Recapping this weekend's Providence, RI 1-day tournament
If there are two things that the CoCo as an organization is constantly trying to do more of, it's recruiting new directors and breaking ground in new tournament locales. So it was doubly exciting, earlier this year, when Niel Gan came to us with the idea of beginning to run 1-day tournaments in his home city of Providence, RI.
This weekend brought a pair of firsts - Niel's first tournament as a CoCo director, and the first CoCo event run by anyone, ever, in the state of Rhode Island. History was made, and twice over!
Here's Niel to recap the action:
This weekend, we kicked off the first in a series of Providence and Boston one-days at the cozy Buttonwoods Brewery. The players commandeered a big corner table and enjoyed smash burgers, wood-fired pizza, and buzzy and un-buzzy brews over the course of six games.
The star of the day was Matthew O'Connor, who put down many bingos and several of his signature hard-to-see top plays that burn the S on his way to a smashing 5-1 record and +827 spread.
In my own games, I had a couple of funny moments:
Holding GHINNOR and eyeing an O in the double-double lane, only to see Justin Morris make a lovely overlapping YUAN to form OU. We both laughed for a while at the point donation (and appropriate conversion to international English).
Overdrawing from AA?? to AAAAEG?? against Matthew O'Connor, who somehow missed both blanks and threw back the G from a turn-over of AAG. Left with AAAAE??, I exchanged.
It was great to have both Justin and Matt Zeleznik join us for their first tourneys in a while - welcome back, and hope to see you at another one soon!
Notably, we also experienced the first public Scrabble fangirl moment in any of our recollections. As one of the games was wrapping up, an onlooker walked up and asked if we were playing Collins, since there were some unfamiliar 2s and 3s on the board (+100 points already for knowing that multiple lexica exist). She went on to shout out Will Anderson's videos (+1,000) and to say that she "is a Chloe, but not the Chloe Fatsis" (+10,000). Now that's fame!
Moments like this make me think we'll see more new faces in the scene over the next few years. In the meantime, we're here to make tourneys as fun and accessible as we can.
Congratulations to Matthew (O'Connor, that is) on winning this weekend's event, and to Niel for successfully directing his first CoCo tournament. And it's only the beginning of a Providence/Boston series!
I'm already excited to see what this New England crew has in store for us in their events to come. If you're in the area, I highly recommend you join them next time.
Until then...