Holy cow. If this is what awaits us over the next 13 weeks, then we are in for... quite the entertaining 13 weeks.

We're now wrapping up the first round of the World Blitz Scrabble Championship and, my goodness, it's been an action-packed tournament so far. Collectively, we played 324 games of Scrabble in a span of 4 days. There was action around the clock, and it was fast-paced as all get out. Some of the games were well played; others were botched in hilarious fashion. All of them were entertaining.

There isn't ample space here to recap every single match, but I thought it would be fun to run through some of the notabilia. Here are a few memorable happenings from Week 1 of BlitzChamps:

THE DOMINATORS

Every game counts in this format - in the end, only 2 players from each group will advance to the knockout rounds, and we're likely to see some ties in the standings that are settled by the tiebreaker of game wins. Suffice it to say that if you start the tournament 9-0, you're putting yourself in an excellent position right off the bat.

In the opening week, we saw 10 players put up dominating performances in their matches, winning all 9 games - the undefeated players were David Eldar, Jesse Day, Jakob Teitelbaum, Geoff Thevenot, Andrew Fisher, Dave Wiegand, Chris May, Brian Bowman, Austin Shin, and myself. All of these individuals are in a strong position in the tournament so far, obviously - we'll see if they can keep it up in Week 2!

(To those of you on the losing ends of these 9-0 matches: Despair not. You were all paired against very high-seeded players in the first round, and you'll surely have some matchups in the coming weeks that are more competitive. Hang in there!)

THE UPSETS

Generally in a 9-game match, the cream rises to the top - these series are long enough that the best player usually wins. But not every top seed took care of business this weekend! We had a few lower-seeded players who came out strong and were able to beat their higher-rated opponents.

Three of our No. 6 seeds - Martin DeMello, Natthanon Limthongkam, and Harry Wiggins - were victorious against their No. 5 opponents. Hriday Samtani notched a win as a No. 7 against a No. 4. And Dipankar Chatterjee delivered the upset special of the weekend - a No. 8 seed toppling a No. 3!

As they say: That's why they play the games. You may think you know who's winning any given matchup, but you never know for sure.

THE HIGHLIGHTS

There were a lot of exciting games this weekend! I had the pleasure of streaming the first match of the tournament, an 8-1 victory for Matthew O'Connor, on Wednesday night. Matt put on an incredible show, including one game where he played DOUZEPER and then FIRECLAY shortly thereafter.

Josh Sokol and Jack Moran had an exciting battle - one of Josh's best plays was extending BRUSHED to AIRBRUSHED to hit a triple and score 42, while Jack got down a flashy long word of his own when he found TINP(LA)TES.

Amalan Iyengar had a thrilling endgame against Ricky Purnomo in Game 1, where he pushed Ricky over on his clock and ended up winning a bizarrely low-scoring game, 359-351, finishing with 4 seconds on his clock. (Ricky came back and won the match, winning 7 of the next 8 games.)

Peter Armstrong came across an amazing position against Mark Francillon - he played GUMPTION one square short of a triple word, and Mark stuck a W in the triple lane to partially block it. Pete soon drew the S and was poised to play BREWSKIS, through the W, for 137! Pete had it lined up, and Mark blocked at the last second.

The weekend was packed with fun moments like this. A joy to watch!

THE LOWLIGHTS

There were also some not-so-great moments. There were a lot of people who blew games simply by running out of time. There were a lot of phony twos - including surprisingly many that stayed on. Browse some of the boards from this weekend, and you'll come across such gems as AK*, UF*, LU*, OA*, IA*, and AP*. At one point, Mack Meller went on Twitch to stream two matches, and in just two matches he saw SE* played twice. You hate to see it.

Chris Grubb (who I don't think will mind me briefly chuckling at his expense) played a hilarious phony when he put down ATRESIA hooking onto KOJI... to make KOJII*. Jennifer Clinchy (who I know won't mind) proceeded to accept KOJII*.

I myself did something epically bad, while the live Twitch audience cackled at my ineptitude. I put down BLUN?ERS, stared at it for an eternity, and pondered whether BLUNTERS* was a word. I eventually decided yes and committed it; the audience very much enjoyed the irony of me blundering by missing BLUNDERS.

Anyway, I say all of this to say: It's blitz. This stuff happens. It's very hard to play perfect Scrabble with just 3 minutes on your clock. It's very easy, however, to play entertaining Scrabble.

Which brings me to...

THE CONTENT

There were a ton of blitz matches being streamed on Twitch this weekend. I myself covered 6 of them, and enjoyed every minute of it; Mack did a Friday night doubleheader, and a bunch of other people streamed themselves as well. By my count, we broadcast a total of 17 out of the 40 matches live.

This was awesome! The Twitch broadcasts, to me, are the best part of running this tournament. It's great having all of this entertaining content to broadcast, and on top of that, the chats are a wonderful way for us all to come together and socialize during this era of social distancing.

Thanks to everyone who helped create fun Scrabble content during Week 1. I hope you'll all keep it up next week and beyond.

Week 2 of BlitzChamps is on the way! The pairings are posted now on our live coverage page - take a look and see what exciting matches are coming up next.