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THURSDAY, AUGUST 16, 2012
SCRARBLE SHAKE UP
THE UNIVERSITY DAILY KANSAN
Top Scrabble player ejected after cheating
ASSOCIATED PRESS
ORLANDO, Fla. — One of the top young Scrabble players in the country has been kicked out of the game's national championship tournament in Florida after he was caught hiding blank letter tiles, organizers said Tuesday.
John D. Williams, Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Association, said that a male player was ejected from the 350-player event in Round 24 of the 28-round event.
The cheating was spotted by a
player at a nearby table, who noticed the ejected player conceal a pair of blank tiles by dropping them on the floor, organizers said. Blank tiles can be used as wild card letters. When confronted by the tournament director, he admitted to it, organizers said.
Williams, who has served as executive director for 25 years and co-authored a book on the popular Hasbro board game in 1993, said this was the first incident of cheating at a national tournament. However, he said it's been known to occur at smaller, regional events.
"It does happen no matter what."
People will try to do this," he said. "It's the first time it's happened in a venue this big though. It's unfortunate. The Scrabble world is abuzz. The Internet is abuzz."
Williams would not identify the player by name or age because he's a minor. There are four divisions and he was competing in Division 3.
He said Division 3 is equal to "any great living-room player out there."
In Scrabble matches, players accumulate points during one-one matches by pulling random letter tiles from a bag of 100 and trying to create words.
A total of 98 tiles have letters on them and two are blank. Blank tiles can be used as wild card letters to complete words.
The ejected player had concluded a previous game and never reinserted the blank tiles into his bag in an attempt to use them at his discretion in the next game, organizers said.
The ejected player forfeited all of his wins.
Williams said there is usually "good self-policing in the Scrabble world" as players try to protect the integrity of statistics on the competitive circuit.
Players in the national tournament format play multiple matches over the five-day event. The winner is determined by a combination of their overall record against other players and the cumulative point spread over the entire tournament.
That's because national events draw young players to seniors. The leader entering Wednesday's final day of competition is National and Scrabble All-Star Champion David Gibson, a 61-year-old math teacher from Spartanburg, S.C.
jason ketter, 30, and nine-time Jeopardy champion from New Jersey, is in fourth place.
The winner receives the $10,000 top prize.
"It gets pretty deep. We're one step away from drug testing," Williams joked.
While Williams said this was the first time the national tournament has dealt with scandal, the incident could shine a brighter light on other advantages players have been known to employ.
Even before Tuesday's cheating ejection it was well-known that some players take minerals known as "alleged brain boosters."
"But no steroids so far" Williams quipped.
SANDWICH SHOWDOWN
ASSOCIATED PRESS
Over 250 individuals help SUBWAY set the Guinness World Record for the most people making sandwiches at once to celebrate "Avocado Season" at SUBWAY on Wednesday in New York. Sandwich makers used more than 905 lbs. of meat and vegetables and 555 feet of fresh-baked SUBWAY bread.
NATIONAL
ASSOCIATED PRESS
An X-51A Wakever hypersensitive flight test vehicle is uploaded to an Air Force Flight Test Center B-52 for fit testing at Edwards Air Force Base.
The X-51A Waverider was designed to reach Mach 6, or 3,600 mph, after being dropped by a B-52 bomber off the Southern California coast on Tuesday. Engineers hoped it would sustain its top speed for five minutes, twice as long as an X-51A has gone before.
Unmanned hypersonic vehicle fails flight test
LOS ANGELES — An unmanned experimental aircraft failed during an attempt to fly at six times the speed of sound in the latest setback for hypersonic flight.
But the Air Force said Wednesday that a faulty control fin prevented it from starting its exotic scramjet engine and it was lost.
"It is unfortunate that a problem
with this subsystem caused a termination before we could light the scrubjet engine," Charlie Brink of the Air Force Research Laboratory at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, said in a statement.
The Waverider successfully detached from the B-52 and fired the rocket booster as planned. Then its scramjet engine was supposed to take over as it attempted to climb to Mach 6. Fifteen seconds after separating from the rocket booster, the Waverider lost control.
"All our data showed we had created the right conditions for engine ignition and we were very hopeful to meet our test objectives." Brink said.
ASSOCIATED PRESS
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