All right then! We've now had 7 weeks' time to decompress following the crazy roller coaster that was the Virtual World Cup. I'd say that's long enough, no?

I'm starting to feel a hankering to run some virtual Scrabble tournaments again. It's not that we've been lazing around doing nothing these last 7 weeks - in fact, we've been hard at work electing our first Board of Directors and taking other steps to build out the CoCo's structure - but at the end of the day, the job of a Scrabble organization is to run Scrabble events. It's about time we started doing that again.

A few weeks ago, I wrote up a post in this space laying out our options for future online tournaments. I tossed out a bunch of different ideas - individual events and team ones, longer events and shorter ones, etc, etc - and I was curious to hear people's feedback. Turns out, that feedback was... well, all over the place. Which I should have expected. Whenever you ask Scrabblers for their opinions, you're going to get a diverse range of them. Our community is full of different people who are passionate about their different viewpoints.

But overall, I'd say, the majority of the input I received went something like this: Watching the VWC was great, as it gave people a chance to see the best players from all over the world compete, but for our next event, they want something simpler and more accessible for everyone.

So I figured, why don't we just keep this simple?

That's why, for the remainder of 2020, our plan is to run three more virtual 1-day tournaments. For those of you who played in our initial 1-days earlier this year, this will be more of the same. Back in the spring, we ran the first 5 Computer Users' Remote Event (CURE) tournaments; this fall, we'll be back with 3 more. Here are the details.

CURE6: Saturday, Oct. 10, 9 a.m. Pacific Daylight Time

CURE7: Sunday, Nov. 8, 12 p.m. Pacific Standard Time

CURE8: Saturday, Dec. 5, 6 p.m. Pacific Standard Time

Please take note of the varying time slots - we're deliberately mixing things up so as to allow different players in different time zones a chance to play at least one tournament. No matter where you are in the world, there should be at least one event at a reasonable hour for you - for example, the first event is at 5 p.m. in Nigeria and 9 p.m. in Pakistan. The last one is at 9 a.m. in Singapore and 11 a.m. in eastern Australia. Of course, all three tournaments should be during the day for players in the U.S. and Canada, since that's our core player base.

(Also note that our Daylight Savings change in the U.S. happens in early November! This may make your time zone math a little tricky, so do be careful.)

Anyway, these events should be good. 1-day tournaments are nice and simple, they're open to everyone, and they should only take 3-4 hours of your time. Also, we're working on a new pairing system that's quick and efficient, cranking out automatic pairings for these 1-days a couple rounds in advance. This should cut down on delays and make all the events run smoother than ever. We're working out the details of that system now, and we'll share them with you soon.

This series of 1-day events should be a nice way to tide us over until next year. Like I said, these are busy times for the CoCo, as we're launching more tournaments and simultaneously bringing in a new Board of Directors. I'm looking forward to getting together with our board members and discussing our future tournament plans with them. We may well come back with something bigger and better than ever in 2021. Time will tell.

Until then: I hope you enjoy the next three CUREs! If you're interested in playing, then sign up now by following the link below.