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Since virtually all sports involve variable conditions, comparing one performance to another is technically imperfect. Consider the absence of black players in Babe Ruth's day, or the presence of steroids in the Barry Bonds era. On its face, the new Scrabble records seem to avoid such problems. No one's juicing in Scrabble. Points in a game are just points in a game, and Michael Cresta scored 830 of them.

That's a bit of a misinterpretation of what happened. NSC Finalists Trey Wright and David Gibson had both agreed to play the best-of-five finals without using words that ESPN would not televise. In the heat of the moment, at this position, Trey forgot and played LEZ for 32 points. My wife, who was sitting beside him recording his plays, brought the word to the attention of the tournament directors, who spent a good ten minutes verifying that the correct course of action was to set everything (clocks, tiles, board) back the way it was before he made the play and let play continue from there.

That was the 2003 Scrabble All*Stars. The event Dan is writing about, the 2004 National Championship, will be shown on ESPN in October. At least as long as I can stop reading this thread and return to helping work on the postproduction. Speaking of which, this time around, we have the ESPN crew who did the World Series of Poker working with us, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing the final product.

By the way, if you want to see how Dan did at the NSC, or play through dozens of top-level games, check out the (shameless plug) event web site. Archived coverage of last year's All*Stars is also still available.

John Chew, Webmaster, www.scrabbleassociation.com

That was the 2003 Scrabble All*Stars. The event Dan is writing about, the 2004 National Championship, will be shown on ESPN in October. At least as long as I can stop reading this thread and return to helping work on the postproduction. Speaking of which, this time around, we have the ESPN crew who did the World Series of Poker working with us, so I'm very much looking forward to seeing the final product.

By the way, if you want to see how Dan did at the NSC, or play through dozens of top-level games, check out the (shameless plug) event web site. Archived coverage of last year's All*Stars is also still available.

John Chew, Webmaster, www.scrabbleassociation.com

Also, the name he goes by is simply "Winter". The only reason he has the "John Smith" in his name is because too many things (like the DMV) break when presented with a single name.

He is also a fairly good tournament Scrabble player. Because the National Scrabble Association's database can't handle single names either, he's registered as "Winter ZXQKJ".

That sux, I was looking forward to playing an GNU version of scrabble from the NSA...

On a lighter note, nothing pollutes the english language like desperate Scrabble© players.

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