Share your WSC experience: Kamil
Word Freak, By Kamil
Everyone of us - scrabble players have probably tried to tell about his passion to other people many times.
We were explaining that we don't go to the end of Poland to get prizes or trophies but just for the joy of placing some blocks on boards. Perhaps we were telling to our more informed friends how splendid words we managed to create. And how we won by a couple of points thanks to that. Or how we could have won if we dindn't miss some key word. We were complaining about the letters we drawed form the bag and that it's always the opponent who has more blanks. People couldn't understand us so we gradually came to the conclusion that we can be understood only by some geek belonging to the closed group of people who go to the tournaments.
Last weekend I couldn't have missed the opportunity (perhaps the only one in my life) to see the World Scrabble Championships in English. Maybe I could expect that, but the thing which suprised me the most was the fact, that there exists the world parallel to ours. And it's even more crazy. I saw a bunch of sometimes odd-looking people, who came to Warsaw for a few days not from Wroclaw or Szczecin but from Canada and Australia. One of our representatives - Zbigniew Wiaczkowski have flown from the United States though he wasn't sure he can play in the tournament! Despite the language barrier I could talk to everyone about the topics mentioned at the beginning without any problem.
I observed a lot of interesting ideas. Many people had their own, often handmade, racks. Everyone had his own scoresheet (in the Dawid Pikul "eLecter"'s style) with his personal tracking sheet pattern (the interesting ones were theese with dark background and bright letters). Most of them were recording their letters and moves in order to analyze the game later. The tournament rules were a bit different to ours - it seemed interesting for me. The standings were based on the difference betweend the winner and the defeated person, not just the points scored. There was a strange system of scheduling a couple of rounds forward. I didn't manage to catch its sense. Every game took 25 minutes per player. The special rotating boards were in use, which everyone turned to their side during their time. Players didn't stop the time to write down the score. Challenging the words looked in the way, that one player entered the word into the computer and the second one launched the process (that was very good idea by the way). When the word was invalid the player lost 5 points and every player could consider the decision whether to challenge the opponent's word during his time. When someone draw to many tiles, the opponent could look at few of them and choose the one, which should be returned into the bag.
A few moments stucked to my memory during the tournament. The determination of Pakorn Nemitrmansruk from Thailand, who was defending his World Champion title, what was enough only to take the 3rd place. The magnificent game in the last round, which decided about getting to the great final, between Deve Wiegand form the United States, who was finally 4th and Andrew Fisher form Australia - further runner-up. And the broadcast from the final, which I was watching with the Polish participants - Rafal Dominiczak, Wojtek Usakiewicz and Bartek Pieta. Together with Brett Smitheram, who was leading the event they helped me to underastand what was really going on, because looking at the finalists' letter sets I could only find the words NIEUFNE, DERENIE, ROZRODU or RILSANU, which are correct in Polish, but not necessarily in English Scrabble :-). Crowd reactions were amazing when further champion Nigel Richards from New Zeland was drawing consecutive blanks (9/10) or when his opponent was pulling out all vowel sets. What staggered me the most, was the applause when the winner was putting on his rack consecutive letters of the word TOLARJEV, just like the audience had foretold this play.
Coming back to our representatives - they were telling me that they felt great as the host of the event, because there were more than one of them for the first time and they sensed the support of their fans who were present at the venue. Perhaps that was the reason why they achieved the best results in their scrabble careers. The best of our players Rafal Dominiczak was 55th with the positive result (17-17 and +308 difference). The event was a great success thanks to Mattel organizers, Hilton staff and volunteers from the Polish Scrabble Federation. People who didn't get there don't know what they have lost, because all the traditional reports, results, recorded games and photos which you can find on the official WSC website can't give you this feeling of participating in such unique event.
There were some events associated with the World Championships, for example Scrabble Day, which took place in the tent in front of the Palace of Culture and Science. I succeded to get there to see the ending just after watching the final game. At that moment there was a Polish scrabble game going on between the teams consisting of Polish celebrities and scrabble players. The event was leaded by Tomek Zwoliñski and Marzena Rogalska. Probably a lot of people were encouraged to try playing scrabble, but it's definitely not enough to understand what I mentioned at the beginning of my report. That's why I hope you will understand me - I left the show and I surrendered to my passion - a game of ad-hoc invented Polish-English scrabble against maniacs from the United States, who I met just before :-).
Same explanations - Dawid Pikul is one of our players - he was the first one who used his own score sheet (with his nickname eLecter on it). Tomek Zwoliñski is our most famous player and Marzena Rogalska is Polish well-known TV personality. We have also some different rules in our tournaments. I didn't mention the G-incident because I didn't heard of it at that time. Now it's the only story from this magnificent event in Polish media, and that's really sad for me.