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#player1 Jim_Burlant Jim Burlant
#player2 Chris_Cree Chris Cree
>Jim_Burlant: EFNOOWZ 8F WOOF +20 20
#note Q prefers the 8G placement, presumably because it sets up FEZ J8 for the next turn - something I failed to consider when I put this down. Given Chris's next play, Q may have had a point.
>Chris_Cree: ADNR 7E RAND +17 17
>Jim_Burlant: ??ENNVZ -NVZ +0 20
#note Prior to Chris's play, I'd seriously considered splitting the blanks with something like WiZEN, and because I played WOOF at 8F instead of 8G, I don't have a reasonable Z play. I considered VAW to dump the V, and if I had drawn unique consonants I wouldn't have thought twice about it. But VAW's ENNZ?? leave concerned me; it wasn't too hard to envision all sorts of scenarios where 3 turns later I'd still be looking at those blanks while he established tempo and ran away with the game. A post-mortem check of Zyzzyva shows that ENNZ??? makes a total of 12 7-letter words, and I would find 4, maybe 5 of them. And, in order for me to hit them, I pretty much have to fish a vowel - roughly a 43% chance given the unseen pool. I figured that the Z was more likely to get in the way than help me, and with no other rack balancer really available, I just said, screw it, sacrifice the equity now and bingo on the next turn. Best according to the sim is VAW. Short-term, this worked out and led to a rather impressive sequence:
>Chris_Cree: AE 9E AE +8 25
>Jim_Burlant: ??AENOR D3 ORANgEs +69 89
>Chris_Cree: CEINORS J2 COINERS +78 103
>Jim_Burlant: AELOPST 5F POLE.TAS +70 159
#note I cannot figure out for the life of me why I talked myself out of SPOLIATE on row 4, but I did. SPOLIATE is the best play. While I only concede 2 scoreboard points and roughly the same equity, for this game this was probably a 20-some point blunder. And the sequence it started sparked my demise.
>Chris_Cree: HPQS 3I Q.PHS +58 161
#note Chris said that SPOLIATE would have killed him and he probably would have played QIS N2 for a lot less than this and he'd have still been addled with the P and H.
>Jim_Burlant: AEIIOTV 6B VI.O +17 176
#note Not much to choose from, as the leave with 8A VOTE is so horrid that the play isn't viable. This is best.
>Chris_Cree: LUX 8A LUX. +33 194
>Jim_Burlant: AAEINTU M5 .AUNA +7 183
#note Terrible, terrible play. No need to go long with this rack; 10F EAU or even exchanging AU would have been better. Having had too many games of late where I would play an E and not be able to get one back, I was dead-set on not burning my E, which ruled out dumps like 10F EAU. Q says I shouldn't have protected the E so much.
>Chris_Cree: EGINSTW N9 TWINGES +90 284
>Jim_Burlant: EGIIJOT 15L JE.T +57 240
#note Wow - I'd have thought that taking 57 points was the no-brainer play, but apparently I should just play JO C3. I guess Q thinks I'm going to draw into an ING bingo on row 12 if I do that?
>Chris_Cree: CEILRT O4 RELICT +30 314
>Jim_Burlant: DEGIIOV 12H VIDEOI.G +88 328
>Jim_Burlant: DEGIIOV -- -88 240
#note Nothing much of note happened past this point. A better player probably would have dealt with the Z more constructively than I did. That said, when I told Chris about my opening sequence and resulting rack on turn 2, I asked him what he would do with that, and his reaction made it clear that he was as stumped as I was. And, while SAUNA threw gasoline on the fire, even if I'd made the better play of EAU per the duck, he still hits STEWING, my 57-point comeback is reduced to 38 points and I'm sitting on EGIIO plus 2 of DEV on a board that's much more constricted than this one. Yes, there were mistakes on my end, and the phony was undoubtedly the last straw. But from where I'm sitting, anything that happened after I played VINO was no more than a matter of blown spread in a game in which the tiles gave me no chance from that point. Of course, what we'll never know is if he still goes on to rout me if I play SPOLIATE instead of POLENTAS. Final score 370 - 460.
#rack2 BDDEKTY
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