I played at this local and another somewhat recently. Local tourneys are not in good shape. This has recently improved by one mark though, Nick handed out a survey which fed back to him that people preferred to play in divisions, so now most tournaments are in two divisions, which is good for me, because playing anyone below 1500 for me is just ( Read more... )

Is what I been telling anyone who'll listen. But yes really. The timing in September, actually means I have not played since 2008 or 9. Not only would this include the 10 years I lived in London, but also years where I lived in America or elsewhere, and then I boycotted a couple as they would not fix the dictionary. So it's good to be back at ( Read more... )

The Vic champs this year had high player numbers, but unfortunately the field was exceptionally weak. To make matters worse, there were apparently complaints from the bottom of the field about the "tight australian draw", about the bottom two players repeat-matching too often, which meant there were only 2 repeats (and two KOTH). This meant I ended ( Read more... )

Well I tried to wrangle some people together for this tournament - with Ed and Trevor assenting, I decided that was good enough to play. As the tourney closed in though I was decidedly less excited and kind of annoyed with myself for signing up, especially when the weather was nice enough outside for padel, which I am so obsessed with now that I'm ( Read more... )

I meant to add this to my original post and forgot

1. a number of people asked me about my close friend rich (nutsinho) and dont seem to be aware that he died (this came to my mind as I was writing about friends in my previous entry, and certainly had an effect). I wrote a long eulogy that you can seek out on his memorial thread on 2p2.

2. Chris ( Read more... )

You have the choice to skip 6 paragraphs of complaining about things.

Since I am on holiday (so to speak), i thought it would take me forever to write this post, but I've realised I can burn an hour on my flight to Chile smashing this out. So yes, I am on an extended holiday - I was in Japan with some friends for a couple of weeks, then friends ( Read more... )

I would like to say I underslept before this tournament (as I often do) because I was excited about scrabble but the truth is I was thinking about padel and a match I had scheduled later. Sad. I turned up on time anyway but very tired - next time I will experiment with skipping the first game or two as seems to be allowed now - why force myself out ( Read more... )

Well at lunchtime the Scrabble trust went to Laurent. Anyway we've been going there the last couple of times at Balwyn and the food has seemingly improved over time despite a few teething problems. But this Laurent in Camberwell, oh my god. I went to order a salmon sandwich and as I was about to pay when I goggled at the price, twenty dollars! I ( Read more... )

Well I always look forward to the decathon as a lot of good players show up but this year was a bit of a letdown due to the shitty draw. With Naween Saidu and Ed present it should have been enough for a day of competitive games, and sure enough, those 3 games were very competitive, but every other game I played was a total blowout. My best play was ( Read more... )

OK so there is a place called College Dropout Burgers that I've been meaning to try for ages. The whole burger shop is Kanye West themed (and it was made before he lost his mind) - apparently he sued them unsuccessfully to cease and desist (I think they had to make some changes after the lawsuit, but the shop lives on). It's in Heidelberg which is ( Read more... )