Jim Kramer's Spectacular Tournament Stories
4 - Ninety-nine and Out?
My game with Adam Logan from the 1996 Nationals turned out to be quite
interesting. The game is shown in SN 126, but the last three moves shown are
not quite as played. The annotator saw my 12th rack, which was arranged *as
if* to play SUCtIONS, and made some rash assumptions about the rest of the
game. He and the other annotator actually left at this point! What follows is
what really happened.
My rack was CINOSU?. Unseen were IINORRRR. Adam had just played STAIDLY to go
up 368-264. After thinking long and hard, I made the play that I calculated
would give me the best winning chances, IN O2 (6). I then palmed a tile from
my rack, put my hand in the bag, and "drew" that tile along with the last
remaining tile (an R, fortunately). I purposefully fumbled the two tiles so
that Adam would think that I had drawn *two* tiles. This is all perfectly
legal, by the way.
At that point he began to hastily retrack. But he was very low on time. He
played OS 1M (2) to "block" whatever I might have been setting up along row
1. I then played OUtCROSS 1H, a 99-point non-bingo.
"99," I said, "and out."
"Out?" he said.
"Out," I said, turning my empty rack upside-down to emphasize the point.
Final score: 381-370 in my favor.
I filled out the Contestant Score Sheet and handed it to him.
"Whuzzis?" he said, seeing that it reflected him winning 381-358.
"Look, you seem like a nice kid," I said. "I've won 'em all. Regionals,
nationals, worlds, solars, galactics, intergalactics, interdimensionals. But
you're the first player I couldn't beat fair and square. I had to do
something borderline unethical. Take the win. I'm sure you'll represent
Scrabble well. All I ask is just a few pennies."
He looked up at me. "How many pennies?"
"Not many," I said. "See this Scrabble board? Just pay me one penny for the
A1 square, two for A2, four for A3 and so on, doubling the amount on each of
the 225 squares."
"OK, mister," he said, obviously not mathematically inclined. "I'll take it."
There's more to the story, but it gets rather improbable, so I'll end here.
