Scrabble Babble

I'm a modest person. The most modest person you'll meet, actually. I'm more modest than anyone else in the world, I reckon. Kidding, obviously. I feel that since I'm plenty self-deprecating in this blog (for example: getting lost at the right address, but in the wrong city, looking like a tool at a party, running into a screen door, losing my pants at the Olive Garden), I'm allowed to brag occasionally.

In the past few years, I have become a Scrabble aficionado. On and off, I play online against strangers, and while I win more than I lose, I do regularly get my ass handed to me. Several months ago, Facebook introduced its own version of Scrabble, called Scrabulous, to the fold. Rather than playing out the game all at once, users can play one turn at a time at their leisure until their opponent had completed eir subsequent turn; after a couple of weeks of this slow-paced back-and-forth action, the game is finally completed. I've enjoyed playing this game with my friends around the world, and, given my excessive practice at the competition, I won each of the twenty-something games I played.

One day a few weeks ago, I logged onto Facebook and checked Scrabulous to make my latest move and discovered that I had been challenged to seven new games by strangers. Previously, I had never been challenged to even one game by a stranger and suddenly in the span of several hours, I had seven new games. I wasn't sure why I was being challenged, but didn't think much of it. Only a few hours later, I checked back to start playing the games and found that I now had ten additional challenges from strangers. Thoroughly confused, I began investigating the Scrabulous page to see if there was some telltale information that I was missing. Clicking on the global stats page, I found what was the likely source: I was ranked as the number two player on Scrabulous.



Hot! Out of about three and a half million people who play Scrabulous, I was ranked #2. It was an exciting achievement, but a definite inflation of my actual skills. Part of the reason I was ranked so highly was that I was undefeated, and with all due respect to my friends, I can't honestly say I took on a top contender to truly earn that distinction. Furthermore, I was currently playing a game against Anna in which she was creaming me by nearly 200 points. (Anna and I play a lot of Scrabble: when the time changed twice in a weekend, while watching the awesomely bad film Troll 2, and before a Polyphonic Spree show.) Since Anna traveled to South America, our game all but ground to a halt, but if we were to have finished it sooner, I would have never won the distinction.

Upon realizing of my honor, I realized that I faced two choices: I could accept the games and risk putting my ranking in significant jeopardy, or I could chicken out and deny them all in an act of preservation. Since there's no glory or honor in dodging a Scrabble challenge, I accepted them all, gradually playing more than thirty-something games simultaneously.

There was plenty of formidable opposition. A couple of people even started the game with unheard of 100+ point words. Unfortunately, some of the best players were also ridiculously arrogant, taunting me in what should have been a friendly game. I never claimed, as they stated, that I was the best Scrabble player: the Scrabulous site declared that for me. I contacted Anna to make sure she'd speedily finish our game so that I lost my first game to her and not some asshole who would smugly berate me after depriving me of my ranking.

Over time, I lost five games, and my moment in the spotlight as a Scrabble champion came to a surely permanent conclusion. Still, it was fun being at the top while it lasted.

In the meantime, we're grooming a bespectacled Bosco to be the next Scrabble champ:

Download and/or stream:
The Cardigans - My Favorite Game
The Polyphonic Spree - The Championship