NSW Champs

The NSW championships are this weekend. I hope to perform well but have a horror week at work and will be quite tired I imagine by the end of the week. On the upside I have about 10 days off work after the champs so that will be cool.

I notice on the flyer that there are 8 games each day which I tend to like (the more the better per day I reckon) but all the games are 50 minutes, or 25 minutes a side. Correct me if I am wrong but I thought this was the NSW champs and in NSW we play 22 minutes a side. I suspect that this has been done to woo more interstate contenders for the title.

On another note I saw that Peter Kougi of Victoria won a tournament on the weekend and rose above 1900 for the first time. There seems to be a trend of players ratings rising, including mine. We now have several players rated over 2000 and one over 2100. This surely must be a result of the expectation of win rating curve being adjusted some time ago or is it just a result of the level of Scrabble player increasing over the last 18 months or so?

Joan Rosenthal Shield

It is that time of year again in NSW Scrabble where the person that has gained the most ratings points in the year wins the Joan Rosenthal Shield. Joan has been a prominent player in Australian Scrabble for many years.

The reason I mention this is that I was a former winner. Other former winners from memory are:

Wilma Vialle
Chris May
Tony Hunt
Tony Kalayzich
Colleen Walker
Apologies for anyone I missed....

When I won is was with a rating gain of 322 points. This year there seem to be two main contenters.

Michael McKenna and Kitty-Jean Laginha

Michael has moved from about 673 to a 1407 - A massive gain of over 700 points.

Kitty-Jean has moved from 760 - 1378 - Another massive gain of over 600 points.

This surely is the future of Australian Scrabble with many more junior about to attend another of Karen Richards youth Scrabble training camps this holidays.

Good luck to Michael and Kitty as they pay the final tournaments this weekend before the winner is decided.

I cannot wait to see who it will be next year.

Funplex

I was playing a game of Scrabble against Quackle this afternoon, as I usually do a few times a day. The great thing about Quackle is that you cannot dumb it down and play against a lesser player. So it is not that often that I win a game and therefore you learn or are at least exposed to lots of words.

On this board that follows Quackle played the wonderful "FUNPLEX" which got me to thinking what other types of plexes are there. Right after the FUNPLEX play Quackle then proceded to play ZOOCYTIA which I also did not know.

• APOPLEX
• CINEPLEX
• COMPLEX
• CONTRAPLEX
• DECOMPLEX
• DIPLEX
• DUPLEX
• FOURPLEX
• FUNPLEX
• GOOGOLPLEX
• HETERODUPLEX
• HYPERCOMPLEX
• IMMUNOCOMPLEX
• IMPLEX
• MEGAPLEX
• METROPLEX
• MULTIPLEX
• NONCOMPLEX
• OCTUPLEX
• OVERCOMPLEX
• PERPLEX
• PLEX
• QUADPLEX
• QUADRUPLEX
• SIMPLEX
• SUPLEX
• TRIPLEX
• UNPERPLEX

Welcome

Hello All

Welcome to my new blog. I am not really sure what I will be posting on this blog but as it evolves I image it will be a mixture of my thoughts and experiences in the wonderful world of Scrabble.

I would welcome any comments or thoughts that you have. Do not be shy speak up. One of the beauties of blogging is discovering websites and resources on the web that you may otherwise may not have been aware of because of other people posting etc.

I chose the name Clabbers for this blog as it is an anagram of Scrabble and was quite surprised that the Blogger site still had it available.

So for my first post, if you are not sure exactly what Clabbers is then read a definition.