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MOST 2009 Commentary: Round 14

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Go to: Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4, Round 5, Round 6, Round 7, Round 8, Round 9, Round 10, Round 11, Round 12, Round 13, Round 14, Round 15, Round 16, Round 17, Round 18, Round 19, Round 20.

Round 14

The last round for Saturday and after this round only 6 games to go. For the benefit of any Tournament Directors out there on the internet, one of the problems which has cropped up is the general protectiveness of all the players who have brought along their Scrabble equipment! Naturally, they have 'lucky' racks, tiles, even tile bags, boards and clocks, so rather than everyone leaving their equipment on the table at the end of each game there is a mysterious migration of bits and pieces around the hall with the inevitable short term chaos ensuing while everyone begs, borrows or steals a complete set of equipment! The belief in the 'luck' these bits of equipment can bring exceeds their fear of the wrath of the Tournament Director whose pleas to leave everything where they are have fallen on deaf ears!

The other interesting phenomena is the rising decibel level as each pair of players finish their game and proceed to carry out an instant post-mortem on the hits and misses, ploys and strategies, bonuses played or missed and finally agreeing the scores for submission to John Chew. In fact the only time the hall has been silent is when it has been completely empty!

Table 1 had the pleasure of a new player - Liliane Servier (ISR) (Rating 1319), who played against David Webb (Eng), the Tournament Leader with a rating of 1985. It was a surprisingly low scoring game with David winning through 382-255. This leaves David still agame clear of the rest of the field with 12-2, wins/losses.