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Glad to see that a vast majority of the players had a pretty decent time in Dayton this past week. I was somewhere in between... there just simply wasn't enough to do out there! All that the city had to offer within a few square miles radius was a few eateries! Fortunately, some of those places were rather delectable. I very much enjoyed the sushi I had at Thai 9 and the cannoli I had at Spaghetti Warehouse. The Doubletree Hotel wasn't all that bad either, and it had a bar located conveniently on the lobby floor. The sleeping conditions were substandard to put it mildly, what with 5 people in the room. :) Had a blast regardless. Conrad Bassett-Bouchard, Jesse Matthews, Rafi Stern, Kyle Widergren and I weren't in the room all that much as it was. The highlight was the fire that took place 15 feet from our room in the pool area, waking up the entire sleeping mass at 4:17am and hindering the first decent night of sleep I was starting to get. I can still hear the resonating shrieks of that damn fire alarm. *shudders* After hours games were fun as always, with team clabbers, anagrams, doubles and an impromptu speed tournament keeping us late owls busy. I really need to practice at anagrams... every time I found a quality steal it was quickly overshadowed by somebody adding several extra words to it. Frank Tangredi's ANTITHYROID was an impressive guess. You'd be surprised how many of these players' guesses actually come back acceptable! The funny part though, is the incorrect guesses. Somebody tried to sneak in OVERFLATULATION*.... uhhhhhh.. *stops clock* "Challenge." Haha. Was happy to see my good friend Conrad win a game against some top flight anagrammers. I thought later that night that I could've turned my VARNISHY into RAVISHINGLY. Not very impressive, but it just goes to show you that big misses go with you a long way. I had a terrible tournament... Division 2, 14-17 +615. Ugh. It seemed so promising in the beginning, since I started with a 375 point victory in game 1, my biggest thus far at a tournament. I had 4 losses by 7 points or less. My closest win was 10 points, the rest were considerably larger. Too bad there wasn't a Tough Luck award this year, I definitely would've been in the running. I had a few nice finds, but most of my finds were pretty pedestrian, and I was held bingoless* 3 games out of 31. My favorite plays were EFOORSU to an M against my buddy Rafi Stern, an opening rack of ADIISSY against Alex Fiszbein and EEEQSU? to an E for 101 against a forgotten opponent. I'll probably bore the masses with a few annotated games at a later date.. I was excited to have ousted one of my favorite opponents Phil Kretschman in a super tight game 425-424 the Sunday prior to the Nationals to take a small $20 first place prize. So my confidence coming in was high. However, I let a phony four go by >>> TRAW* (I held for at least 3 minutes), and I attempted a ludicrous TRODDInG* against Frank Lee, who promptly gave that hideous garbage the boot. Another lowlight was challenging SLIVeRED. I immediately see the other valid 3, and thinking they're the only ones, I challenged with confidence. Also challenged COOTER. *sigh* Oh well. We can't always play as good as we think we should. I dropped 80 points to sink below 1600. Yuck. I'll bounce back :)

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