It's time to review another fun quarter of play at the CoCo Virtual Club on Woogles. Thirty players joined us throughout the winter quarter of 2022. Congratulations to the club champions: 

• #1 - Sammy Okosagah, 37-13

• #2 - Austin Shin, 38.5-16.5

• #3 - Geoff Thevenot, 25.5-15.5
  
  

And to the CoCo Cup winners, who played the most total games during the winter session:

• #1 - Mohammad Suleiman, 63 games

• #2 - Rod Weis, 60 games

• #3 - Austin Shin, 53 games
  
  

In other fun stats, there were 2 games over 600 (Mohammad with a 610, myself with a 602) and the highest combined score was 1059 (my 560 to David Whitley's 499).

In the first week, our champion for the prior several months, Austin Shin, got off to an inauspicious start at 2-3. He continued to give others a chance to shine by missing a few weeks. We had standout performances from the likes of Mohammad, Sammy, and David Eldar, as well as many wins by one of our newer players, Adheesha Dissanayake.

As the quarter proceeded, Austin returned, and after 5 weeks, he'd worked his way up to 10-5. Plus, in February, he started live streaming all of his club games on his Twitch channel at twitch.tv/austinho9.

Also in February, Austin played a game against Mohammad that captured a lot of attention because of his superb endgame strategy. He agreed to share his thought process as he made what appeared to some (or all) of us to be a strange choice at the time.

After Mohammad's play of DENSEST, Austin can see that his opponent is holding AVZ. Austin's rack is DEINNRW and he's behind by 80 points.

What would you do?

Here's what Austin did: He played D(E)N 8L, through the first E in DENSEST, for 6 points.

I asked him to share his story of why he chose that play and it reveals some great strategic thinking. Here's Austin:

I was pretty pleased with the move I had chosen, though it was definitely an unwinnable situation if Mohammad had played it right. First and foremost, (C)AZ wins every time for him. And because his letters were AVZ, I noticed that he cannot play the V or Z by itself, so if he makes a move he would either be V or Z stuck. My idea was to maximise my scoring on the TWS, whilst blocking the pretty easy to find ZA/ZE spot on DENSEST. As I'm playing a human, and that he's down to about 1 minute 30 seconds, I figured that playing something like this could distract him from a move like (C)AZ that is quite well hidden on the bottom, especially if he hadn't already found it as I play my move. This means that he most likely plays either SAZ or VAN (on DEN), and again, either way he will stick himself. Naturally a player would play (S)AZ just to get rid of the Z and give fewer points away on count back.

The truth is I can go out with REWIN after DEN but it's not enough. Whatever I do will not score enough, so I put two and two together and thought, I could potentially use the Z he has, that could potentially be put on that lane, against him. So not only did I work out that DENI/WINZE fits, it doesn't give him anything to play his V, and I can go out with the R. However, playing WINZE doesn't quite win, so further to my previous point of using the Z against himself, I could actually play ZE first to gain an extra 11 points out of my endgame sequence, which would be enough to win the game.

Again, all of this is fully dependent on whether he plays (S)AZ, but the fact is that if he makes a mistake and plays that, then I would win. It's a very easy mistake to make, especially in his shoes, he goes 88 ahead and I only have 5 tiles to play. So on the face of it, it doesn't look like there's any way for me to catch up. 

But the real lesson is to always give yourself a chance to win any game. I align this with an analogy from tennis, by that you "always make your opponent hit another shot," and sometimes your opponent whiffs it into the net.

As you can see, Austin won 427-425.

In early March, with Mardi Gras drums audible in the background on his live stream, Austin was undefeated for two sessions in a row and jumped into first place. (An interesting stat - on March 8, he averaged exactly 500 points per game.) All the while, though, Sammy was keeping up, and the race was close between the two of them all month.

Meanwhile, other players were having fun as well; there was an interesting game between the two club directors, Geoff and me, that you might want to check out.

We also had an exciting development with the return of Colin Northmore after several months. He's getting ready for his first live play in the UK after two years of pandemic downtime, and what better place to practice than the CoCo club! Even though it means staying up into the wee hours of the morning for him, UK time.

In the end, Austin and Sammy were even in the standings going into the final week of March. It came down to the final game of the final session, and they were paired in the last King of the Hill match. In the middle of the game, Austin had just bingoed with the lovely find of WAVICLE but was behind 177-206 when Sammy surprisingly passed his turn. As Austin mentioned on the live stream, he suspected this might be a mistake, and graciously asked in the chat if he had really meant to pass. It turned out to be an accident and Austin passed back, allowing Sammy to play his bingo of SIRLOIN.

"That might have changed the outcome of the game, if he didn't let me have my turn back after I passed unknowingly," Sammy told me. "He is a great guy."

As it turned out, Sammy won 428-400 and thus won both the club for the night and the quarter overall.

Many thanks to all who joined us during the winter months. The spring quarter is already underway!