Recapping a weekend of Portland Pub Scrabble - and running!
It's back!
This past weekend brought the highly anticipated, long-awaited, much-ballyhooed return of Portland Pub Scrabble - by far the most popular series of brewery-based 1-day Scrabble events on the West Coast of the United States. After a dazzling run of 10 events in 2024, the PDX Pub crew lay low for the first little bit of '25, but they were back with a vengeance on Saturday and Sunday, running a pair of events back to back.
And this time, there was a twist - the weekend featured not just two Scrabble tournaments, but two running events as well! Scrabble director and runner extraordinaire Dave Wiegand put the whole thing together, and he participated in an impressive total of 21.3 total games + miles on the weekend.
Without further ado, here's the report from Dr. Bing...
On this fine spring weekend, Portland was the site of back-to-back tourneys, for a double dose of Scrabble action! Each day we gathered at a different local brewpub (Saturday at Gigantic Brewing and Sunday at Migration Brewing) for some excellent beers and lunch to go with the top-level gameplay. To add to the fun, there were optional running events in town both mornings.
We ended up with 10 players each day, with most playing on both Saturday and Sunday. Both days were highly competitive and went down to the wire, but when the smoke cleared, it was Conrad "Cardbox" Bassett-Bouchard edging out Kolton Koehler for top honors. Ruth "The Truth" Hamilton had a great run, sweeping the class prizes.
In the running events, only one other competitor was up to Dr. Bing's challenge of a running event and Scrabble tourney on the same day. Congrats to Jennifer Clinchy on this feat! Thanks to all for attending!
Indeed - congrats to all! Speaking as a (mediocre) player this weekend myself, I can attest to both the quality of the event and the extremely high level of competition. As always, a most excellent Portland Pub event is in the books. I'm already looking forward to the next one, whenever it may be.