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EOSC 2012 Commentary: Round 1

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Go to: Round 1, Round 2, Round 3, Round 4, Round 5, Round 6, Round 7, Round 8, Round 9, Round 10, Round 11, Round 12, Round 13, Round 14, Round 15, Round 16, Round 17, Round 18, Round 19, Round 20, Round 21, Round 22, Round 23, Round 24, Round 25, Round 26, Round 27, Round 28, Round 29, Round 30, Round 31, Round 32, After the Tournament.

42 players from 13 countries on 5 continents gathered here at the northern tip of the island of Malta for the 32-round European Open Scrabble Championship, directed by Amy Byrne with the support of the Malta Scrabble Club and local sponsors. We are at the Paradise Bay Resort Hotel, just down the street from the ferry to Gozo, a newer and more scenic location for this event. This event will be followed next weekend by the Malta International Scrabble Open, and most players have come for both events: a total of seven days of Scrabble and three days of sight-seeing, or possibly more Scrabble.

For the first time, the organizers will be trying out a live video feed of Board 1, instead of live annotation, with Jim Wilkie bringing in the necessary three webcams, tripod and two laptops. We have had a few technical difficulties so far, related to unexpectedly low uplink bandwidth, but hope that the feed will be running by next round.

At Board 1 this round were top seed Craig Beevers (Eng), facing Mary Morgan (IRL). Beevers had a blowout win, 512-261.

Ossie Mair (USA) is the only player here without a WESPA rating; he has been seeded according to his NASPA rating for his Collins debut. He loses 236-520 to Joanne Craig (NZL).

Not all the games went to the higher-rated player. The biggest win by an underdog was by Ovidiu Tamas (ROM), who beat Bob Violett (Eng) 405-353. Geoff Cooper (Eng) also beat Simon Gillam (Sco) 446-436.

High loss for the round: Jackie McLeod (Eng) to Ruth MacInerney (Eng), 469-481.

At the end of the first round of play is Mikki Nicholson (Eng), undefeated +292, narrowly ahead of Joanne Craig (NZL) at +284.