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Odkazy:

The Prague Qualification Tournament and 1st Team League 2011

Praha, CZ, Sat Feb 19^th & Sun Feb 20^th 2011

 

 

Some of my friends said that rather than taking the 427 morning train on Saturday, they'd prefer to arrive in Prague as soon as Friday and spend two nights there instead of just one – even if they had to pay for a hotel. Not me. Being a nightowl, I just take it as “having to get up early” – no matter whether at seven or 350.

I had a scrabble meeting in Jaroměř the Thursday before; the only player to beat me was Zbyněk Burda, and the old fart Vladyka was as happy as a child to tie with me at the superb score ratio 414:414. I looked forward to the tourn the more – to the cut-throat competition.

 

I played an online game with Jarda Kodym, the old Grim Reaper, the day before. He said he decided to put an end to his tournament scrabble career, the tourns being “too expensive for a pensioner”. As he is from Prague, I asked him whether I'd better get off the train at Vysočany, the part of Prague where the fast train also stops before reaching the terminus at the main station.

“Definitely,” he confirms. “It's closer to where the tourn's held.”

Alright – as I found out later on, it saved me six crowns (about 33 cents, heh, but why pay them if I don't have to), enabling me to travel on a shorter-term streetcar ticket.

I arrived about thirty minutes before the beginning, so as always I helped check the completeness of all the 41 scrabble sets (there being 83 players at the tourn), having made me a cuppa coffee and grabbing a few poppy seed kolaches. Yum! I adore poppy seed. The only drawback to it being that it requires some picking of your teeth in front of the mirror afterwards. Not good a smile after eating a poppyseed kolache, eh?

 

Greeting Katka Rusá, I sit against her at one of the tables and help her verify the completeness of one of the sets. I wish her good luck, which she glosses with the answer of the day. “I don't enjoy this game anymore anyway.”

Haha – one of the most talented Czech scrabble players ever, who has qualified to each and every National Championship since 1998 and was even the National Championess in 2003 – doesn't enjoy this game anymore. So said Jiří Kamín who has also qualified for each and every Championship since 2000 when he entered the scrabble tournament scene. Where does Czech scrabble go from here? Well, people just come and go but there are fronts which they just shouldn't leave – like the scrabble one. Why throw one's talent over the shoulder?

 

I move to another table to verify another set when Hana Závišková stops by.

“How's the book?” she asks, meaning my translation of Stefan Fatsis's scrabble bestseller Word Freak in process.

Before that, she had recommended me one of her fave authors – Terry Pratchett, the translation of whose books is also famous for mastering his puns and coping with them successfully in Czech; she thought reading them would help with the translation. I did read a book by him ages ago – The Unadulterated Cat – but that being a quite untypical book of him, I gotta read some other ones to enjoy his style as well as its translation.

 

In the first round, I get Filip Vojáček, the son of the current Czech Scrabble Association president. He's been getting better and better in scrabble, sometimes even better than his father rating-wise, but I still have a positive win-lose ratio with him, about 3:2, one of the losses being pretty close on top of that.

Heck, I hate having to fight THAT hard as early as at 9am. Getting no “bingo-making letters”, I had to resort to the “classic” scrabble tactics, squeezing the shit out of bonus squares and using the blank – to which no compatible bingo letters came either – in some 30-ish move; he though, didn't let it frighten him and still kept neck and neck with me. When we turned the bag the wrong side up to show no letters were remaining in it, the winner was still not plain to see. We sat racking our brains over our last racks, each making up his own way to the final deciding move.

There were two ways I saw among my letters. Either go out quickly – but risk he doesn't have enough to deduct – or make these two fat moves but have to hope he doesn't go out after the first of them. Like, he's got six letters right now. Do you often go out with six letters? Not very probable.

 

Of course. Of course he did!!! Fuuuuucccck it. I was a bit in the lead before this, but I don't suppose this will save me.

 

Not really: 310 – 311. Shiiiiiittttt!!!

 

“Hm. Well, congrats, then,” I said not bothering to conceal how pissed off it made me feel.

Two tables higher, at #13, a similar disappointment was in progress. Katka Rusá's uncle, the triple National Champ Milan Kuděj, just lost by eight points against 1760-rated Radek Mannheim. Not that the difference between their ratings was yawning – about a hundred – but still, not a nice surprise.

 

I declared that I'd take it out on my next opponent. The unlucky one was Raul Kačírek, a recent newcomer to the tournament scene who was lured to it from the scrabble site, hearing a lot about tournament scrabble there.

I pushed a lot in accordance with my decision, played a bingo as early as in my 5^th move (potkejte with a blank for the other E – a second personal plural imperative of “to meet”) and a 42-pointer three moves later, but still, if I thought I'd have been far away from him point-wise by that time, I was badly mistaken. I had to put together a 42-pointer – znuď, the 2^nd person imperative of “to make s.o. bored” – yeah, make me bored and don't chase me like this!

The pool is growing thinner. Heck, gotta think something up. I had been waiting forever for a P and an O to make měř (the imperative of to measure) two squares in front of a triple into poměř (“compare”), but having almost overlooked that of course – at the last minute I notice I could use the triple for making téměř (“nearly”) squeezing as many as 44 points from the word.

“Oh, that's beautiful,” he says frankly.

“Thanks,” I grin. “Nearly overlooked it.”

 

Now that you think you got the game nailed – what do you get?

Right – the Q in the English version, the X in the Czech one (thank God we don't have the Q – but the X is sometimes pretty enough! Being of the same point value as the English Q).

I did think up a way of burning it: down there in the lower right corner, there's a chance of making noxe – noxa being a general term for a toxic substance in the air. It's even sometimes used in English (coming from the Latin noxa – damage) but surprisingly not good in English scrabble.

Now, whadya think he did?

Of course – jammed the spot. There being no other one to burn the X, I had to make hard calculations in my head to see if there are chances of winning even if deducing the X as a leftover.

 

There definitely are. I quickly counted the maximum value of Raul's going-out move which would still win me the game and hoped he would make less.

 

He's gonna get as much as twenty fucking points for free. Grrr.

 

Goooooood. He didn't make much in his going-out move, so even after having to deduct the X and give it to him, I eked out a win by four points – 344 – 348.

“You deserved that – téměř is beautiful,” he praised once again that 44-point move of mine.

 

Not that I had a good feeling about that, though. Losing the first game by one point and winning the second against an almost-newbie to the tourn scene by four points – doesn't look like a good sign.

 

If I only knew that what I'm just commencing is gonna be one of my best, if not THE best, scrabble games ever, I wouldn't be so pessimistic now...

I get sent to table #17 of 41. Jiří Matějček, my upcoming opponent, is a guy my age, a buddy of mine from the scrabble site and a professional theater actor. Let's see how he's gonna act in the course of our game.

Ouch! Like, didn't mean it ironically at all. Sorry ... well, too late for excuses, obviously. He throws a 68-point bingo and accompanies it with a theatrical grin. After giving it a disgusted sneer, though, I noticed that his bingo actually helped me to one of mine – and a pure one. Naložíme – the 1^st person plural future of to load; let's load a full steel body of bingo.

And so I answer to a 68-point bingo with a blank with this pure bingo of mine for 70, not knowing I sort of trigger a double bingo vendette from his side by this. Three moves later he shoves on a pure bingo schovav, an ancient past participle of to hide. I respond with a 39-pointer which gets me close again. But other three moves later he tries another ancient past participle – omraziv, of “to freeze all over”, which I challenge (he himself was grinning with doubts over it) but comes back good.

“Such bullshit – next to impossible,” I sneer. He's asked for trouble by this. With a series of 39-38-39 points for succeeding moves, I soon breathe on his neck again. And what's more – we both cross 400. What warms the very cockles of my heart is, though, that I keep pace with him in spite of playing just one bingo as compared to the three of his. And WHAT a pace! Maybe I'd better say gallop.

Oh, there it is! Just what I need. A 20-pointer towards the end of the game is a real lifebuoy. Now I can go out and he “can't catch up anymore” as Burda would say.

 

403 – 428. Now this win is a real delight. Against three bingos and opposing score of 403. Ain't this the best game I've ever played!

Indeed – our 831 sum of scores is going to hold a record of the best sum of scorers of the tourn until the end of the eighth round. And at the end of the tournament, it's still gonna be the third best sum.

I just gotta have some chocolate to wrap my nerves up. I have a bar of extra dark one along – how could I ever do without it!

 

Jindra Voráčková. Ouch, I knew I did need the choc.

 

This old lady is a tourn veteran just like her partner Jarda Buksa is, often ending up in the Finals (she did so every year from 2001 to 2009 with the only exception of 2007), but says she doesn't enjoy the tourns anymore. Yeah, you remember well – she's the one who says “I don't care” when you congratulate her or apologize for your good luck. “It's fine for me to get into the Finals,” she said recently, “But I just don't enjoy it...”

True. I have never seen her smile and been wondering how the heck Jarda Buksa, who's quite a gigglebox, can live with her, let alone be her life partner. Well, probably it's just that opposites attract each other.

 

My personal win – lose ratio with her being 5:4 in my favor, I sure ain't gonna let her tie it. Let alone a scrabble rope around my neck, eh?

This one, a game in which I seemed to be the game (and she the hunter, eh?), was a perfect example of the fact that things aren't what they seem to be. The 15^th line of the board was being watched closely by me, that is to say. And so while anybody might think she can as well keep cool for having already won in the main, I was making up a deadly blow for loads of points there, distracting her attention from the spot at the same time.

Yes... yes, I rejoice in my mind before the 11^th move. Now it comes. I suppose now she's gonna block it, eh? Even unintentionally. There's no exception to Murphy's laws.

 

She didn't. Oooooooooph.

 

Vymetším, a blank for the y, an ancient masculine/neuter past participle of “to sweep out”, sweeps Jindra out of her leading position for awhile. She challenges, of course – with a 92-point word it's just the “duty” – saying, when we arrive at the comp, that she wants to type the word in herself, probably to prevent me from spelling it another way than when I played it.

It comes back good – well, of course! I didn't have any doubts – and as another sweet reward, I get the other blank, too, in my new handful of seven.

(Did you notice that after years and years of playing scrabble, you mostly manage to pull exactly seven letters out of the bag with just one grab? You sort of already have the knack.)

 

I play the shit out of it right in my next move, squeezing 38 points of it. But even this one doesn't get me in the lead much – just slightly. She, being – as I had already noticed before – apparently not under the influence of tourn fever, calculates her moves coldbloodedly and even this other killer move of mine doesn't get her out of it.

 

130 points in two moves – you just get exhausted after those, even if you don't admit it. Let alone if they don't get ahead you much.

 

She went out – the last straw to catch upon and rely on your opp's big leftover. I counted on that one, though, and ensured I'd win even if she did this.

 

320 – 311. With two blanks ... lame win, ain't it? Oh well, what the hell. Every win counts.

 

I have asked for even more trouble by this, eh?

Of course. Pavel Žibřid, our team capo and a quadruple national championship bronze medailist, currently as high as fifth on the Association chart. One of those games that keep you at ease because you know you just can't win. But come on – didn't I nearly beat him back when I first came to the Parnas club? Hadn't it then been for that stupid mistake of mine at the end of our game.

As if to demonstrate who the main bingo king here is, he plays a pure one right in his fourth move. I get a blank but quite incompatible letters to it – as usual, eh? – but hey, guess I could make something up. Sřasíme, a future tense of “to join something together by lashes” looks sooo strange that even this scrabble macho goes and challenges. The weird word turns out to be good, but my joy doesn't last longer than three turns – after which he shoves a bingo of his right on a triple. The spot being, of course, the only one I hadn't managed to jam.

This definitely decides an up to now quite even-chance game in his favor – 325 – 413; after all, not that bad a loss against such a scrabble (and medicine as well, ha) capacity. As a quadruple bronze medailist from the Championship, he deserves the win. Oh well.

 

I down some further bits of choc to calm my nerves down, although, as I had said, there was no need to be nervous in a game against a player of such a level. I make me another cup of coffee and enjoy the break (I always enjoy a longer one – one of the advantage of blitz tactics).

 

I overhear Niki Zgafasová and a few other female players, standing aloof in a group, mentioning my name. I come closer to see the circumstances – they were arguing over my occupation.

“Tom! Are you a railroad man?”

“Nope!” I let a laugh. “An English teacher. How did you make that out?”

“Dunno – mebbe it's just that I thought that just about everyone from Eastern Bohemia works on the railroads.”

It's a peculiar phenomenon in the Czech scrabble world – a real lot of Eastern Bohemian scrabble players really have a job connected to railroads so she thought I did as well.

Sixth round – against Dana Klimešová, rated 1600, who started organizing qualification tourns in Zlín last year and this gave me a chance and a pretext to regularly come and see my best friend Šárka who lives there. She seems to be a nice person “live” – makes me wonder why she noplayed me on the scrable site. On the site and at the tournaments, we all seem to be totally different personalities. Or maybe she doesn't know who I am on the site, having not opened my profile. Who knows.

I play a tripled bingo early in the game – in my fifth turn, for 80 points. Everything seeming to work out fine, I take my chances with a word I'm not 100% sure about. Just 99% - šimy should be good. If you know š is the Czech transcription of the “sh” sound, you can guess what it is – yeah, right, shimmy (the original spelling also being good in Czech scrabble) . But -y also being a frequent plural indication in Czech, it looked like a plural of some šim*, too. And while the tourn players usually have learned all the threes cold, her challenge is fully understandable.

Šimy having given me an injection of thirty points, I ponder over my last rack. But hey – it ain't as good as to be able to empty in just a few moves.

Unlike hers. She plays losicí, a case of the noun losice, a female of the elk, which leaves only two letters in her rack. I am ahead point-wise, but if she goes out, the leftover can cause me pretty much trouble.

And what? Of course she does!

Now, what do you think the reslut – oops, result – is?

Of course. Another loss by one fucking point – 350 – 349. A reslut indeed – what a good typo.

 

“Nobody ain't gonna believe me this,” I say to Dana Kučová the tournament IT manager when handing her the score sheets. She just nods her head and chuckles in sympathy, checking on the scores – she remembered how the first game of mine at this tourn had been.

One loss by one point sucks. But a second one five rounds later... just makes you gather all your strength not to fly off the handle right on the spot.

 

Poor one, the next opponent, I think to myself. S/he'll catch it from me although s/he's not to blame – for all the preceeding bad luck of mine.

Blanka Kovaříková, I read on the 7^th round match-ups. Rating of 1431 – hell, where have I ended up? Somewhere down there in the slumps, evidently. Well not yet – table #21, which of 40 is the uppest in the lower half, ha...

“Are you a relative of Jan Kovařík?” I wondered, remembering that ole scrabble player who recently suprisingly dropped in his rating and dangerousness.

“Yeah ... downright his wife,” she laughs – I can't believe my ears. She looks much older than him.

Although I play just one bingo (nevstrč in my 5^th move for 78, an imperative of “not to stick [into]”), I soon get much more ahead than what would be called a “one-bingo difference”. No mercy – I have had too much bad luck to be good to you. I smash her with a precise 200-point difference – 430 – 230; and no, I didn't need more than one blank and one bingo.

 

Dagmar Rusá. Katka's mother is gonna be the next victim. And yeah, that's what's vital – the way you look at your opponent. She's gonna be another victim of mine.

Like the bag heard me. I get a pure bingo kvasíme (the 1^st person plural of “to ferment”) right on my first rack. She goes first, though, so I hope I will be able to hook the bingo on her word.

She gives me an N in her word. Good. I can rearrange it into nekvasím, the 1^st person singular negative future of the verb. As Burda would say, if you make a bingo representing a negative verb, it's a lame one ... but oh well, better play a lame bingo than none.

If I had only known I was going to make a better one in awhile. Pulling a blank among the next – exact again – handful of seven after the initial bingo, I soon start working on another one.

 

Typical. Everytime you start working on a bingo, what you get is those fucking c's and ě's and company.

But hey ...

... after a minute of thinking apparently the effect of extra dark chocolate has arrived. And, yeah, THANK YOU for the fucking ě and c! Thanks to it, I can now play strmělce, with a blank for the L, the dative case of strmělka, which is a kind of edible mushroom, the common funnel. (I've studied the mushroom atlas a lot when was a little boy and NOW it suits me – surprisingly on a front totally different from mushrooming!)

To my surprise she didn't even challenge. Just said “nice” – she apparently knows the mushroom.

In my new handful of seven I get the other blank and three turns later come up with a third bingo – rozvážu, a 1^st person future of to untie, with a blank for the O.

Even after my first two bingos, she kept pace with me. The third, though, was too much already – it made the one-bingo difference between our final total scores: 359 – 424.

While I was glad I had just gained my fifth win and so if I lose now, I'd still be 5 – 4 so the wins would prevail, Pavel Žibřid comes from the 1^st table like a beaten dog, with a pissed-off expression on his face.

“I've just played the little miss Filip,” he says, meaning Hana Filipová, sometimes calling her the Young Shrew, too, according to her mother's scrabble site nickname (it being the Old Shrew for a change). “I was already about to give the final blow, shovel her into the hearth. I play a move, announce twelve points and then realize, fuck, duh, it's fourteen... too late though. I lost by one point – just mucking ineffability.”

Yeah. The results of the tourn become ineffable too – Hana wins gold thanks to this while Pavel ends up seventh. If I won gold like this, I'd rather give that win to Pavel.

 

My last opponent is the tourn veteran and policeman Martin Vacek.

I start with a one-letter swap, which we both grin at, knowing what it is probably a sign of. On my second turn – guess what I did. Nooope – you didn't guess it – another one letter swap, which gets accompanied with an even bigger grin. Martin tries to play a word generally unhookable, but still, in spite of having two R's which would generally not be considered bingo-friendly, I try to use an O of his word for a bingo of mine – prooraly, a feminine plural past tense of “to plow through”. He challenges, and when it comes back good, he says he wouldn't take the chances of playing the word if he had it in his rack.

“Me I did believe it,” I responded. Since I played this bingo of mine, I kept pace with him until the end of the game. Then, though, he got both blanks – or maybe had had them for some time – and played a triple bingo with them, which decides about the winner in fact. He wins 394 – 325 – as I said, what decided was getting the blanks and composing a bingo with them, which he admits. But oh well, he being a tourn veteran, experience is what counts as well.

The best word of the tourn, surprisingly, wasn't played by a top player – it was Lukáš Karlec, rated 1427, who shoved the triple triple onboard. Polonahý, “half-naked”, for 158 points – a good one, indeed; that's the naked truth, not only half-naked.

5 – 4 then. Oh well, no big deal but not that bad. I end up 30^th of 83 – three qualification points, eh? Not many. But oh well, too early to talk about qualification in February, and besides, I'm still among the qualified ones. So let's keep there! And compensate for today's bad luck tomorrow at the team league.

 

I call my cousin to discuss today's evening and the time I should call him to pick me up, as I want to spend some time with my Praguean friend Dominika now. He tells me it doesn't really matter.

 

I meet Dominika in a down-city pub and we have a special kind of beer together. Dominika notices that every time we meet we sooner or later come up with an intimate conversation topic. It being sex when we last had seen each other, this time the theme developed into masturbation. She just threw an embarrassing look around, and seeing nobody really cared, we went on, since as it turned out, I discovered a serious problem within her. “Everyone does,” I tell her. “And those who say they don't, they're talking shit,” I grin.

This was just the beiginning, though. She confessed she never really did as their parents considered that a taboo and something that shouldn't be done. I ended up explaining to her how women jack off, whereupon she was all embarrassed laughter – where the heck are we at again?

“It's easy – just caress your clitoris,” I crowned my frankness, making her blush like a schoolgirl and burst out laughing, saying “oh God”.

When she was off to wash her hands, she sneered and said, “I'm going to give my clitoris a caress.”

 

She was back again in a minute, and when I wanted to take my turn to wash my hands, she warned me: “There's a guy at the Gents, puking.” What the fuck?

 

She was right. A girl with an embarrassed expression on her face was standing at the entrance door of Gentlemen and begging the guys coming to leave for the Ladies, there being more toilets to take advantage of.

 

About half an hour before midnight we part; Martin comes and collects me and we hit the road for his apartment. Agreeing that we don't have mind for beer, we don't stop by anywhere.

When we arrive, Martin's gal Tereza wakes up. Oh well – at least I can give her the choc rose I brought her. She says she doesn't mind anyway and that she's glad to see me. We spend about two hours talking before I gather I really do have to go to bed if I want my next day's performance at the team league to be worth at least something.

 

Martin accompanies me to the city bus stop in the morning, reminding me which stop to get off at. It's a hell of a ride – he calls it jocularly a “sightseeing city tour”. Rightly, as the bus sometimes goes to and fro because of roundabouts and shit, and before you get there, almost an hour's gone before you even notice.

We counted that I'd get in front of the hotel where the team league takes place at about ten to nine AM – there being a ten-minute time reserve for me then. As I have to gather later on, I need one badly – cuz when the city bus gets to the designated stop, this fucking driver closes the bus door before I even manage to get through the crowd to it. So I, curse words flying from my mouth, travel one stop farther and then walk back to the hotel over fields of high grass.

When I get in front of the hotel at about two to nine, my cell phone starts ringing. Of course – the team capo Pavel Žibřid is wondering where the heck I am. I calm him down telling him I'm just in front of the hotel, about to get in.

“Alright, take it easy – we're not sitting at the tables yet,” he grins into the phone.

 

Before we are finally seated against our first opposing team, I even manage a coffee and a few slices of bread with the traditional delicious team league garlic spread. The secret chemical weapon, eh?

Before I even notice, our team gets the list of the four players of our first opposing team, Paluba (The Shipboard), it being up to us to make the match-ups. When I get to find out, I have not much choice left, and so I take the prettie Jana Vágnerová.

“I suppose you chose me, eh?” she chuckles.

“I didn't, to your surprise,” I smile in response. “I wouldn't choose someone with a strong female weapon.”

“I don't get how you can like someone aged 35,” she wonders, like she didn't know this is not a matter of age.

Most of the games with her are great, but this one got sort of out of my control. After a while of running neck and neck, I got this combination which drives scrabble players crazy – six good bingo letters plus a seventh shit. I set out for a long trip in vain persecuting the bingo. I mean, she's too far away anyway and if I wanted to shrink the difference a bit, I had to hold on some more.

Now, whadya think? Without any pre-bingo preparation, she plays one of hers. Well okay. Now that the game's REALLY in vain, I can as well go on trying the bingo – it just has to work.

In the meantime, of course, she tries to jam all the possible spots for bingos thoroughly, while I desperately go 2-3-2 throwing off the extra non-suitable letters.

“Will you finally play the bingo,” she sneers. I feel the bag: one tile left. My last chance.

And yes... yes! At least fifteen seconds of fame at the utter end of the game – and downright on a triple. Klesáme, a 1^st person plural present tense of to decrease, with a blank for the At least it gets me over 300 and saves me from total humiliation – and brings fruit of the ages-taking pursuit of the bingo.

It's a shame that I lost by so much, as it means only a small tie for our team and thus only one point for Parnas in this round – Pavel Žibřid won over Martin Hrubý by eight points only, and Pepa Grosskopf, who came as a substitute for Jirka Kracík who is sick, beat František Růžička.

 

Oh well – that was only a warm-up.

“Now we're playing the poultry,” Pavel Žibřid grins. He means the Střelené kachny team, which would, taking into consideration the pun in the name, translate as Meshugga Ducks, the knack to it being that střelené is also the passive of “to shoot”, i. e. a pun with “shot ducks”. Yeah – that's the one this sweet half-Vietnamese Žaneta plays in, too. And hey – ain't there been a substantial change in their team! I notice their strongest player, one of the best, of not THE best, Czech players ever, Martin Sobala, is missing (maybe taking care of his wife who is currently in a high stage of pregnancy). He's been substituted by a recent newcomer to the tournament scene, Raul Kačírek. It was their turn to match up their players to the ones of our team, and Raul chose me, enjoying to play against me on the site, too.

“Sob[ala] has invited me to his team – dunno why,” Raul explains to me as we sit down opposite each other. “Maybe it's because I'm Kačírek [his surname means “little drake” in Czech] .”

Indeed – with his name he can be a perfect mascot for the Meshugga Ducks team.

But if he meant it as a rematch for the game the day before, he was mistaken. I smashed him with a 175-point difference 283 – 458, playing two nice bingos, one with each blank (mezitím – “in the meantime” , the blank for the other M, for 83, and šlachám, the dative plural case of the noun “sinew”, the blank for the A, for 78), and this very difference contributed to the fact that the tie we had with the Střelené kachny team was a “big one” (i.e., two wins and two losses on each side but our sum of scores was bigger than theirs). Zbyněk Burda won over Sára Matějková by about 70, but Pavel Žibřid got beaten by the 2004 National Champ Michal Sikora and Pepa Grosskopf lost to Tereza Matějková by more than a hundred.

While this had been a win I took quite at ease, I didn't have an idea about how tough a job the next game was gonna be. We are to play a top Praguean team Poškoláci, The Detainees, which won several team leagues and ended up silver last year. Yeah, the one that consists of the Vaceks, Věra Majtánová, Luboš Vencl and aces like that.

I look at the match up sheet we were given and choose Věra for my opponent, which my co-players from the Parnas team approve. Zbyněk Burda takes on Katka Rusá's uncle and triple National Champ Milan Kuděj, Pavel Žibřid challenges Jana Vacková, and Pepa Grosskopf, who always says he “doesn't care which opponent he's gonna get”, is assigned Luboš Vencl.

I always enjoy playing Věra, so had someone told me in advance that my game against her was going to be stressful as hell, I would have talked back straightaway that they were kidding.

I started the game and began with a one-letter swap, accompanied by an innocent grin typical of this kind of situation. No, I ain't got nuttin' cookin'...

She, for a change, exchanged two.

I had this combination which would yield bingo with practically any short vowel for the seventh letter... and yes, yes, and O's just come. I shove on a pure hostovo, a neuter possessive case of the noun host (“guest”) – just any other short vowel instead of the last O would have yielded some other possessive form of this noun.

She bingos back, as you might guess – with a blank, though. Podivech, with a blank for the P, gives her 68 so she's immediately only two points short of me.

What began as a neck and neck game started to spoil when I felt I was about to have another bingo – but I just couldn't for the FUCK of me make one up.

 

When I came up with one at last – lámanku, an accusative case of a type of crumbs – to my surprise it got challenged off.

“FUCK the dictionary!” I couldn't help letting out loud when leaving the comp with the dic(k) installed. A player seated nearest the computer burst out laughing – she could hear me the clearliest and thought SHE was the only vulgar one there. But why – even Věra herself knew the word, but took her chances with the challenge, hoping it wasn't going to be in the dic(k). So it does exist – why the heck don't the source dicks include it!

I try another bingo two moves later. Whadya think?

Yeah. Challenged off again. Grrrrrrrrrrrr.

She plays a word of hers and with it she creates a new, very limited, but on the othe other hand tripled, hook. The only letter you could hook a word on it with was a Z. Which I didn't have as both Z's of the Czech scrabble set have already been played. So when I play my blank and announce it represents a Z, she sneers and so do I, as it's clear to both of us that what is going to follow is an act of total desperation. I try the word klouzán: it does look good – like a passive of the verb “slide”. Věrka challenges again, though – some verbs just don't take the passive.

Guess what? Not this one, either.

I was beside myself with anger. That's to say, by that time she had long been above me point-wise.

But then a strange thing happened. She played děla, a plural of “cannon”. Such an obvious hook! And she does know I have an O, which makes me able to play oděla – a feminine past participle of the bookish verb “to dress”. That's how I hooked a fourth try for a bingo in a row – volánku with a blank for the V.

“Shall this not be good!” I threaten. Věra challenges “just in case” – she herself says it definitely should be.

 

It was. Oooooooooph. Thanks to this I finally take the deserved win (377 – 349) which almost cost me nerves – after three bingos challenged off, the fourth was valid at last. “What's volánek anyway?” I ask after the game. “I only know it's a part of a dress.”

“Yeah,” Věra confirms. “On a skirt, a tightly gathered piece of fabric.” Yup – you guessed that – the Czech for a frill, volánku being its genitive and locative case.

No, this is not the point of the round yet. I turn around to find Pavel Žibřid waiting to record my results:

“Your win was useless,” Pavel grins. Kiddin' me – such a nerve training was this game for me, and finally I win in vain. That's to say, I was the only one of my team to have won in this round, so we get diddly-squat this time anyway. Pavel Žibřid got beaten by Jana Vacková as well as Zbyněk Burda did by Milan Kuděj, and Pepa Grosskopf lost to Luboš Vencl.

 

Our next opposing team, Sklípkani or The Trap Door Spiders, turns up without Marián, but with Yvetta Hlubinková as a substitute. Marián may have stayed home taking care of his two babies.

Who chose me was – of course – the most dangerous one of the team, Ivo Hradský. (It was expectable – we are friends who enjoy playing each other and on top of that he studied English at the university just like I did. He's the redbeardo who fought his way to the championship last year only to get drunk before its beginning and finally end up among the last ones. Not that it had been his first one – a second one already since the beginning of his tournament career in 2006. At the 2009 championship he finished as high as 11^th .)

Proving how strong a player he is, he plays a non-bingo quadrupled seven-letter word for 56 as early as his 2^nd move. Then no less than two turns later he gets a blank and plays the bingo nemlsat, “not to have a sweet tooth” with a blank for the T, saying that that one was too primitive. I start composing mine, but having no blank, it's a tougher work. I do come up with one, though – as I start laying vydáveno on the board, he later on confesses he expected it to contain a blank. It didn't, though – I made a pure one.

My joy didn't last long, though. Be it partly because of the still lasting joy over the bingo, or because of the respect I hold towards him, I didn't see through the obvious hook he made for himself. Not for a bingo – you already know what he's an expert in: another fat non-bingo move. He quadruples the six-point Ň in šňáb – šňába being a kind of brandy made from wine settlement. I go out with my CKNS playing scink (the skink or shingleback) around an I already on the board, saying that “t[he CKNS] was an exact demonstration of the kind of letters I kept getting all the time.” He wins 443 – 324, glossing it with “... and on top of that you've thwarted quite a couple of other nice plays of mine.” Luckily none of my teammates won in this round either, so I was not alone in the failure. We got our asses kicked – hopefully the footprints on the back of our pants aren't that much plain to see.

Oh well – hopefully the next team, Nerobité from Silesia, will be an easier job. I take on Mirka Zaisová, a rather average player who, though, shone at the tourn in Kladno along with her partner as you may remember.

Her then lucky strike already having been obviously gone though, she had to rely on what she can do. And not that there's little of it! In her 6^th move she plays a nice pure bingo. She, though, three moves later lets me get away with an invalid dialect word for 33 and I keep at lead since then. I beat her (well, okay, defeat – women shouldn't be beaten, duh) 308 – 352, and as Pavel Žibřid won in a hard 800-sum fight over Katka's sis Lída Rusá, we get a “small tie” one point, as the sum of scores ratio was 1436 – 1514.

Záškoláci, The Detainees, our next opposing team, often end up at the bottom of the chart at the end of the year, so it's gonna be an easy job I hope. Who choses me for his opponent is my scrabble site buddy Josef Pustka. At last a game I can say I was lucky in – I deserved it after the hard work of fighting off the bad luck. Well, downright against you – sorry, my friend.

I start off with a pure 63-point bingo, then in my next turn shove another pure one, also for 63. He draws a blank and strives to make one of his, which he manages three turns later. However, the preparation of the bingo took some time so I get away in the meantime. There's still an approximate one-bingo difference between us so he hopes to shrink it with his, get back neck and neck with me and maybe even in front of me.

However, I can smell the danger. Although his preparation wasn't that conspicuous, it was just plain to see that there was a little too much room in one area of the board, and you know what the threat always is when you don't jam all those roomy areas of it before the end of the game. So I just went there with an average move of mine, whereupon he grinned and made a gesture like he said “whoosh”. You did have the bingo ready there, eh? I just guessed so.

He also had the other blank, too, but it turned out to be useless. I win 311 – 377. “Exactly the one bingo difference – I had a pure one ready but you jammed the spot,” Josef said.

“I guessed so. The spot was just too dangerously open for a long time.”

The Detainees get a 4 – 0 dusting from us. The fourth win – of Pepa Grosskopf over Petr Kuča, the father of the 2008 National Champ but quite a weak player himself – was a close one though, an interesting one to watch and a result of Petr's stupid mistake in the endgame.

You'll make that one out yourself straight away. Say, I'll teach you two Czech words: za, the Czech for “behind”, and zbraň, the Czech for a “weapon”. On the board there was the word braň, an imperative of “to defend”. In your rack you got a Z to go out with. Where do you put it?

Of course, you're right – in front of the braň to make zbraň. That way you get 2(z)+3(b)+1®+1(a)+6(ň) = 13 points.

Now, what did Petr do? He put the Z over the A, making za for three! And so Pepa enjoyed a close victory and contributed to our smashing 4 – 0 score against Záškoláci in this round.

Just like after every team league round, Pavel Žibřid has us all report our results to him to record them on a common sheet of paper to have them all together. When I do so, he tells me my performance has been the best of the whole team so far. Indeed – altho I can't believe it, he has had three wins so far, Zbyněk's had two. Me I've had four. So let's not muck it up now!

Our seventh round opposing team become the Brno Dragons – Brněnští draci. I didn't quite care who I'd get so I was “assigned” Jiří Kučka.

He's a dangerous one. A top player currently 42^nd on the Association chart and as high as 2300-rated on the scrabble site. Well, 42^nd – I'm higher than him then, eh? 32^nd. But that doesn't mean much if you stand up against each other. A 10-place difference makes you roughly equal.

It's a hell of a fight again – like, as if there was any other kind of fights at the team league, eh? Jiří punches me in the face with a 65-point bingo of his, tradicí with a blank for the I, a genitive of “tradition”. Just wait! I've gotten a blank and am workin' on one of mine.

I come up with it five turns later, using an Á on the board, the blank for another Á and making splétává, a 3^rd person singular present tense of splétávat, to entangle. Guess the development of the game has just pretty entangled!

The lead this bingo got me into was just slight – about twenty – but the deal is that he didn't catch up on this lead of mine anymore. Duh – lead is too smooth and heavy a metal to catch upon, ha. Heavy metal – but guess I'll give ya quite a different kind of music to listen to, ha! The sound of beat – or more exactly, of being beaten. I win by exactly the twenty – 358 – 338, thanking him for a hell of a good game, an interesting neck and neck fight with one bingo and one blank on either side.

And again – my win helped save the team from a loss.

“How did you do?” Pavel wonders, ready to record. I dictated the results of my game to him.

“A small tie again, eh?” he can't help letting a laugh when comparing the results of the whole team for this round. Actually he's used to calling it a “worse tie”. Duh – getting one point is worse than getting two points.

 

If we thought the last round, against Záškodníci or The Saboteurs, would save us, we were mistaken. A round where all four bags played evidently against us. Me I took on Barbora Hrůzová. What'd you say: an initial pure bingo came to her all by itself from the bag. I worked hard on evening (and even morning!) up the score odds, but when I finally did, she got both blanks at once and played another bingo. This kind of games just always has me pissed off. She wins 411 – 346 without even having to work on the victory. So my words of its evaluation when congratulating her are quite exact and concise:

“A fucking rotten game.”

Which this one really was. “Don't talk foul,” she lets a laugh. As I said, I was not alone in the fatal failure – all the other Parnas boys lost too. In the final ranking chart of the team league, we end up last but one (even this is not a solace as the team who finished dead last has just kicked our asses in this final round!). As the individual player, I end up 12^th of 55 which is not all that bad – oh well, at least something positive to all this shit.

 

Who came to have a look at the team league is yesterday's newcomer to the Czech scrabble tournament scene Irena Lauermannová, a sweet, amiable gal my age with long red curly hair. Radek Mannheim, of course, tried to make moves on her, being similarly unlucky at love like I am (but I, unlike him, don't try to pick up any gal I bump into).

“You're Quentos, aren't you?” she smiles when I come by to greet her. Another one to recognize me according to the photo in my scrabble site profile – although it's more than 10 years old! “All this time I was like, hey, I know this guy,” she goes on when I confirm. “Ain't that Quentos? And I thought, no, that' can't be Quentos – such an easy-goin' guy... he's got such weird quips at the site.”

“Well, I can get choleric from time to time,” I sneer admittingly.

“Not really choleric – just weird...”

I was glad to get to know her She even said she was going to attend the following tourn in three weeks in Přerov, too.

 

I call my cousin Martin, as there was a few hours time till my train was due. He wonders if I had the mind to have a beer, and we agreed we didn't really. I suggest going to the confectionery instead. He doesn't come alone – a stout bearded guy accompanies him. I guess right who he is – his former boss that he often talked about, even since the time he was employed in his company. Martin quit the job later on, saying he's “a great guy but impossible to work with”.

He turned out to be all around a brilliant guy indeed in both senses of the word. Smart and sociable, and we had a fruitful discussion over quite a number of topics – I even infected him with enthusiasm so much so that he pondered over organizing a scrabble tourn himself. When I said it was about time we left for the train station, he started to make up plans how to make me stay longer.

“I'd love to, but there's no way,” I had to admit. “I have to get up for work at six tomorrow.”

“That's no problem either,” he takes my breath away. “You now have one more piece of cake at my expense, and then let's hit the road for Trutnov in my car.”

That was something I had to talk myself out of – as I had suffered from a strong indigestion in his car, although it was just a short way we traveled – from the Prague main station to the Vysočany one. I refused the nice gesture saying that I had a two-way ticket anyway so it's valid for the way back, too. That covninced him. We said goodbye, agreeing we definitely should meet again.

 

I sat down in the coupé of the train car, my stomach totally overfilled, saying to myself I had had enough of candies for at least two following weeks. Actually I didn't hold until later than the very next day, ha!

 

30^th of 83 : three qualification points. No big deal but hey – let's make up for it by kicking ass in Přerov on 3/27!

linkuj.cz vybrali.sme.sk

poslal scrabblista, 21.03.2011 6:18:00

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