It's Spelled C-H-E-A-T

Little-known fact that should not surprise you at all: I play on a Scrabble team. Well, it's a group of people who play Scrabble together, so it's a loosely defined "team." But we like to play about once a month.
We do have individual Scrabble dictionaries with our names embossed on them, which is probably more "geeky" than "team-like." We even have a back-up dictionary because the company that produces them misspelled my name on the first order. Shocker.
And we do play with our dictionaries in hand. That may be against the rules, but we don't care. We're rebels like that. Maybe we're more like a Scrabble gang. Leather jackets with our names spelled out on them in Scrabble tiles are probably in our future.
And though we are mildly competitive with each other, we would never stoop to cheating to win. One of our gang has threatened to feed her dog all of the "I" tiles, but that's just because she always ends up with about five of them per match.
So imagine my shock when I saw the Huffington Post article about cheating at the national Scrabble championship. Evidently a player dropped blank tiles on the floor to use later. I had two thoughts about this. First, there's a national championship? Second, dropping tiles on the floor is not exactly subtle. You would have had as much success with "accidentally" flipping over the board. Not that I have ever done that.
Obviously this big Scrabble tourney needs to adjust its rules. Our gang could help them with that. The new rules would include dictionaries right on the table (trust me, it doesn't make it all that much easier), snacks at every elbow, and lots of wine. That way, everybody wins.

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