Share your WSC experience: Calum Edwards

A newcomer's report, By Calum Edwards

It has now been nearly two weeks since I arrived home from Poland after competing in my first World Scrabble Championship. I have decided to right a report on my experiences as some others have done. I suppose the first thing I should really mention is how surprised I was to be playing in the World Championships in the first place. I do not think I ever expected to do so. I certainly did not expect to do so this year as I had missed out on qualification for the England team through the Peak Rating System. (I think I was around about 17th on that list and the top 9 qualified). My only chance of qualifying was to get the one spot which is allocated to the highest finisher in the B.M.S.C Open Division who has not already qualified. I went to the B.M.S.C with no real expectation of doing this. I will not go into too much detail about what happened at the B.M.S.C because that is not what this report is about but I finished eighth, sixth of the seven people above me had already qualified and the seventh declined the place, so with just six weeks to prepare (renewing my out of date passport being first on the list) I was going to Warsaw.

The six weeks leading up to the Tournament were largely spent in a state of anxiety and worry. I could not quite believe I was going and I also could not believe that something was not going to happen to prevent me from going. I think when the plane touched down in Warsaw I started to believe it was going to be all right but I was still half expecting to get run over on the fifteen minute walk between my hotel and the Hilton on the first morning of the tournament. I got there without incident though.

My first opponent of the Tournament was Komol of Thailand. His rating of 2099 looked pretty intimidating. The fact that my first rack of the tournament was AAELORS settled my nerves a bit as I spotted the high probability bonus straight away. I managed to get to about 100 ahead before Komol started to claw back points and I ended up winning by just 7.

This was my first WESPA Rated game. My provisional rating after one game was a ridiculously high 2499 and it remained there after rounds two and three because I won those as well against Joshua Otenio Manase (Kenya) and Tony Leah (Canada). My round four opponent was Neil Scott (Scotland) who I had beaten in our two previous meetings. It was a really tight game but Neil spotted a clever play that blocked the spot I had left to play out for 19 which I had thought was unblockable. I lost the game by 7.

In Round 5 I had a good run of the tiles and beat Allan Simmons (Scotland) by over 150 points but in Round 6 I lost to Howard Warner (New Zealand) by a similar margin and for the first time in the Tournament I was not the provisional World Number One. I suppose nothing lasts forever. I had been at the top for just a few hours.

In Round 7 the tiles swung back in my favour and I beat Peter Kougi (Australia) to finish Day One in 20th place with 5 wins and 2 defeats. There was a moment in the last game where I got quite excited. I had a rack of FFGHINW. Peter started to lay down his tiles. I got the impression a bonus was coming down and I could see that the last letter was going to be in 6th position between two triple squares. I was hoping for an I to give me WHIFFING for 275. The tiles came down from an L on the board L... I... T... E...R...A...T... and then the last tile was an O. To add insult to injury, I was unsure whether HOWFF was a verb so I backed out of HOWFFING for 116 and just played HOWFF for 51+5.

At the end of Day One I really could not believe how well I was doing. It was way beyond what I thought I was capable off. I went into the tournament with no real expectations of how well/badly I was going to do. I suppose the thought in my head was. "It would be nice to win half but I'm probably not going to." After Day One I was on track to do much better.

Day Two was pretty mixed, not as good as Day One, but still reasonably good. I started by losing to Jim Kramer in Round 8 (U.S.A). In Round 9 I got my biggest win of the tournament against Weibin Toh (Singapore). I won by 206. I only had one bonus, ReADMIT for 68 but I got QuAY for 97 and JEUX for 78 meanwhile Weibin was experiencing quite a lot of vowel trouble.

Round 10, against Hubert Wee (Singapore) was where I made my first real howler of the tournament. I attempted a four-timer with ENDITERS* (I knew it did not sound quite right) when I had about eight available playable bonuses. Annoyingly the one anagram out of those eight letters that i could not remember was the one that hit the four-timer SINTERED. To begin with it did not look as if the phony was going to cost me as I got three bonuses in the next four turns but I went on to lose the game by 34 points. My record was now 6-4.

In Round 11 I beat Sherwin Rodrigues (India). I got OTARIEs and OVARIES. That is one example of the sort of good fortune I was getting for the first couple of days of the tournament. I then suffered my first consecutive losses of the tournament in Rounds 12 and 13 against Mikki Nicholson (England) and Dean Saldanha (Canada). In Round 14 I beat Sam Rosin (U.S.A) to put me on 8 wins and six losses.

In Round 15 came one of my highlights of the Tournament when I beat Joel Wapnick of Canada by just three points. This is the only time I have beaten a World Champion. (He won in 1999). In Round 16 I lost to Naween Fernando (Australia). At the end of Day Two I had 9 wins and 7 losses with a +276 spread and I was in 33rd place. I felt that I was still doing really well even though the tiles had not been as kind to me as they had on Day One and I had also made one or two mistakes.

Please forgive me if I do not dwell to long on Day 3. This was not a good day for me. The first couple of games I felt I was a bit unlucky with the tiles but then I also started to make bad decisions and played three phony bonuses in the space of five games. My opponents in Rounds 17-22 were Feargal Weatherhead (Ireland), Tony Sim (Singapore), Bradley Whitmarsh (U.S.A), Lynne Butler (New Zealand), John O'Laughlin (U.S.A) and Chrys Placca (Ghana). I lost all six games making my total 9 wins 13 losses. My +276 spread had been totally destroyed and was now -401. I had now lost 7 consecutive games.

In Round 23 against Marie Fernandes (Oman) I finally got a win, despite playing a phony (the second of the three I mentioned earlier). In Round 24, however, having got away with having a phony challenged off in the previous game, I had another one challenged off and the next thing I knew I was 200 behind after consecutive bonuses by Evan Cohen (Israel). I lost by 113. I lost to Simon Gillam (Scotland) in Round 25.

On Day 3 I had won just 1 out of 9 games. My record was now 10-15. My spread was -635 and I was in 94th place. I felt a bit down about what had happened but what did surprise me a bit was that I still felt fairly calm about how things were going and I still felt good about the tournament and the whole World Championship experience. One characteristic about the way I have improved as a Scrabble player over the last three or four years is that my temperament has improved. I am less inclined to get down about things, though it does still happen especially if I have a few bad tournaments in a row. I am also less inclined to petulance and panic when I am playing and feel things are not going my way. Again that does not mean it does not happen sometimes, just less often than it used to.

My hope for Day Four was just to win a few games. I think the figure in my head was five. I knew my opponents in the first couple of games might be weaker than those I had been playing the first few games but I knew they were still going to be pretty strong players. It is after all the World Championship.

Day Four began with a comfortable win against Ben Berger (Germany) but then I had a big loss in round 27 against Abraham Sosseh (Gambia), so I was now on 11 wins 16 losses. I was pretty nervous in Round 28 against Tomas Rodr (Czech Republic), I was only 40 ahead as we approached the endgame in a game I felt I should win. He then made a couple of mistakes (including passing his turn in the hope I would open a place for his bonus) and I won the game by about 150 in the end. Tomas played AGOROT which I had not seen before.

In Round 29 I beat Zbigniew Wieckowski (Poland) despite yet another phony bonus being challenged off. In round 30 I beat Suzanne Dundas (Netherlands) and in Round 31 I beat Lakshan Wanniarachchi (Sri Lanka). I got TORQuED for 89 to get me back into that one from 100 behind and ZUPANS for 57 two goes from the end was the winning play.

I now had four wins in a row. My overall record was 15 wins 16 losses and I had moved up to 67th place with 3 rounds to go. In Round 32 I played Theresa Brousson (Malta). Theresa played a couple of really nice bonuses EuPHROE and HINDLEGs but I played my highest scoring move of the Tournament TIECLASP for 98 and seemed to be able to score heavily on nearly every turn. I won 492-456.

In Game 33 I played Ed Martin (England). I got ahead and managed to stay ahead, winning by 79. I was now on 17 wins and 16 losses. I had now won six in a row. My luck ran out in Game 34 against Blue Thorogood (New Zealand). He got FOLIUMS for 82+5 on the opening move and continued to score heavily after that. I always seemed to be struggling to score. I managed to bonus out with ETESIANS to cut the spread to 76. It was not until a couple of days ago that that outplay meant that I had started and finished the Tournament with a bonus word.

So at the end of my first, and possibly only, World Championship my record was 17-17 with -300 spread and I finished in =60th place. Overall I was pleased with that. I was very pleased to have won 7 out of 9 on the last day.

So will it be my only World Championship? I hope not. I thought the whole experience was fantastic and I really want to go again but realistically I cannot hope to qualify in the same manner next time which means that I need to significantly up my game to improve my average peak rating by at least 12 points. Is this doable? I am not sure. I have already begun to increase the size of my Cardbox in preparation for the long slog.

One thought that I hold onto is this. When I started to play Scrabble at Romford Scrabble Club in 2004 I never thought I would be good enough to win the League there. I have now done so nine times. When I first played Tournament Scrabble i never thought I would be an A Division Player. I am. When I started playing in A Divisions I never thought I would win one. I have won twelve. I never thought I would win a prize in a major. I have once. I never thought I would reach the NSC semi, I have four times and I never thought I would reach the World Championship once, and I have done that too.

So why not twice?

In fact I am not going to stop there. That just tells the story in terms of Scrabble. On a personal level there is more to tell. In 2005 I reached the gates of my own personal Hell and I had the choice to keep on going and walk right through them, that seemed at the time to be the easiest option, or to walk away and try to save myself. I chose to walk away. For the next two years things were very up and down and there were plenty of setbacks. I went back to those gates a couple of times and had a stroll around just inside a couple of times but I walked away again. Since then my life has got better and better and the experience of playing in the World Scrabble Championship in Poland is hopefully something I well remember forever as being one of the best experiences of my life. I am not really sure why I am saying all this. Six years ago I could see no hope and no way out from where I was, since then my life has improved beyond what I could have imagined. So I suppose what I am saying is do not give up hope and keep going.

So, again, why not twice?

Anyway, I have more questions that need answering waiting for me in my Cardbox, so I better leave it here. Finally i would just like to thank everyone who helped and supported me in those panicky weeks in the build up to Warsaw and also those who helped and supported me while I was there. Sometimes it was just something simple like saying "Good Luck" before a game.

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