DAVID MORE IN HOBART?

I will not shy away from privately or publicly supporting David More, even though I am in his bad books at present. My resolve is emanating from my own personal experience with some lame ducks on the current Victorian committee, who made fatal organisational errors and still refuse to step down from their perpetual control of that committee.

David is perfectly peaceful if not intentionally stirred up. To illustrate this, I will give you an example of what I had to confront while recently playing in the Nationals at Hobart. There were minor issues that I would not mention in detail because they were too strange to be believed. Any of such deviously planned situations would put David's temper on fire if he faced them. The perpetrators were too clumsy and lacked the imagination that could have told them that Mohammed Hegazi and David More are two different persons who would react differently in any given situation. David might rave on about how some players are targeting him, while I would ignore the matter and deprive the offenders of the satisfaction of getting any reaction.

The incident I will mention here was created by a player that I would not mention by name, but if you are good at cryptic crosswords the clue is: A floating iceberg in the shape of a shoe. To be fair, I could have unintentionally stirred her up by failing to recognise her as I shouted loudly asking JH to help me find her! It was both funny and stupid by me. The last time I could remember seeing her was in 2011 at Lake Wonboyn in a four-day tournament organised by Kashi Ross (Thiris). Since then, time has added wrinkles to our faces that tide cannot fix. Only "Botox" can make costly temporary short-term repairs.

The lady (a figure of speech) in question accused me of cheating by making a tile on the board temporarily disappear in order to allow me to hook a last-minute bingo that made her lose the game. Furthermore, the magic tile (R) reappeared on the board at the end of the game, in six different locations. She called the TD who sorted the matter out, as he could see the impossibility of the ridiculous claim. The real aim of the culprit was to associate my name with a cheating incident. It would not matter to many that the accusation was false. They quite readily would prefer to propagate the lie as fact.

Now, imagine David More facing this type of situation. You would then understand why I would continue to support him against such devious creatures.   

HOW TO RULE SCRABBLE RULES

Some heated discussions do flare up every now and then, about whether to adopt WESPA rules in totality or to keep on patching up our Aussie rules. We have borrowed the "open hand rule", from WESPA, in order to make sure that a hand heading off to the bag is not carrying any unwanted baggage.

Unlike WESPA rules, our Aussie rules kept on rephrasing the simple rule of how high the top of the bag should be in relation to players' eyes. Instead, we related that height of the bag to players' shoulders, then later on to table tops, regardless of the fact that all players use their eyes to see, not their shoulders or table tops.

The funny aspect is that I cannot recall any time tournament directors started by pointing out a summary of essential practical rules, in order to save new players the embarrassment of being requested to observe some rules.

Anyway,  my contribution here is:

A new rule should be devised that would make counting the scores, and confirming aggregates, take place outside play time. Personally, I make this happen, under the present imperfect rules, by disputing score counts in order to stop the clock for the sake of relaxed accurate counting.

I admired the contribution of Adam Kretschmer when he chipped in, to resolve a slinging rules match, with his precise-concise quip, " Even if we assume that Aussie rules are somewhat imperfect and that WESPA rules are somewhat imperfect, surely it's better to be playing under and working from a single somewhat imperfect set of rules that we can work towards fine-tuning as a Scrabble community? Having a long discussion every few months to on-board WESPA rules one-by-one doesn't seem like a good use of anyone's time."