…with Gary Moss

Archive for December, 2010

I love scrabble. I love talent. I love creativity.

Don’t you just love it when you discover something new to you that you just love? Other than sometimes feeling a little foolish that I hadn’t known about this earlier in time, I am so pleased with myself. I can’t wait to begin to share my find with others.

Yesterday I was introduced to the music of Lorraine Feather.

Okay, I hear you! Many of you are already familiar with Lorraine’s work. What can I say? My blinders have me so focused on running clubs, teaching scrabble and producing Letter Man that I’m a bit out of touch with some of the funner things in life.

The rest of you will just have to trust me and CLICK BELOW to enjoy Lorraine’s scrabble song.

Last Wednesday I met a man named J.D. who showed up unannounced at my Scrabble CLub #350, In Laguna Hills, CA. Yesterday J.D and I were both attending the Laguna Woods Village Scrabble Club. It was there that J.D. told me about Lorraine’s scrabble song and provided me with the link. I listened. I loved it.

In an introductory email Lorraine wrote:

I am a lyricist (have written for films and TV, much of it for animation) and jazz singer. There is a long article about me that posted on allaboutjazz.com recently, accompanied by a link to a free download of my song “Scrabble,” from my latest album Ages (the song contains the word OXAZEPAM). It was written with Dick Hyman, a great stride pianist in his 80s who, among other things, did the music for various Woody Allen films.

Listen NOW!
http://media.lorrainefeather.com/mp3s/Ages/Scrabble.mp3
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And then get your weekly scrabble tip from Letter Man. CLICK

It was pouring rain outdoors. The scrabble heat was on indoors at the Winter Holiday Scrabble Tournament in Laguna Woods, California. Gary Moss, Director

FINAL RESULTS

1st Rachel Knapp…………….12/1 +1362
2nd Doug Brockmeier………..11/2 +1362
3rd Victor Tantua…………….11/2 +1220
4th David Whitley……………..9/4 + 591
5th Tom Singleton……………8/5 +614
6th Fern Trausch……………..8/5 +412
7th Gary Moss…………………8/5 – 40
8th Arna Schutz………………..7/6 – 186
9th Esther Kisich……………..5/8 – 518
10 Diane Kerner……………..4/9 – 684
11 Margaret Hughes……….3/10 -1114
12 Beverly Moutet…………..2/11 -1082
13 Jim Laris…………………..2/11 -1289

High Play: ’158 points’ for ‘beadiest’ by Doug Brockmeier
High Game: ’623′ by Doug Brockmeier

Next Scheduled Tournament: SUNDAY, JANUARY 2
For Info CLICK HERE

Did you watch Letter Man this week? He always has a scrabble tip or two for you. JUST CLICK.

He flies through the air with the greatest of ease,
He can spell any word with from two to five Es,
He provides tips and such
To all mavens and rubes
You can catch him each week
When you sign on to You Tube

CLICK HERE

Going the extra mile puts you miles ahead of the competition.

It happens all the time. You’ll see it for yourself if you are paying attention. I see it all the time in ‘living color’ as it is played out in front of me at Scrabble Club #350.

One of our regular players get caught up in life’s web and is diverted away from scrabble for a while (weeks or months). Then they return. In what seems to be a very short period, they have usually lost their winning scrabble ways, compared to those who have continued their scrabble regimen.

A few weeks ago one young man returned to play after an absence of several years. He had made the conscious choice to come back and regain his scrabble mojo. He realized that in some ways he would have to start all over again. (When we don’t use a muscle we often see it atrophy.) Scrabble skills and words in our memory banks waste away too, when unused.

This particular club player pulled his WHIZ CARDS and word lists out of the drawer, dusted them off, and began reviewing. He learned that during his absence from the game there had been an update to the OWL Dictionary, so he had to invest in the purchase of OWL2. Her took one of my Scrabble Workshops devote to learning How To Use ZYZZYVA (a word study program).

The first week back to club he went 0-4 and didn’t have a single bingo (a word formed using all 7 tiles from your rack and earning a 50 point bonus). Now, a month later, he was 2-2, had 4 bingos and beat yours truly.

You can most likely remember times when you really applied yourself toward achieving a goal vs. other times when you did things half-heartedly. We make those choices over and over again, all day long, all month long, all year long, all life long.

Here are some tools that will surely help you move up in the ranks . . . IF YOU USE THEM.

SCRABBALUTION . . . a 90 minute move including scrabble tips and incites.

ZYZZYVA PROJECT . . a 15 minute movie teaching you HOW TO use the ZYZZYVA program

SCRABBLE 101 . . . an online class requiring a 5 week commitment with da

And whatever you do, don’t miss the Scrabble Tip from Letter Man. Watch him on You Tube. CLICK HERE

I don’t think that I’ll ever forget the words ‘opacified’ and ‘obviate’.

I learned those two words from a National Scrabble Champion who, in an instant, taught me the lesson that ‘it ain’t over til its over’.

The rest of the story.

It was just another Tuesday evening scrabble club meeting in Livonia, Michigan back in the mid 1990s.  I had attended that club regularly for several years.  For a relative newbie (me at the time), winning even a single game out of four was a huge challenge every week.  The regulars included Paul Epstein, Rod Nivison, Karol Foss, and the Champ, Chuck Armstrong.

On this particular Tuesday evening the tile gods seemed to be smiling down on me.  Every draw out of the tile bag left me with balanced racks; I had more than my share of the blanks and the esses.  If I remember correctly, I had won all 3 of my first 3 games that evening.  And so I was paired against Chuck in the final round of the evening.

(At this point in time I had never ever beaten Chuck in a game of scrabble.)

I took a deep breath as I drew my first seven tiles and if you had listened very closely you may have heard this agnostic saying a little prayer, asking the tile gods for continued good fortune.

Voila, I had a bingo and an early lead with an opening score of 70 points.  And that’s the way the game went.  I lead in the score throughout and even when Chuck made some wonderful play, he drew closer but continued to trail.

The game was drawing to an end.  Chuck had just played a bingo, ‘corniest’, putting a ‘C’ at A4, creating an opportunity for a triple/triple.  At this point I still lead by 23 points.  After Chuck replenished his tiles, 2 tiles remained in the tile bag.

My rack was A-D-E-F-I-I-P and I had plenty of time on my clock.

And just like all evening long, I saw my bingo.  It was not a triple/triple, but I could play ‘PACIFIED’ through the ‘C’ for 98 points.  I remember feeling giddy as I laid the tiles down and announced the score.  I was so proud of myself.  I now lead by 121 points as I drew an ‘A’ and an ‘M’, the last two tiles from the tile bag.

Chuck was cool.  He was always a calm professional on the outside.  My smile was a grin from ear to ear.  Chuck sat thoughtfully shifting the tiles on his rack, never once displaying panic.  I knew his rack because I had tracked correctly.  He was sitting there with A-B-E-I-O-T-V.  What a mess I thought.

And then it was over.  I had lost.  See Chuck’s final play: CLICK HERE

Too many vowels. Too many opponents’ bingos.

It was her first time playing at scrabble Club #350. She didn’t know what she was headed for. Too many unknown 5 vowel 8s. She came undone.

But she sucked it up, copped an ‘I CAN’ Attitude, remembered that scrabble was one of her favorite things. When Rachel bites and when Roy stings she remembered that she was playing her favorite game and didn’t feel so bad.

It was just about this time that she realized that the chances of winning without some coaching and studying was about a million-to-one. But she was ‘One-In-A-Million.’

She went straight home from club and watch every available episode of Letter Man on You Tube, navigated over to WORDGIFTS.NET to purchase a copy of the OWL2, and pulled out her WHIZ CARDS with studying stems on her mind.

And then like thunder and lightning, she stuck a chord and that may have been frightening to others. She slithered into a study hole, remaining there for an entire week, coming up only for an occasional morsel of food and water for sustenance. And when an entire week had passed and Club #350 met again she appeared in a state of preparedness.

This time she’d moved ‘em (tiles) to the right, if it took all night. She practiced that which she had learned: she was a hooking fool; shake, shake, shake a tile bag; then along came ‘satine’ and ‘satire’. She bingoed early and straight through lunch; her mood was as sweet as the punch.

You can do it too.

And Happy Birthday Gretchen, wherever you are.

Scrabble has become a part of the holiday experience for countless families around the globe. The best part of family get togethers is the greeting; seeing each other; embracing each other; feeling that familial connection. But, there is only so much small talk that most people can endure. Usually, the one individual who is bored the most suggests, “Lets Play Scrabble.” When no one has a better idea, someone remembers in which closet the board was buried last year, and the game begins (without even counting the tiles.)

In order to help you prepare for that moment in time, I’d like to share this link: CLICK HERE

All your scrabble wants and needs are available at this one location: CLICK HERE

Lets say you are playing a game of scrabble and at the end of the game you not only know that every word played on the board is a ‘legal’ word, but you also know its meaning.

I’m sure you feel great but what have you learned during that game? Probably nothing at all.

Now lets say that during another game, after you played ‘zebras’ (vertically in the left-hand triple column, ending just above the TWS) I came back playing ‘sferics’, hooking the first ‘S’ under ‘zebras’ creating ‘zebrass’.

I can hear you moaning. Then saying something like, “That can’t be any good.” And finally I imagine that you would scream, “CHALLENGE!”

After the play was adjudicated and the verdict was ‘ACCEPTABLE’, some players would throw up their hand and walk away. Other players would appreciate having learned something new and might even make a note to look up those words at the end of the game.

Those words are not new words. They are part of the 95% of the words in the dictionary that most people do not know.

We competitive types like to learn lesser known words and surprise the likes of you and others by winning a challenge, after playing the words we have build into our word arsenals.

I don’t play obscure words in order to scare wannabe players off. I hope to inspire them to expand their knowledge. You see, when you play a word that stumps me . . . I end up learning that word too.

When I lived in Michigan I would frequent the clubs and tournaments in Canada. The Canadian use the exact same dictionary as we Yankees do in the scrabble world. And even though we all speak English, the Canadians use many words that you may not encounter in everyday conversation in the USA. The differences ae even greater when you converse with English speaking people from England, South Africa, and Australia. At times one might be surprised that you are speaking the same language.

Become all that you can be. Let SCRABBLE open the world of words and language for you.

Watch Letter Man on You Tube for some basic scrabble tips, and then build on that.
CLICK HERE.

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Being a grandpa or a great-uncle is so much easier than being a
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parent. You get to play with the kids, have your fun, get them all riled
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up, and then kiss them good-bye, leaving them to their parents. Today
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will be one of those happy days for me. Today is Griffin’s 3rd birthday
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party. Happy birthday, sweet boy. (I may show up as Letter Man, cape
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and all, and confuse the little guy and his friends.)
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Letter man has launched Episode #5 on You Tube, CLICK HERE. Thanks for watching. Again I’d like to ask for your help to network the word that Letter Man is out there with constructive scrabble tips.
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We’re coming to the end of another calendar year. Many people create New Year Resolutions in order to inspire themselves to improve or better themselves. May I suggest that you consider putting a scrabble resolution on the list that you make this year. You can inspire yourself to take a ‘BIG LEAP’ or a ‘small step’, just decide to do something. If you stand still, the world will pass you by.

I guess, while I wasn’t paying close attention, I somehow arrived at this stage in my life where I find more and more friends and associates leaving the stage. When I look into the mirror or see Letter Man appear on You Tube I sometimes wonder to myself, “Who is that person?”

It is just the cycle of life doing what life does. And since we scrabble players become so much closer to so many other players, we are apt to experience an even higher number of profound losses.

So today, when I read the emails circulating on the CGP and OSPD scrabble chat networks, I was saddened to read that our dear friend Stella (Cheryl Cadieux) is entering into hospice.

If I remember clearly, I recall Cheryl as being one of the very first competitive scrabble players I met on a snowy February day in 1987. She was one in a pack of players along with Elaine Glowniak, Chuck Armstrong, Jerome Boyd, Karol Foss, Rod Nivison, Steve Grob and Paul Epstein to name a few. It was in Allen Park, Michigan at the Presidential Inn on I75. I thought that I was headed to some singles event where they were playing scrabble. (Some newspaper editors suck at placing announcements in the correct columns.)

But there was Cheryl, playing letter combinations that did not look at all like words to me. She has always been a top wordsmith in my experience; it took me several years to become good enough at the game to earn the opportunity to play against her in a tournament.

I have always enjoyed being in Cheryl’s company: so bright; so witty, so fun.

I have been a long time follower of Stelllla’s OSPD network and a frequent contributor. What a wonderful service she has provided to all of us scrabble hounds.

Its at times like this, when filled in with deep concern and sadness, I am also exhilarated by a deep appreciation for Cheryl, for scrabble, and for all of you who are sharing this ride through the galaxy. While some of you may be focused primarily upon your beliefs and what may lie ahead, I am simply looking back, celebrating all the good times we’ve shared, and feeling thankful for being with you in the same circle.

We never know our exact fate and when it will be our time to say good bye. So please know that I love and appreciate all of you. And until my curtain falls I’ll continue to turn tiles and fly onto your computer screens, celebrating life.

~ Gary