinking beer, it wasn't just one of those “beer chats” about little or nothing, or “shooting the shit” you are used to. Over the years, he's gained such a lot of experience, such a staggering overview of the current political situation in the world your eyes would pop at. He had his say and it made me glad I was able to contribute just here and there. But it just always fit – like a hand in a glove, he said.

 

He bore in his mind I had to get up early to reach Kadaň by noon when the participation check starts, but even so, we sort of didn't manage to get back from the pub in time, there being so much to discuss (I guess you've been there, eh... even without being there with us). But oh well, we did so by one AM, so there's at least five hours of sleep ahead of us.

 

So you can guess how surprised I was at first to hear the alarm clock five hours later. It's the time already, is it? I staggered out of the bed, splashed some cold water on my fucking face and brushed my teeth, having promised to my still half-sleeping body it could take a nap on the train in an hour. You're going to take part at the national championship, man! You've gotten qualified for the second time in your life, so seek to do better than last year!

 

Luckily I did manage to take a couple of hours of sleep on the train. And even more luckily I woke up JUST on time – to find out I'd better get right out! Kadaň-Prunéřov – hell, I'd almost miss it! Anyway, it's so strange to get off on the outskirts after 200 kms of one straight route and change trains for the last few kilometers to get downtown … a kind of local peculiarity :{)>

 

As the national championship is used to taking place a whole weekend, one of its advantages is that it doesn't begin until 1pm on Saturday. So we had time for dinner before that – but if we didn't talk that much, it was, as you might guess, just because of nervousness before the championship. We didn't have the slightest idea about the fact that we would make up for the lost fun during dinnertime the next day...

 

I was seeded at the last of 16 tables at last year's championship – probably as the championship newcomer – , today I am watching the first round match-up with astonishment: table #3 – against our team capo Pavel Žibřid!

 

I did the best thing I could before we began our game: I remembered what he said after our very first game at the club and before we last played against each other at a tourn, respectively: “You're a talent, indeed. You simply have to play in tournaments” and “at last a proper opponent.”

So let's not get intimidated – whether by his 9^th position on the chart or by his three bronzes from the past national championships. Or by the bingo he throws as early as in his fifth move. I get a blank in the meantime and seven turns later come up with a bingo too. The tile fairy obviously started to root in my favor since then. He set me up for a triple, which I took a full advantage of by playing čumy for 42, bookish for “snouts” – the dogs sure went the right way when sniffing for points! Pavel just bursts out laughing at the helpless situation. I win 324:434: it sure delights you to see yourself in the top five in the continuous ranking of the national championship, although we're only through the first round yet.

Although “only through the first round”, it was full of surprises! The tourn veteran Jana Vacková has just been beaten by the championship newcomer Jiří Matějček, qualified for the championship for the first time in his life, and what's more, last year's champ and the triple National Champ, the lucky ass and #2 on the chart Pavel Podbrdský has just gotten beaten by #3 on the chart Břeťa Basta. Serves him well!

Round #2: Martin Hrubý. Perfect! No doubt he's dangerous, qualified for the championship every year since 2006, but I have a positive 2 – 1 win – lose ratio against him so far so there's no way he could intimidate me.

After a series of 18 neck-and-neck moves, he uses a blank and sixtuples a 8-point Ď, which gives him 61 points. I, though, strike back with a pure bingo. Ths puts me in a 20-point lead, which I extend to a 40-point one later on. I win 378 – 339 which pushes me up to 4^th place in the continuous ranking. Being such a killer at the National Championship puts you in a state of ecstasy. “4^th @ the continuous raking after 2^nd round – greetings from the frog phantom killer Ribbit.” Mom laughs her ass off, while I get ready mentally for a killer 3^rd round opponent.

And here he comes. Michal Přikryl, is another newcomer to the championship – qualified for the first time. We all know, though, that qualifiacation for the Nationals is where he's long belonged.

The neck and neck run typical for national championships takes place, though, just for the first five turns of ours. Then an 80-point pure bingo neustálý comes to him all by itself without him having been working on it. Yeah, no doubt I'm holding a blank, but such shit to it that a bingo is something I can only dream of at the moment.

Then, though, he sets me up for a triple. The best I can hope for if I can't bingo, eh? I can get rid of both the awful accented U's – the five-point Ú and the four-point Ů – by playing súsků, a genitive plural of súsek, a kind of chest used for storing cereals. The only drawback to it being that I have to sacrifice the blank. Oh well.

“Nice,” he said, although – or because, eh – he's never seen the word before. “Let's challenge.”

“Should be a kind of chest used for cereals,” I hand the definition just so he knows I don't just cram words without knowing their meanings, like it's done in America.

“That's possible,” he responded with a tone that was saying '...but I'm gonna check it anyway.'.

Of course it was good. He, though, was too far ahead of me to catch up on already.

He wins 362 – 320, making me fall to the to the 6^th place of the 32 championship participants. Which, though, is still pretty good, so let's not lose our head. We'll take it out on the next opp!

Jiří Kamín. Yeah, the classic scrabble veteran who hates bingo players and who said that the didn't want to qualify for the championship this year. He did – for the eleventh time in his life – for the very reason that he didn't pursue the qualification desperately this time...

In spite of getting an X, he makes a bingo with it in his 7^th move, expertu, with a blank for the other E. Sometimes one can be glad for the seven inflection cases, eh? To the word EXPERT in Czech you can add an A, an E, an I, a U, a Y, or the endings -EM and -ŮM to make a valid word. However, I'm after him with a few fat moves, so soon he's busy getting rid of me again. This is not that easy though. We're neck and neck even at the brink of the end, so everything now depends on the endgame.

Jiří keeps thinking for the whole two minutes allowed for the move, which is not his style at all – as he himself said, he likes blitz scrabble. With this carefully thought-over move, though, he signs his death sentence. That's to say – he set me up exactly for going out on a triple. I win 343 – 321.

“Hm. Had I chosen the other plan, I would have won by a bit,” he frowns, congratulating me. Eighth at the continuous ranking of the national championship still looks pretty good, eh? That's where this win has kicked me to.

A first continuous statistics were printed out. I rejoiced upon seeing that I had a bigger sum of scores after the four rounds than Milan Kuděj, Katka's uncle and a triple national champ.

I shouldn't have rejoiced comparing my then results to his. I shouldn't even have given him a mere thought...

Yeah, you're right in guessing. I get Milan for my next opp and what follows is a lame game, one of those in which you can't do anything and get all the possible (and impossible, too) crap while your opp keeps lucky-assing. A primitive bingo coming all by itself to him as soon as in his fourth move is only the beginning. A beginning of a hopeless fox-and-hare chase which isn't worth losing a lot of words about. He kicks my ass 454 – 247 and confirms he's been there – there just are games in which all you can do is watch your opponent play. Which, indeed, was exactly this case.

Let's take it out on the next one. But first of course, there's a need to go next door for some yummies to wrap up my nerves.

I meet Katka Rusá on my way. She's just been through the game with Zbyněk Burda: she's won, but it didn't seem like a winning game for her since the very beginning; quite the contrary.

“I just thought I was meant to lose,” she laughs, “until that moment when I flashed the light into the hippo's eyes. Then the tables turned at once.”

This needs some elaboration, I guess. What light? What hippo? Well, that was so: you sure remember the “pygmy hippo affair” when there was this strong disapproval over the scrabble invalidity of the word hrošík, which is, for one thing, a part of the scientific name for the pygmy hippo – hrošík liberijský – and, for another, a diminutive of the noun hroch, “hippo”. Well, but the dictionary sources are dictionary sources, and so hrošík has remained an invalid word in spite of being a zoological term. Like did, for example, hydrošok, “hydroshock”, in spite of being a term too...

And so this made Zbyněk get himself a talisman of this kind – a little plastic hippo to bring him luck at scrabble tournaments. Now, Viktor, besides sponsoring the whole championship this year, had these topic-related pens made, in which there are little light bulbs installed. Which Katka “misuses” masterly by flashing it into the hippo's eyes...

“He then complained that I enchanted his hippo,” Katka guffaws, “by flashing the light into its eyes. And so I say, ‘try flashing the light into its ass’...”

“What's wrong with Thirst?” she wonders. Thirst being Pavel Žibřid's nickname, coming from the first syllable of his surname (the Czech for thirst being žízeň, or colloquially žíža, the latter being used as his nickname) – indeed, at the end of the fifth round, he hadn't had more than one win.

“He's been playing like a fool,” Zbyněk Burda grins.

“He's gotta do better, else he's worsening my Buchholz criterion.” Katka knows her way through the mathematical trivia of tournament ranking cold...

My sixth opp, and last for today, is “The Old Shrew”, Milena Filipová. After six championship games I was already done in and quite satisfied with my current 16^th place in the continuous ranking, but with her you always know it's gonna be a hard fight.

Phew, I didn't know it was going to be that hard. I get a blank and throw a bingo for 71 in my 11^th move: what for? Only to be chased again by Milena shortly after. We're pushing it hard until the very end, and indicating how fucking close the game is, onlookers start gathering behind our backs, recruiting of those championship-qualified players who have already finished their games in this round.

Now, guess what I've drawn. Guess what! At the bottom of the bag. Crap, you expect? Right, that's how it usually goes. But now – could you believe it – the other blank!!! Of course I have the kind of letters to it that make you unable to go out within one single move, but let's hope we're gonna make it in two. Don't you dare go out!

I've managed to get rid of all the high-point crap towards the end. As I said, the two blanks I drew accompanied a highly incompatible bunch of letters, so I just got rid of the high-value ones.

And no, she didn't go out.

I win! The most lamely you can imagine – by one point with both blanks but what the hell, every win counts – and especially at the championship! 365 – 366.

“I can only blame myself for the loss,” she relieves my lame feeling for winning by one point thanks to both blanks. “I should have gone out in two steps.” Oh well, but you never know...

 

I bump into Zbyněk Burda. He's grinning like he's got something to say.

“I had such horrible letters at the beginning [of this past round]. Still, I played TAX for 32, getting solemnly into the lead. We went on down the board, until I played this yv [plural genitive of yva, IVY], ví [“knows”], and víz [genitive of VISA], with Z behind the triple word. I say to myself, Z as a second letter [for a triple triple], such a difficult position... [and he still played] ozvučené [“with sound added”] for 203! But – a pure one! He had 550 [total points] and I didn't even have 300 … I'm gonna be the biggest fool [of the tourn] with the biggest difference [between the player pairs game scores]. To top it, he then got both blanks...”

 

Now guess what. I've just afforded this lame win by one point with both blanks, which sprang me up to 11^th place of the 32 people qualified in the continuous ranking of the championship. Who do I get? Martin Kuča...! In the eyes of many of us the best Czech scrabble player ever, the 2008 national champ and a fivetuple runner-up.

Oh well. The best games are against those you don't even expect to win against. Indeed. After five turns he leads 126 – 60 without any particular effort. I've been working on a bingo, duh. But I didn't know he had gotten both blanks in the meantime. So before I play mine, he comes up with one of his and thus even after I shoot my bingo he's still ahead by 50. The art of someone many of us consider the best Czech scrabble player consists in beating you in a way that you don't even notice you're getting beaten, slowly but steadily. At the end of the game he's already killing me by a hundred. No doubt he's had both blanks, but in his case you can be sure that this is not what decided the game. And you can be glad for being killed only by not even 100 – like in my case, 326 – 432.

 

This being the end of the first day of the championship, I say to myself I can be satisfied with my continuous ranking of 16^th – JUST halfway through. Good – at least to round up the first day with.

 

I'm rooming with Radek Mannheim this time. If you think this is an improvement in comparison with last year's championship when I was assigned Zbyněk Burda to share the hotel room with, you're badly mistaken.

“Make sure you read something on the sleep apnea syndrome,” he had told me before while chatting with me during an online scrabble game. A worse snoring caliber than Zbyněk, eh? God forbid.

 

We go and have a beer together in a nearby restaurant. As we chat, Radek browses through the menu. He finds an ice-cream cup called “Hot Love”.

“Let's have that one,” he suggests.

“Now, after having a beer?”

“Why not?”

 

I sort of do have a tooth for it, after all. But when the waitress comes, Radek acts like it had all been my idea, the naughty one: “My colleague here would like a Hot Love.”

When the ice-cream cup is brought, I suppose he's gonna wanna try a bite. He didn't.

“So, like, you order me something, let me pay for it myself, and in the end don't even want a bit?”

I grin.

“No, but I'm gonna order you one more,” he laughs.

Haha. Just try.

As I dip the teaspoon into the ice-cream hill, a creek of hot raspberry juice springs out.

“Hot Love... hm, the poor virgin,” I can't not comment the obvious association the raspberry juice creek evoked in me along with the name of the cup.

“You're a beast,” Radek laughs his ass off.

 

We agree it's necessary to go to bed by midnight. We do, and in the morning we manage a coffee before going. The championship is almost around the corner after all.

When we are leaving the next morning, the receptionist, while doing the checkout, routinely makes us pay. As she leans forward to the counter, you can easily see all the secrets her bra was hiding. Her breasts are small but beautiful and enough to excite you, along with her pretty face and petite body. I had to gather all my will to keep me from getting a hard-on right in front of her. I didn't but she turned me on enough so that I actually paid – completely forgetting that I had already paid the day before. I actually wondered how little money I had left – but under the spell of excitement I didn't even chance upon the idea that I could have already paid before. Luckily, she quickly found out and told me so.

Madam, we're checking out. Can I check out your breasts, too?

We quickly make off. See, I don't want to hear her adding something like “I'm sorry sir, there's a fine for jacking off in the shower” and want the CZK 300 back... ha, I'm kidding, but anyway, we have to arrive by 8.25 so it's just about time we left.

 

We do arrive on time. Soon the match-ups are printed out and pinned up, only to make us all shocked: the number of players being suddenly odd, there's the so-called BYE ascribed to the player at the last table. (Not to mean, of course, that the player should leave the tournament – BYE is just a way of denoting the odd player, usually the one with the worst current performance at a certain point of the tourn.)

This means one obvious thing – one of us must have overslept or simply not arrived for whatever other reason, which has never happened yet throughout the whole Czech scrabble championship history.

“Who hasn't arrived?” I ask the pressing question.

“Guess who? The drunkard,” I get the answer straightaway. They mean Ivo Hradský – you remember him coming drunk to several tourns in the past, and now, probably he had been burning all the past night long and he's “overslept”, or overshot the mark a bit...

 

With regards to the odd number of players, the match-ups have to be remade, too. So as soon as I've prepared myself mentally for Hana Filipová, I can forget about it – I get Petr Landa instead.

I've beaten this ardent top player, who's as high as 6^th on the Chart, several times already, but needless to say, as you can see from his chart position, too, the number of tourn games you've won against such people doesn't really help you take it easier when it comes to playing them, not even when you have a positive win – lose ratio with them like I have now with him (3:2).

Phew, such a straining neck-and-neck game right in the morning! Chasing each other with point blows, racking our brains over the racks; no fun, no quips, no jokes. A sip of coffee from time to time.

I come up with a 35-point ďul in my 11^th move, the plural genitive of ďula or dyula – an African language. “Hm, well, now I'm shit outta luck,” Petr grumbles. Too early for such judgments, I guess – and I tell him so.

Indeed. Three turns later, he comes up with a bingo.

“Told ya it was too early for judgments,” I say.

“Well, couldn't see it at all at first. Made it out of total squat,” he tells me with relief.

I can't catch up on this anymore. I lose 372 – 325, falling to 19^th in the continuous ranking. At the championship, the usual comfort after losing a game doesn't work – that is, the one that you would get a weaker opponent. Here at the championship, you always get a killer no matter how good or bad you're doing. It's only that you get a bigger killer after you win.

And so do I now, too – Martin Vacek, the Praguean scrabble veteran who has attended just about every tourn since 2000 and qualified for every championship since that year.

“Good morning, Mr. Doctor,” he sneers. As the grin I show back shows lack of understanding and signs of being perplexed, he adds: “You're that doctor of Romance studies, aren't you?”

Most Czech doctoral degrees, that is to say, are four-letter and end in Dr., wherefore my surname looks like one, too. Why Romance studies? That's because of the first two letters of the surname of mine, duh...

If my game against Petr Landa was a neck-and-neck one, this one against Martin was genuinely that. When I got a blank and composed a bingo in my 8^th move, milujme with the blank for the U, a 1^st person plural imperative of to love, he was right back threatening me again. Let's love this kind of games!

Towards the end of the game, when I still think I have it under control, I realize at a glance at Martin's score sheet that our records differ.

 

Without having to tell him, I quickly check my sheet for a miscount and unfortunately discover one on my side. Ouch. I got ten points less. And I thought I had you nailed.

Ya remember when an opponent was in my current shoes? Yeah, Tomáš Fanta at the tourn in Babice. He, though, then didn't discover his miscount until after the end of the game. I did mine early now, so I guess there's at least something I can still do about it.

I do what I can. I can't go out though, and he does when the score stands even and I have one tile left in my rack. Thanks to this one fucking tile, he wins by two fucking points … 360 – 362.

“At least a good neck-and-neck game,” I say, congratulating him.

“My previous opponent told me so as well,” he grins. “But from a defeated opponent it sounds frank at least.” Indeed – he lost his previous one by two points for a change, against Věrka Majtánová.

 

“As you have noticed,” Petr Kuča, the main referee of the championship, the IT manager's husband and the 2008 National Champ Martin Kuča's father, has his say to us all, “The BYE has entered the championship, as Mr Hradský has not arrived to finish the championship. It is going to stay so until the end, because even if he came, he wouldn't be allowed to play here today any more anyway.”

 

Again: what I said just a while ago confirms now. You lose to Vacek, and still, get Martin Daněk to play against in the next round – the 2001 National Champ.

The best games are those you don't even hope to win: you stay completely relaxed and calm while playing, and so, paradoxically enough, this often causes you to stand tall to your opponent.

He starts the game, to which I respond by playing a “welcoming” bingo. The pure nejídati, an infinitive of “not to be used to eating”, gives me 62 points, but Martin doesn't let me enjoy my lead for long – he bingos back with pozdvihů for 64. A pozdvih is when you lift something up, but still it sounds peculiar enough for me to challenge – just in case. Martin says he would, too, if he were in my position.

It comes back good, and so I didn't enjoy my lead from playing a bingo for very long indeed. This was just the beginning, though. A beginning of a long neck and neck run. When I start getting some 20 points behind at around the 10^th turn, it's only so I can be right back with three fat 30-ish moves which put me neck and neck with him again. Until the very end of the game! When I go out in my 14^th move, our scores stand at 365 – 365.

His girlfriend and a top player herself, Iveta Vondrátová, comes to our table to complain, having finished her game earlier.

“My opp played a bingo in his very first move,” she grins.

“So did mine,” he blurted out concisely. As she glances at his score sheet, she knows that he is probably not going to be very talkative now.

Martin is the kind of man you would call a “scientist” by sight. Tall, slim and clean-shaven computer programmer with glasses and sharp face features, the sharpness underlined by an broad, hooked nose and a strict look you would hardly ever see smile, especially not when there's no reason. Which there's surely not at this moment from his point of view...

“One,” he utters when showing his leftover, to denote it's worth one point. A single one-point tile causing him now to lose by two.

“364 – 366, right?” I check.

“Yeah. Congrats.” He confesses a tactical flaw towards the end.

Yippee! The loss to Vacek was sure worth beating Daněk now. 19^th in the continuous ranking before the last round, I say to myself, it would be nice to push it into the first half. But let's go outside first to take a breath of some fresh air.

Ivo Hradský arrives. Yeah, he does...! He apparently overslept a bit, eh... as Petr Kuča said, he§s not going to be allowed to play in the last round anyway.

When I come back from outside at the brink of the beginning of the last round, Dana the IT manager calls me up.

“You put your carbon paper the wrong side up in the previous round,” she says. When I come home, I find a kind gesture from her in my mailbox – she's scanned the 10^th round score sheet records of my game for me. Sure a delight to have a living proof of such a game ending in such a scalp...!

Last round before the final ones to which only the two best players are going to be allowed. Michal Sikora. Owww. The 2004 National Champ and a feared-of bingo thrower my age, a student of sinology (not to mean the science of sins) at a university who regularly qualifies for the championship every year since 2000 and is currently #9 on the Czech Scrabble Association chart.

What do you think – yeah, he gets a blank right in his second or even very first move and plays a bingo in his third. Luckily I'm already used to this so I don't let this sicken me, while I'm getting together one of mine. I come up with it no as soon as two turns later, after hesitating for a good minute between letenská and netleská. Netleská is one of those bingos Zbyněk Burda calls “primitive” beacause of its being a common negative verb, a 3^rd person singular present tense of not to clap. Not only would it be primitive but on top of that it would also end in front of a triple column (luckily not in front of the triple itself). But compared to letenská, a feminine geographic adjective of a Prague suburb called Letná, netleská has this one big advantage – it's 100% valid. Letenská – well, I'm almost sure, but it could be one of those damned exceptions, or not be included in the dictionary sources for whatever reasons, etc.

And so I go for netleská, getting 70 points and neck and neck with him. According to these 1000% reliable Murphy's laws, I know he's now gonna get a 4-point Š to extend it with and put something downwards on the triple at the same time.

Of course! Of course he does get it. My lead is up and gone in a minute and we start the even-chance fight practically all over again. I come up with another bingo in my 9^th move. This puts me in an about 30-point lead. I seek hard to keep it and so I keep blocking all possible spots where he could play a bingo or even a promising move. Don't get me wrong – mucking up ALL such spots is a hell of a job, too! Especially in games against him – he being a bingo thrower, he likes wide open games, so wide open that in Czech scrabble world they even gained a nickname. “The Sikora harakiri”, hinting at Michal's degree in japanology and sinology.

I did manage to block most of them, but as it seems, he's not after a bingo anymore. He tries to shrink my lead instead, quite understandingly. Even at the brink of the end, the scores are quite close, but not so close as to make me afraid of him catching me. If I go out now, I should still win by about ten. Yeahhh! 383 – 374. Beating a former national champ is always a delight, eh? Especially if he's a #7 on the Chart.

I was looking forward to the place I leaped to by means of this nice win, now at the end of the Championship. The ranking, though, I was told by the referee, is to be kept a secret for us all until the end of the final round of the finals, where the top two players of the championship are going to fight each other for the 2011 Czech Scrabble Champion title.

“Don't be so impatient,” he tells me. Okay – if it were just for a piece of info of whether I've made it into the first half!

Now, who do you think has gotten into the finals?

The current #2 on the Chart, Pavel Podbrdský, a triple national champ. That's not much of a surprise. But to stand tall to him – the 2003 Championess Katka Rusá, whom I had spotted for this year's Champion, although she said this was a bit of a courageous spot as she originally was on the brink of not even qualifying, and anyway, she doesn't enjoy the game anymore. But I wished she would make it – she'd sure deserve it. Unlike Pavel, who, as you remember, won last year's Champ title thanks to being fucking lucky in the final rounds.

But before the final rounds we're going to have dinner. I'm dining with Věrka Majtánová, Martin Kapler, and Jarda Buksa, which turns out to be hazardous, as old Jarda is apparently in a philosophical kind of mood:

“It's a beautiful life. It's a wonderful world. It's just this scrabble that's ffffucccked uppp....”

We burst out laughing, while Věrka, who unfortunately had a mouthful of dinner before that, almost chokes. The conversation turns to chess and comparing it to scrabble: there is no element of luck, but as it turns out of the discussion, it's just a matter of memory.

“Such a thing as marathon,” Martin Kapler pipes in, inspired by memory being mentioned, “seems fair to me. Hardly any marathon runner runs the marathon race for himself in advance.”

“Chess pissed me off more and more. That's why I turned to scrabble,”says Jarda, a 61-year-old receptionist, who hopes to be able to win a few more championship bronzes before he retires.

 

The playing room is rearranged for us like a little “movie theater” – the chairs are put into several rows in front of a screen to which the final rounds are to be transmitted. The ones who think Pavel is gonna win tease us who believe Katka is.

“I'd be glad for Katka to win the title too,” says Věrka Majtánová who has ended up with seven wins. “But we both know this is rather just a wishful thinking.”

Are you kidding? Of course it's not.

Nothing, and not even what Věrka has just said in spite of being Katka's good friend just like I am, is going to shake my unshakable belief in Katka's win.

The board is stuck to the table with a glue in the room where they are going to play so it's not moving while the final games are being recorded.

The biggest shot on the screen records the games, and two smaller shots do the finals players' racks. Beside them you can see score sheets. Almost everything's solved and ready, but –

“How are we going to know whose rack is whose?” somebody rightly asks.

Whereupon Luboš Vencl, who, quite like Pavel Žibřid, has bombed out this time, having only three wins, pipes in, laughing, with a solving suggestion: “Look, you're gonna know according to their fingernails.”

Indeed! We can't help laughing too on acknowledging he's right: Katka's black nail enamel is something distinctive enough to prevent us from mistaking the racks for each other.

 

For the first five turns, both Katka and Pavel get comparably awful crap. They cope with it the way tip of the top players do, before guess what happens. Yeah – it wouldn't have been Pavel, the lucky ass, if he hadn't drawn a pure bingo right out of the bag without any preparation. He even has a choice between vodnice – a colloquial expression for a water pipe – and doceniv, an ancient past participle of “to fully realize”. We spectators burst out laughing. After playing the bingo – he chooses doceniv – he gets away with a word a few of us (including me of course, ha...) damn straight away as invalid. The IT managers check it and it's plain to see we are right.

Katka just keeps cool and plays as best as she can – she was one of those who spotted Pavel for this year's champion, and now she fights him in the final rounds. Now it's her turn to get bingo-prone letters. I myself see two bingos she could play. She, though, goes for a completely different one – folks, a triple triple!!! Hodívalo, with a blank for the í. Something hardly anyone would think of: an imperfective past form of to suit [someone]. A triple triple always suits anyone, eh? Except the opponent...

Pavel challenges – duh. It's good. A hundred and thirty-one points! We want to give Katka a big hand and are told we can (but I guess she can't her it over there in the final rounds room anyway). She gets forty points ahead thanks to this. Pavel plays a beautiful bingo hardly anyone would think of either – pýchnul indeed spelt with a ý, pýchnout being a bookish ecpression for “to blow” or even better “to gust”. Katka bingos back with nevrknou, a 3^rd person plural future of not to [utter a] coo.

“This is what a proper scrabble swing looks like,” Katka's uncle and a triple national champ Milan Kuděj laughs.

Thanks to her last bingo, Katka wins the first final game 366 – 436. This first game of the final round didn't even take half an hour.

 

She appears for awhile among the rest of the championship-qualified people; we congratulate her for this awesome game of hers. One more scalp of Pavel the Lucky Ass, and she's gonna be a double national champ! Of course chances are that Pavel would win the next two – but that would be a cruel game of Murphy's law, eh...

 

The second final game. Katka goes first, which is surely not a blessing with CDGSŠÚV. She plays the obvious ŠÚS, a direct downhill skiing technique, for 20, and draws ŘTL.

“Some might find it weird, but if I were Katka, I'd swap tiles,” says 1670-rated Martin Hrubý (not the famous Czech poker star – just happens to bear thewho ended up 22^th with a 5 – 6 balance.

And she does, indeed, turning in all seven.

“She didn't even keep a single Ň,” somebody cracked. Some of us who sit near enough to hear that let a laugh at it. She didn't have a Ň on her rack, duh, but, “not a single Ň”, or the onomatopoeic “ani Ň” in Czech is simply a metaphor for “not even a tiny bit” and the cracker just took this idiom literally. In the meantime, Pavel plays a 25-point move. He didn't even once have to change tiles. The lucky ass.

“If [Katka] had had a M instead of the Y, she could play pébrinám,” Martin Hrubý makes our jaws fall with one of the tons of weird words he's learned. Once I caught him whipping various minerals into the electronic scrabble dictionary, and as each and every of them came back good, I asked then whether he had studied mineralogy or what. “No,” he says, “I've studied the scrabble science.”

Dana Kučová the IT manager was damned right when she said we – Martin and me – where the two biggest scrabble freaks...

But hey, now Katka starts pushing. She draws a blank and is evidently about to make up for the lost lead (and even for the lost iron). She sets up SE?YÁNI and there being a free P on the board, it's obvious that she's aiming at sesypáni – a 1^st person plural passive of to scatter together. The IT manager's daughter, rather jocularly, checks the validity sexypáni* – like “sexy gentlemen”, but that would of course be written as two separate words.

In her next two moves, we discover even better ones than she plays – by about two points each – but we agree on the fact that sitting there, in the final rounds of the finals, against the biggest lucky ass ever, we would be able to see anything at all.

As of now, they're still neck and neck: 185 – 184. 209 – 208 after the next. Katka still leads by one point, getting an X.

“If she had an O, she could have exostery.” Who said that? Of course, Martin Hrubý. The walking talking scrabble dictionary. Pavel Žibřid laughs – he has never needed to cram the dictionary for his three bronze championship medals. Not that Martin did, either – he just does so out of scrabble eagerness.

Believe that – Pavel Podbrdský is swapping letters! Well, but you know what his swapping looks like. Remember that moment when, in a game against me, he swapped three times to get three times exactly what he wanted – the rest of a pure bingo?

Luckily this doesn't happen now. If he was fucking lucky last time in the final round of the Finals, now, against Katka's scrabble art, he's lost. Now it's her time to get a piece of deserved good luck. After an exchange, she gets DIKLOV? – a rack she could get easy bingos from, like kladivo (a hammer) with a blank for an A, or odvykli with a blank for the Y, a 3^rd person plural past tense of “to unlearn”, “to disaccustom”, or even odlivka, a piece of chemical dishes, with a blank for the A again. She chooses the middle one. And what about Pavel and the bingos he is used to drawing as wholes right from the sack? Of course he does have one. Luckily for Katka, he has nowhere to put it.

“I'm surprised that he just draws the whole thing,” Martin can't help remarking. You bet – everyone is! But now he's shit out of luck, and his drawing whole bingos out of the bag isn't going to help him.

Katka plays one more move we can see a one-point better version of, but on the other hand, she gets rid of a seven-point Ť. Yes, yesss – she wins again – this time by seven points only but, at a staggering score on both sides – 402 – 395!

 

“Kateřina Rusá becomes the winner again and the 2011 Czech scrabble champion,” goes the final result announcement. Beating an opponent she herself proclaimed impossible to compete with, she confirmed her 2003 scrabble champ title. She's the only Czech female scrabble champion – now a double one.

Everyone is positively shocked: I'm positive too, but not shocked – I knew it from the beginning, duh. I knew she was gonna make it, and I didn't doubt it even for a second. In my scrabble championship profile, I was the only one who spotted her for the title, and I turned out to be right. She gets heartfelt hugs and ever a few kisses from us all. Great job!

“Next time, we'll ask you who the winner will be,” Luboš Vencl jokes.

 

The bronze goes to Martin Kuča: he being a sixtuple runner-up and the 2008 Champ, the bronze is the only medal he hasn't won so far at the championships...

Pavel Podbrdský, the fresh 2011 runner-up Katka has just beaten, had the biggest average score – almost 400.

“Well, is it worth playing him at all then, eh?” Petr Kuča comments on that.

Michal Přikryl, who qualified for the championship for the first time in his life, finished eighth – we just knew he's long belonged here. Jiří Matějček, another championship-qualified newcomer, ninth. Same with him, then...?

With six wins and five losses. I finished 15^th. Ain't that good, too – the top half, and after all, when I first qualified for the Czech scrabble championship in 2010, I finished 28^th . Ain't that a mucking good leap!

 

Well, folks, I'm leaving for Prague to flush it down with my cousin. Cheers!

 

 

poslal scrabblista, 20.01.2012 23:02:00, Komentáře (0)