Tuesday, May 22, 2018

The Scrabbleist Manifesto

There are two Scrabble organizations that put on sanctioned tournaments (meaning after each tournament your rating goes up or down depending on your success), NASPA, which costs money to join and which holds no tournaments in Wyoming or Colorado, and WGPO, the Word Game Players Organization, which  does hold tournaments in Colorado, and which is free to join.

The WGPO website is wordgameplayers.org/

From July 7 - 11, 2018, the National Scrabble tournament, WORD CUP 8, hosted by the WGPO, will be held in Burbank. At the moment there are 114 entries.

I will not be attending, because I live in Cheyenne and the cost to go to California and stay for 5 days is prohibitive. as I only have a 671 rating! If I'm going to go to a National tournament, I intend to win.

Which means that I am going to start training seriously for the 2019 WGPO National Tournament. Nothing has been announced yet, but I'm going to assume that it will be held in July, somewhere on the east or west coast.

So, here's what I need to do to win the C division in a national Scrabble tournament in 2019:

1. Start studying now.  I know all the 2-letter words, but there are still a handful of 3-letter words that I'm not quite sure about.  Then I have to start on the 4-letter words...

2. Start saving now. Depending on where the tournament is being held, I'd love to take an Amtrak train to and from it (having to go to Denver to do so as there are no passenger trains passing through Cheyenne, more's the pity).  I'd also like to stay in the hotel where the event is taking place, and those hotels are usually over $100 a night.

3. Continue to practice. The Colorado Scrabble Club holds 3 sanctioned tournaments each year.

The upcoming tournaments are:
  1. September 2018
  2. January 2019
  3. May 2019
There's also a sanctioned tournament held in Monument, Colorado each year in November, and I plan to go to that one in November 2018.

So that's 4 tournaments between now and July 2019 (when I'm assuming WORD CUP 9 will take place) and I'd like to be near the top of Division C in ranking at that time...if not even at the bottom of Division B!

But the main thing to do is study. Study. Study.

on