"P.S.--I hate keeping score in Scrabble. My goal always is simply that all the letters be used, me helping my opponent if necessary. "
Keeping score is easy when you play online. I play at
www.isc.ro. There are other sites with scrabble and scrabble-like games, though.
When I was younger, I never played to win - I played to get the coolest word. Of course grandma trashed me. I don't recall ever having beaten her. Perhaps I did, but I don't recall. I played an interesting foursome once. My wife is not a native English speaker. She got her BS in math from Berea college. Her sponsor in the US was the president of Berea College in KY. (In fact, this same man had been her father's teacher at Yale in China HS.) It was me, my wife, the president, and his wife. My wife and I were severely thrashed, but it was a pretty fun game, all the same.
I play to win now, and not to get the coolest word - though sometimes I just can't help myself. Mostly I just play for fun. I can't get into the nastiness. You beat someone - by luck or skill, it doesn't matter - and the first thing do is start cursing because you "cheated" or "used a program" or what have you. I've though perhaps I ought to adopt that philosophy - surely, NOBODY could possibly be THAT MUCH smarter than me, and ANYONE who beats me THAT badly, MUST BE CHEATING!
I figure there's a lot more crazy people walking the streets than there are in all the asylums in the world - and eventually they figure out a way to get on the net.
