…with Gary Moss

Today, yesterday, tomorrow . . . these are the days of your life.

I know many people who live their todays as if they were merely practice. They don’t give as much importance to the week days as they do to the weekends; they don’t appreciate the clubs as much as they honor the tournaments; they don’t honor the daily homework the same as they do the final exams or the graduation.

Those folks are missing out on a whole lot. The learning occurs while doing the daily homework. There are 5 weekdays and only 2 weekend days. And even though graduation is a distinguishing milestone, many people go on to work in fields other than the major indicated on their diplomas.

If you play scrabble at one club each week and the club plays 4 games at the club session, you’ll most like play 68 words and have 68 words played against you. (The average scrabble game is 17 turns per player.)
If you play at club once each week for the entire year, you’ll play about 3,224 words and at least 15% of those words (483) will be repeats of words you’ve already played, leaving only about 2741 different words.
Considering that there are more than 155,000 words in the OWL2, you would have played a mere 1.7% of the words in the dictionary in the course of the year.

We humans learn by doing. No wonder your word knowledge/power is lacking, if you depend solely upon expanding your word prowess via club play.

This example goes beyond scrabble and applies to all of life.

To have great relationships we need to devote more time to them. To maintain healthy bodies and minds we must make it a priority and not just a once in a while thing. To become the master of any skill we need to spend the time and energy doing whatever it takes.

Make TODAY the first day of the rest of your life. Use it up. Live it completely.

Get yourself a book of ‘Word Lists’ to carry with you. Look at them when you’re at lunch or waiting for an appointment. Keep one next to your easy chair. Word lists can be so much fun. Start right NOW and CLICK HERE!

If you only play online then the computer will keep score for you.

When you play head-to-head, the official scrabble rules say that each of the players must keep the cumulative, running scores of their total and that of their opponent. Then, if there is any discrepancy, due to computational error, you can look back and clear things up.

When playing head-to-head, seasoned players also use a tracking sheet. The printed sheet has representations of all the tiles that start out in the bag. As those tiles are played onto the board, players are permitted to cross them off of the tracking sheet, updating the list of the tiles which remain unseen. (Those tiles are in one of 3 places: on your own rack; on your opponent’s rack; or in the tile bag.) As the game progresses and fewer tiles remain unseen, clever players can use that information to determine whether or not it is wise to exchange tiles or if he/she should block a specific hot spot. Tracking is especially valuable in a close scoring endgame.

To this end, over the last 20 years, I have developed a Tracking/Scoring Sheet that works well for me. I have introduced this sheet to players at my clubs and tournaments. I would guess that hundreds, if not thousands of players use my product or some variation of it.

In addition, I bind 35 of these 8.5 x 11 pages (printed front and back) into a comb-bound booklet with a personalized cover. These are for sale, cheaper when purchased in quantity. Have a look: CLICK HERE!

You still must do the math accurately.

You still must do the tracking accurately.

This tool will help you get the job done and that could lead to improving your game.

CLICK HERE!

It’s is completely okay with me if you choose to do something other than scrabble. I don’t understand why everyone doesn’t devote themselves to scrabble as I do. But that’s alright with me, especially if you are investing yourself into something else.

An Aside: I’ve shared this story before and it is worth repeating. The cousin of my ex worked for the public schools as a secretary and her husband was a public school teacher. From their 20’s through their 40’s they lived their lives very frugally with a eye on a plan for their future. They planned to retire from their jobs as soon as they qualified for their pensions, purchase an RV, and travel the countryside, enjoying the wilderness and visiting every yard sale that they passed. They found other things to busy their lives as the years passed. And just as they were nearing their retirement year, Nori became ill. It was breast cancer. And soon after she was gone.

An Aside: I married at a relatively young age, 22. I married the girl who I had taken to the senior prom. My parents and grandparents had always been married to the same partners for their entire lives so that was my expectation too. I never thought other than I would be married to my beloved our whole lives long. But women’s lib changed the way that women envisioned marriage. It was quite confusing to me and I thought that I was doing everything required to be a good husband. It was not good enough. She busied herself with other outside activities. (It didn’t help that many of our closest friends were divorcing and the women were experiencing new life adventures.) My ex stopped being my girlfriend and I was feeling abandoned. After the marriage ended, after 18 years, there was a period of 8 -12 years when I desperately tried to reinvent myself and get on with life. Like many people who marry early I had the belief that I was only a ‘half’, searching for my other ‘half’. And then, one day, about 13 years ago I came to the self-realization that I am ‘whole’ and okay just as I am. Knowing that, at my core, has freed me to live my life to the fullest. No more postponements. And if I choose to share life with a partner again, she’ll have to be ‘whole’ too.

Postponement sucks. It’s like purgatory. And there is no need to live that way. The truth is that we each have the power to choose to live our lives fully. So you have my permission to begin living right now, if you’ve been on hold.

The only postponement that I’ll allow in my life these days is that turn or two, while forming my rack, which leads to a bingo and another scrabble victory.

P.S. Happy Birthday ZuZu

There are many things that others do for you.
Some things that others may do for you are listed here:
Hem your slacks
Repair your auto
Plow the snow off your driveway
Write your doctoral thesis
Be your personal shopper
Compute your income taxes
Operate
Fly you to the moon
Take your trash to the landfill
Entertain you singing an aria
Wash your windows
Grind your glasses
Dig your grave
Deliver your morning newspaper

No one else CAN do it for you, scrabble that is.
Becoming a star on the scrabble scene requires the following:
Your desire
Your passion
Your actions
Your time
Your focus
Your regimen
Your commitment

Scrabble is a game of offense; smothering your opponent with words that you have acquired and uncovered in the cracks of the pages that have gone unnoticed by the multitudes. Words like ‘bemadam’ or ‘flancard’ and ‘panchax’ will make most opponents pause a while and scratch their heads in wonderment. I will often create a short list (10 or fewer words) at least once a week and attempt to play them on my unsuspecting opponents.

I’ve noticed that if they challenge one of my words and lose that challenge, I am usually home free after that, as they will feign from challenging anything I choose to play.

HOWEVER . . . the other side of the game is ‘De-Fence.’ What’s fair for one is equally fair for the other. Your opponent may be using the same tactic. You may have to stop and discern whether a word played is legal or phoney. And that’s not always easy.

First, if you are uncertain, say “HOLD” very quickly. If you do not say ‘hold’ and your opponent draws even a single tile out of the bag, it is then too late to challenge. At the point you say “HOLD” your clock is running; you may remain on ‘hold’ for as long as you wish. The first thing I look for when I am ‘holding’ my opponent is whether their play creates an opportunity for me to respond with a big score of my own. If it does, I may accept the play just so I can get my play down. If I don’t have an advantage by that play, I consider if the word is good or not, then I challenge or not.

Last night at Club #350 I played a silly phoney for 62 pts. ( knosh ). My play provided my opponent an opportunity to play a legal bingo, hooking under my phoney for 76 points over a TWS. He chose to challenge me off the board and at the same time eliminated his own bingo spot. As it happened, the game became a cat & mouse game on a closed board and I eventually eked out a victory.

There is no single ‘right way’. There is usually one way which is better, based on the probabilities at that time. But, the game of scrabble contains a luck factor of about 30% and is therefore highly unpredictable.

You have to know what is a phoney as well as knowing a volume of legal words.

I challenge you to improve your game. Plan a scrabble vacation to southern California where you can come to play at Club #350 and THE 1ST SUNDAY TOURNAMENT. Click Here

Many people who get a rack like this one throw their hands up in the air and tell me, “Now I remember why I don’t play too much scrabble.”
I understand the feeling completely, but when I decided to play the game competitively, the two kinds of words that made the biggest impression on me were the real common words like ‘cheese’ and the really obscure words like ‘ouistiti’. That’s right, if there is an open ‘S’ on the board, that ugly rack above can create a bingo.
I can hear you talking to me through your computer saying, “Well, who would know a word like that?” But now you know it. It is a monkey. I, like so many other club players learn most words one at a time. I don’t always find a word the ‘ouistiti’, the 5 vowels will throw the best of players. But if you like strange words there is an amazing list called the 5 Vowel 8’s. Here’s another one of those racks:Through a ‘B’ one could spell ‘aboiteau’, a dike. Another interesting fact is that most words that end with ‘eau’ will take an ‘X’ at the end: ‘aboiteaux’

Too many people sell themselves short by telling themselves and believing that they could never remember that kind of information.

The truth is that when you decide you can’t, YOU CAN’T.

The truth is that when you decide you can, YOU CAN.

That applies to everything in our lives, not just scrabble. Now, have a great, productive day.

I’m getting pretty gutsy here. There is a good chance that the ‘Believers’, no matter what their slant, will judge me to be a heretic and block this site and think bad thoughts about me.

But you and I both know, if you have ever opened your door to a Jehovah’s Witness or a Fuller Brush Salesman, that ‘he who believes the hardest’ has no room for consideration outside of his own belief system.

Most believers believe that their beliefs are the direct ‘Word of God.’ They believe that their own understanding of ‘The Word’ is the ‘TRUE WORD’. That implies that all others who lay claim to other belief systems are simply ‘Wrong and Misguided’.

I contend that in spite of the ‘universal good works’ that so many well meaning missionaries and governments provide to people across the planet, much of it is done with an underlying self-righteousness.

The case is frequently that ‘enemies’ come together, standing side-by-side, during a Haiti or Chili or Katrina, providing help to the victims, in spite of their doctrines. All helpers feel empowered by being part of a universal helping force. But when finished, they go back to their individual doctrines and feelings of righteousness. Isn’t it obvious that there is something much bigger that guides all of us?

Faith and Belief with a small ‘f’ or ‘b’ have been the root cause for war and genocide throughout all recorded time. In spite of our computers, satellites, and bullet-trains, we are still only animals.

We rush off to do good works in Haiti and display our works grandly on newsreels and UTube. But we continue to fail our own citizens with filibusters in our congress, aligning ourselves in red camps and blue clusters, prolonging hunger, poor education, idle hands in search of work, all for the glory of some idyllic ism that is in itself a ‘FAITH’ based hinderance to achieving agreement.

Playing scrabble would be an impossibility if it were a ‘faith based’ game. Players themselves, would never agree upon which words we could or could not play. Players would rarely agree on the amount of time for a game. If we denied Methodists from playing the naughty words and yet permitted the Atheists that privilege, there would be an uneven playing field. What if Jews weren’t allowed to play words that were tref? What if we demanded to see your green card if you played any foreign based word? Pretty silly. And yet many people play their lives away being that silly, hiding behind their personal faith and beliefs, as their justification.

Scrabble helps me know all people and influences me to be a citizen of the world.

Just what determines a persons’ age? The number of pages that have turned on a calendar? I used to think that way but not any longer.

There is some invisible factor related to age that has nothing at all to do with benchmarks and milestones. Age has little to do with wrinkled skin, graying hair, or hair loss.

Just like me, I’m certain that you must know people whose birth certificate indicates that they are age 90, but they have the spirit, liveliness, and attitude of a person much young. Likewise, we all know people in their 50’s and 60’s who live their lives with one foot in the grave.

It is possible to find a whole set of reasons and circunstances in everyone’s life to rationalize their behavior and attitudes towards age and living.

But as difficult as it is for some people to hear others pointing out their weaknesses, the bottom line and choice of how we live our lives is our own choices and actions.

I knew a woman, over the span of many years. She always battled her personal weight issues, trying to lose weight and stay thin. Every time a new diet was published and promoted on Phil Donahue or Oprah she became a true convert. She took in her slacks and let them out again so many times that the seams had seams. While she was finding success on a diet she preached to others who looked too big, in her eyes. And then, each time she slipped back to her old bad habits, the wonder diet faded from memory, and the extra pounds returned, like a homing pigeon coming back to its perch.

I know many people who are now retiring or have been retired for some years who are ‘anti-new-technology’ from iPods to Computer to iPhones. They are satisfied with vynal records and 8-Track-Tapes, but are limited to the music still available on those formats. They may give in to using a computer for the sake of sharing email with their kids and grandchildren. And they are willing to ignore all the other wonderous possibilities in computer technology for enhancing their lives.

I meet an endless stream of people who happen upon CLUB #350 or find me on the internet; they express their joy in playing scrabble. And so many of these scrabble enthusiasts are content to continue to simply play the game at the kithcen table level, unwilling to accept the challenge to expand their word knowledge and play the game in competitive circles.

It’s Your Choice.

Sorry folks, I traveled all day Tuesday from Michigan back to Laguna Woods, CA. I didn’t have the connections to do my blog. I’ll be back in the swing of things on Wednesday or Thursday.
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.(Left to Right) Gwen Rea, Margie Gordon & Maddy Kamen. Lorry Higgins & Irma Proulx (Some of the scrabble queens at Scrabble Club #350)

Birthdays can be such wonderful celebrations. They are a time when we pause to look through the rear-view mirrors of our lives at all the places we’ve been and the things that we’ve done. Birthdays stir up memories of old and allow us to relive events otherwise set on the shelves of our past. Birthdays are benchmarks and milestones that notch achievement and fortitude. Birthdays are, for some, a time of rededication and planning for the future. (If one has made it this far, than it is more than likely there some more to go.)

Attending someone’s birthday party can be very joyful too. Just watching the celebrant glow in the warm aura of their friends is heart-warming too.

I attended two birthday parties yesterday. The day began with my mom’s 90th birthday party, a brunch, attended by a small number of her closest relatives. Grandson Alex Hale and great-grandson Wylie Sutton sang songs of tribute. Everyone enjoyed a traditional brunch of bagels and lox with all the trimmings, topped off with ‘hamentashin’ for Purim, and a traditional birthday cake.

Later that evening I attend a 65th ’surprise’ birthday party for friend Donald Deitz. It too was a special happy ocassion.

An Aside:
There I was at the birthday party of a friend, not knowing many of his other friend, neighbor, or acquaintances. It was one of those cocktail style parties where people walk around nibbling on delicious food on servers and meeting and talking with other strangers, meeting at the party for the first time. So, I was standing there, eating a shrimp and an exotic type of cheese, when I overheard a stranger introducing himself to someone else in the room. When he said his name my ears perked up. I turned slowly. I stared at the (60ish) man. I stared hard. Behind his glasses and under his beard I imagined seeing the face of an 8 year old boy whom I had not seen in 50+ years. I turned to the stranger and said, “I know you;” “I knew you when were 8 years old.” And then I told him from where and when I knew him. His jaw dropped and his wife took four steps back. They were astounded. We stood together and talk for a good part of the evening and I felt like I reconnected with a long lost friend.

When I return home, to my scrabble club and friends on Wednesday, it will be like coming home to a birthday party. Come join us and party with us.