Weekend Tiebraker

The Wife and I played five Scrabble games this weekend. The tiebreaker went like this, with seven-letter words earning the bonus highlighted:

Her		Him
swivel	38	carouse	22
starting	68	airfield	63
hoaxed	27	we, weaning	79
dirtiest	66	affect	28
phobia	54	at, anomaly	77
equine	37	razes, affects	43
rev	18	globules	78
jump, ja, my	31	sky	20
drop	21	gluon	7
mint	6	E, I, O	-3

End score: The Wife 379, Transplanted Lawyer 414

Normally, you'd think 379 points would be enough to win even a two-person game. But I got extraordinarily lucky and got not one but four long words and that really helps out. And fortunately for me, only once did I open up the triple word score to The Wife in a way that she could really capitalize on it (phobia) and I kept on getting good opportunities. In fact, if you look at the running count, you'll see that the lead went back and forth between us the entire game, until "globules."

I still think The Wife is better at this than me. Even when I jump out to an early lead, she finds a way to sneak up on me and even in a game like this, she didn't lose by all that much in relative terms. But sometimes you'd rather be lucky than good.