In Reply to: Netsuke............the beat goes on posted by larrysden on June 06, 2002 at 16:43:41:
OK, the unmasquer's unmasqued, and ironically enough foiled by the very investigative technique that blew my V1 "case" wide open. My decision to hurl my little stone anonymously was driven by pure childishness and cowardice. But it's generally known by anyone who'd care that QrazyQat is Steve Cook, and I had no real desire to get that personally involved in the whole thing. I go to Scrabble tournaments all over the country and am constantly introduced to on-line players, something that's dodgy enough without it being someone you've already made enemies with. And it's frankly a bit embarrassing to have it known that I spend my time browsing through game results of a ladder I haven't even played on in a couple of years. (God, it sounds even more pitiful now that I've put it that way.) So I probably shouldn't have said anything, but that's exactly why the whole Emperor's New Clothes phenonmenon persists on these ladders. In fairness (to me) you'll note I didn't mention any names and made no allegations that weren't a matter of "public record". Why I should really care about any of this is mysterious even to me, but I have a vague idea. OK, here we go... (see how much trouble you've caused me larry? Well karjen really, I guess.) I've played Scrabble as long as I can remember and have been at least reasonably good at it for most of that time. But I didn't start playing "serious" Scrabble until I discovered the on-line version over on the v1 Zone a couple of years ago. (This coincided with my finally getting a real computer.) The idea of actually studying the Scrabble dictionary and memorizing anything beyond the 2's was totally alien to me. I had enough raw skill to hold my own (I played as Psteve back then) but I couldn't hold a candle in terms of basic Scrabble word knowledge to most of the players there. ("SUQ??? Where'd that come from?" I was still using the OSPD first edition then.) I soaked up hundreds of words from my games there, the ones anyone will if they play enough games against semi-serious players along with a number of fairly weird ones like WATERDOG, VISCACHA, etc. that I've never had a chance to play to this day. At the time I didn't know what to make of words like this. I wondered, are there actually people who have words like this loaded into their brains ready to spring in the highly improbable event they'll ever get the opportunity to play them? I didn't know if I was being had, or if I was getting my first glimpse of an alien race of Scrabble playing machines. It turned out it was a bit of both. I soon learned that the NSA was more than the sort of Scrabble fan club I'd imagined from their little cards you'd get with a new Scrabble set. I got "Everything Scrabble" and learned about the tournaments and the ratings, and that 1600 or 1700 was considered an "expert" depending on who you asked, and naturally wondered how my ability compared to that of a certified Scrabble master. Surely these were the people who were playing the VISCACHAs and never phonying. When I started playing over here on v2 I discovered the even more amazing species of players who never phony, never fail to detect a phony, and never mistake a legitimate word for a phony. (In fact this phenonmenon was so nearly universal I made no secret of the fact that I would never challenge a word I wasn't specifically sure was phony, since my hunches were virtually always wrong.) Also at this time I started to become aware of which players were NSA players, and was dying to know what their ratings were, so I'd have something to gauge myself by. I was a bit crestfallen to find that not a single one of the NSA players that beat me on a regular basis was even close to the expert range. Yet deep down I knew something had to be wrong here. Something didn't add up. Every previous opportunity I'd had to gauge my ability at word games and puzzles against the general population had confirmed my smug belief that I had a rare talent in this direction, and I just had a sense that the same had to be true of my Scrabble abilities. Yet my experiences at the two Zone sites seemed to be telling me that no, in fact there were scads of people, most of whom took a very laid-back attitude to the game (not that there's anything wrong with that), never studied a single word list, who were just as good or better than me, and had achieved a mastery of the lexicon I couldn't imagine ever having. (I considered the possibility some of them might not be playing honestly, but I swear to you that back then I was naive enough to believe that it was a very rare adult who would waste their time and compromise their self-respect cheating at an on-line game. And a lot of these people were my "pals" and I couldn't imagine they'd be so brazenly dishonest with someone they liked and respected.) I might have simply said to myself, (and I think I'm finally coming around to the reason this whole issue still burns me up) "I'll never be better than mediocre at this game.", and given up on the idea of going further with it, as I think a great many players here probably have. I would have been justified in imagining that actually venturing out to my local Scrabble club would just bring humiliation, the experts there scoffing and jeering when I challenge SHANTIH and let DENTURED* pass. Well, as you've already guessed, I didn't let these apprehensions hold me back, I went to the club, I went to a tournament, and a couple more, and within 6 months I had a 1700 rating. Two years and more than a little studying later I'm the highest rated player in Ohio (thanks in part to John Luebkemann's decision to leave the state) and 50-somethingth in North America. And yet I still play phonies and make challenging errors every few games. As does nearly every player at every level... in live games. In on-line games of course perfection is still the norm. In live games the bingos at all but the highest expert level are at least 90% pedestrian (by which I mean words that are either common or common in Scrabble the way ERASION is), and among novice and intermediate players (of whom I've played many, at club and in my first few tourneys) nearly all of the bingos are words every expert knows and easily finds. Surely there are a handful of players whose word knowledge far surpasses their playing ability, but I have yet to run across one of these.) In meeting and playing face-to-face with a few of my on-line heroes I've learned that in fact there are grown up people who cheat and cheat hard at meaningless on-line games. Maybe the person I singled out isn't one of them and if she isn't I'm a heel for suggesting it, but to pretend they don't exist, and exist in large numbers, is pure fantasy.
PS to larry: While we're on the subject... tell me honestly, did you know all those bingos you found on OSPD challenge? If you say yes, I say you lie, since your posts, at least until this one, have shown you to be someone who couldn't spell their way out of a soggy thesaurus. If you say no, no sweat, larry. If that is your real name.