The 2nd official tournament by the Scrabble Association since the 12 Aug 2012 Jurong Green Mini, this tournament drew a large number of NTU players as the last tournament, the Singapore Open Championships 2012, was held too close to our exams. Of notable mention was the Hall 7 Scrabble Team, which came down in force with 4 of their members.
Div 'A', as usual, was the clash of the titans, and there were many indeed. Out of 8 players, 5 were Grandmasters (GM), 2 were Senior Masters (SM), and our own SKY was the only Master (M) there. SKY did his best, and in a remarkable game against our boss LKB, he lost by just 3 points, with both players having breathtaking scores of 516-513. In his last 2 games, which were both King Of The Hill (KOTH) after 7 rounds of Round Robin, SKY came back with 2 wins against SM Adrian Tay to overtake him and place 7th, despite being seeded last.
GM Aaron scored 6 wins out of 9 to place 2nd with a superior spread. Interestingly, he defeated all the other players exactly once, except the big boss GM LKB.
GM LKB proved himself the National Champion once again, as he left everyone trailing at least 2 points behind, scoring 8 out of 9 wins, achieving a high game of 590, even bullying 3 other masters with spreads of >150.
Div 'B' was really a 'fake' division, with more than half the players pushed up from Div 'C' due to insufficient players. Out of the 9 players (excluding dear ZZ Bye), 6 were from NTU. Aside from the 4 Hall 7 players, there was also Gabriel, and Stifen, a hall 6 alumnus who had his first tournament after a long hiatus.
Gabriel was the highest rated in Div 'B', but only managed to win 2nd place, losing just 1 game to the division winner with 8 points out of 9. He had an almost perfect record of every game above 400 points, except for the 1 game he lost.
Tommy achieved 4th place, narrowly missing the prize pool. with a score of 5 points out of 9. With a score of 507, Tommy took the honours for high game.
Jinghan came in narrowly behind in 5th place, also with 5 points, but losing to Tommy by spread. Nevertheless, he was crowned "King of the Hall 7 Slope" by defeating all other Hall 7 players in their personal encounters in the tournament.
Stifen graduated in AY2010-2011 and used to be known as one of the better scrabble players from hall 6 on par with SKY. After not playing for a long time, he made a comeback with a decent score of 4 out of 9.
Chun Kin, aka "Dancing Hunk" (an anagram to his name), scored 3 points. He tried very hard to overcome unfavorable circumstances, especially when 3 moves into his game against Tommy, he was supposedly trailing by 160 points. He finally managed to catch up to 20 points, but was thwarted by the tiles in the end.
Ramona did not have such a good tournament, scoring 1 point, but that would be in part due to the fact that she had 2 papers on the last day of exams, 7th Dec, unlike most of us lucky souls. Nevertheless, she put up a good fight, losing to the top 2 players by margins of less than a hundred.
Div 'C' this time consisted mostly of "first-time" players. Another 3 NTU players, Seline from Hall 12, Yun Jie from Hall 6, and Morris from Hall 6, had their first foray into local scrabble tournaments. However, insider information from SKY raised a puzzle, as he mentioned that Yun Jie had played in Div 'C' 2 years ago and had actually won a prize then.
After 8 rounds, Seline was revealed as the clear winner, with 7 wins out of 8, beating both other NTU players narrowly, with margins of less than 30.
Yun Jie placed 4th with 4 points out of 8, winning 3 games by huge margins of more than 120, and in an epic match with Morris, losing by just 2 points.
Morris placed right next to him at 5th, also with 4 points out of 8. Nevertheless, Morris claimed the honour of having the high game, with a score of 495, thrashing his opponent by 265 points!
More detailed results can be found here
The next Scrabble Association (SA) event mentioned on their Calendar of Events is the "SA Millenium Cup" to be held on Jan 12-13, 2013, which is, unfortunately, only open to SA Members. However, as SKY said, one could simply treat the membership fee to SA ($12 if I'm not mistaken) as the entry fee to a regular tournament. Also look out for our own WGS Boggle Mini happening on Week 5 of Sem 2, more details later!
