Yorra challenged FLATFISH, a reasonable move given the word and its score, but it was in the official word list, so he lost his turn. Cresta exchanged tiles on three of his next four turns, while Yorra bingoed again, this time with SCAMsTER. (The lowercase letter represents one of the game's two blank tiles.) Yorra told me he had no idea whether the word was legitimate. (It is.) SCAMsTER was simply the first possible bingo he saw. That put another letter, the R, in a triple-triple lane. Cresta, who held I, O, Q, U, and X, recognized he was three-quarters of the way toward a really huge triple-triple: QUIXOTRY. (He had studied words starting with Q.) He exchanged two letters from his rack in hopes of drawing the needed T and Y. From Cresta's vantage, 57 tiles were unseen, including three T's and one Y. The probability of pulling one of each was 532 to 1.

Cresta beat the odds. And when Yorra didn't block the open R—because he played his fourth bingo, UNDERDOG, for 72 points—Cresta laid down his 365-point QUIXOTRY (a quixotic action or thought).

# posted by Gerry Canavan @ 4:37 PM  |