Scrabble. Being somewhat of a Scrabble geek, I'm finding the World Scrabble Championship games fascinating. It's very cool how they've put all the games on the web, play by play. (Good thing I didn't discover this while they were playing, or I probably would have got caught up in watching in real time.)

Having flipped through a couple games, I'm surprised by a couple things: First, how often there are challenges and letter trade-ins. I didn't realize this was a common component of world-class play. And, secondly, the huge percentage of plays that are words I've never heard of. I expect a large degree of this, but these people must sit around and, literally, memorize the dictionary. On second thought, I looked up a few of them, and a lot are indeed not in the dictionary (even the Scrabble one). Heh. These people must also be good bluffers. They also have some scoring rules I'm not familiar with, regarding bingos and challenges, but I haven't bug in enough to figure them out.