Friday, October 28, 2011

A Few Words About The Nonverbal

About eight years ago, I found myself at an adult spelling bee in downtown Austin, which I'd read about the day before. I hadn't been living here long at the time. I did spelling bees as a kid, and at that time had just started playing Scrabble tournaments. Sounded like my kind of thing, and I figured I might do well, though you never know.

The way the adult spelling bee here works is that they first pass out a written test. Contestants circle the misspelled words on the page, the panel grades the tests, the top X finishers go on to take a second written test, and the top 20 or so from that test get to go onstage and compete. I went down there alone, didn't know anyone and I'm hardly a social butterfly to begin with. So I've got my first test but we haven't been told to open it and start yet, and I'm standing there with a beer in hand, finishing up a cigarette (five years quit now! but this was eight years ago, remember), pacing a little nervously...I was feeling competitive excitement, sure, and spelling was on the short list of things I would have been confident about at the time, but as far as I know I was not outwardly displaying that to any great degree.

What happened next is why I'm telling you this story. A woman came up to me, I don't know, fiftyish? Barely remember her, but I remember what she said: I bet you're going to win this. You just look like you will. I said, well, shucks, I hope so...I did end up winning, but...how the heck did she pick up on that? I hadn't said a word to her. Yes, the situation was not like others for me, but she couldn't have known that at all. I didn't look bookish, nor intimidating - just some nervous but generally happy-looking guy in jeans and a patterned shirt finishing off a smoke and a beer and waiting to open his test. I have no idea what I was doing that made her think I had supreme confidence (even more than I actually had).

Last year, I competed in this event again, as I usually do. I've done it seven times and won five times. There's a highlights video here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Kl-jiVilS9U

My family emailed the video around, and one of the viewers noted that she thought I oozed confidence here. What's strange is that to me, watching this video, I look nervous - rapidly blinking eyes, shifting posture. That the viewer thought I was supremely confident could have been confirmation bias (she knew I'd won the event multiple times), but I suspect not. Other people who were there or have seen the video have volunteered similar observations. Yes, in the video I'm spelling quickly as if I know the answers, but only because, well, I did happen to know them, and like a lot of people I tend to speed up when I'm nervous. I had also drunk maybe four beers rapidly on an empty stomach, which is, what, like six or seven normally, so I had a good buzz going and was feeling a little queasy and was trying to manage that. I've almost always had a lot to drink at these things, and it's part festive and part trying to calm my nerves since there's a lot of socializing. Yeah, I'm confident when I'm up there, but that's not really the internal dialogue - I'm not up there thinking, man, I'm a badass. I'm thinking, yikes, I hope I don't get a word I don't recognize, guess wrong and get knocked out. I'm always a little surprised when I win. Honestly.

So I'm perceived as giving off this super-confident vibe in this situation, and this situation alone, even when I'm not really all that confident. And it was true before I ever won, so it's not just people knowing I've won before. Again, what the heck are people picking up on? If I could identify what I was doing right there and replicate it at will, I'd do it all the time, because intense but calm confidence is the optimal social strategy.

Tuesday, October 25, 2011

My 2011 in Scrabble

Lots going on but little I'm inclined to write about here just yet, so I'll turn to a familiar subject. I'm not playing any more tournaments this year, so I'll recap my 2011 Scrabble season:

February: Texas State Championship, Salado, TX. Finished 1st of 14; won this event for the second time (previous win was in 2008). North American TWL rating up from 1941 to 1970.

March: Dallas Open, Dallas, TX. Finished 3rd of 70; lost a close final game to the first-place finisher, Dave Wiegand. North American TWL rating up from 1970 to 2014, a new peak rating; new peak rank of #7 in North America. A couple of club members made me a cake!

Later in March: West Coast World Championship Wordlist Challenge, Ashland, OR. Switching to the big word list now. Finished 4th of 18, just out of the money; would have finished 2nd or 3rd with a win in the final game, but Nathan Benedict bingoed out to beat me. North American Collins rating down from 1986 to 1968. (Note: "Collins" refers to the word list, published by the Collins dictionary company, used in tournaments everywhere except North America and for a small but growing number of tournaments in North America; "TWL" refers to the smaller North American word list.)

Memorial Day, Houston, TX: Finished 4th of 14, just out of the money again, by losing the final game by a mere 10 points to second-place finisher Orry Swift. The game began with five passes, and had I made a sixth pass the game would have ended in a tie and I would have finished 3rd. Tough call to make in the moment; I chose to play it out, but in retrospect passing was probably better. Oh well. North American TWL rating down from 2014 to 2004.

Austin June one-day tournament: Finished 1st, 4-2 record, playing in our first-ever Collins division. North American Collins rating slipped just a bit, down from 1968 to 1962.

July 4 weekend, one-day San Antonio tournament: Finished 5th of 6, 2-4 record, North American TWL rating down from 2004 to 1968. Near-total trainwreck. One-days can go that way sometimes. Glad to see tournament Scrabble action in San Antonio, though!

National Scrabble Championship, August, Dallas, TX: After a miserable NSC in 2010, I had hopes of redeeming myself. It looked good halfway through, as I was 12-4 and playing at Table 1...and then I went on one of the worst losing skids I've ever had, losing 10 of 11. Finished 16-14-1, 40th place of 108 in Division 1, North American TWL rating down from 1968 to 1928. Not as bad as the previous year's debacle, but still a poor result. I'm very happy about one thing, though: I've never been calmer or more Zen at a tournament than I was in Dallas. Surprised myself how well I handled the roller-coaster ride emotionally, and I didn't feel bad about the outcome. I did my best, that's all you can do. I think that calm, if I can maintain it, will help me in future tournaments.

Austin August one-day tournament: TWL this time; I usually direct these events and don't play, but we needed an evener and I joined the field. Finished 1st, 5-1 record. North American TWL rating up from 1928 to 1940.

Toronto International Open, September: Finished 3rd of 22, behind a couple of pretty good players named Adam Logan and Nigel Richards. Given the strength of the top of this field, I was very happy with that result. North American Collins rating up from 1962 to 2007, a new peak on that list and in the top 10 North Americans. WESPA international rating up from 1940ish, I forget, to 1991 going into Worlds.

World Scrabble Championships, Warsaw, Poland, October: Finished 16th of 107. Got as high as fourth on day 2 and managed to eke out a win against Adam Logan at table 1, but day 3 and the morning of day 4 weren't as kind, and I had to rally to win my last five and get into the top 20. Played a lot of very strong players, so a top 20 result is respectable, though of course I wanted more than that. Ten-day European vacation/endless pub crawl/major international tournament. Whew! This was my third Worlds, and it's always a rewarding experience. Great to see and play old friends and meet new ones. WESPA rating up from 1991 to 1999.

North American TWL rating started the year at 1941 and ended at 1940; I'm ranked 31st now.

North American Collins rating started the year at 1986 and ended at 2007; I'm ranked 12th on that list now, 8th or 9th (something like that, too lazy to check) if you don't count one-off foreign players or Quackle.

WESPA International rating is 1999 after Worlds; I'm now ranked 28th on that list.

(Yes, having three ratings is weird.)

Money won this year: about $1,800. After expenses, I lost a fair amount, which isn't really unusual; very, very few people make a profit playing Scrabble while going to the types of tournaments I often do. I would guess that I've broken about even over the eight years I've been playing tournaments, and that includes nothing for the time spent practicing. Worth it for many other reasons, though.

***

Outlook for 2012 (etched in jello, as always)

I'm committed to playing four tournaments: New Orleans in January, Texas State Championship in February, Las Vegas in February, and the Dallas Open in March. At this point, I plan to take an extended indefinite break from tournament play after that and focus more on some non-Scrabble things. There is a small chance I might play a strong event like the British Masters (do I have that right? I can never keep those British tournaments straight...EDIT: no, not quite: it's not the Masters, it's the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship) in August. Almost surely not playing Nationals this time, as much as I'd like to wash the last two years' results out of my hair. (The two NSCs before that were pretty good, though.) It's possible I may not play out of my region, or much at all, before the 2013 Worlds, which is too far in the future to say much about now.

As a player...well, I recall thinking around 2008 or so that I'd gotten about as good as I was realistically going to get. A year or so later, I recall thinking I might be able to make a push and get up another level, but that really didn't happen. Now, I'd say I'm a better player than I was three years ago, but not by much; my instinct then that I've found my level has proved to be correct. I'm not and most likely never will be one of the top 10-15 players in the world - I'm somewhere in the next group of, I dunno, 30? 50? 100? A lot of good players out there now...anyway, I'm cool with it. The question is whether to do what is required to stay where I am. I can't imagine not doing the words at least some, and I'll still play games now and then in club and elsewhere, so even my time off won't be a total break. So who knows. After thousands of games, I still enjoy playing; Scrabble's a very replayable game. Not every game turns out to be interesting, but enough do to keep me engaged. And more important, I've got lots of friends in the scene.

Wednesday, October 5, 2011

The most underreported news story of my lifetime

This link shows the overall and per capita crime rates for the U.S. from 1960 to 2010:

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/uscrime.htm

Scroll down and look at the crime rates per 100,000 inhabitants. To anyone braying that civility is dead and that we are on the brink of societal collapse, um, yeah:

The rate of overall violent crime has dropped from a peak of 758.1 per 100,000 to 403.6 - nearly cut in half. This is the lowest figure in any year since 1972.

The murder rate in 2010 was 4.8; this is less than half of the peak rate, in 1980, and lower than any year since 1963.

Oh, but surely rape is on the rise, given the changes in our culture...nope. Peaked in 1992, down over a third from that peak, and the last year lower than 2010 was 1976.

Aggravated assault? Peaked in 1992, now down over 40% and at its lowest rate since 1977.

The peak robbery rate, in 1991, was 272.7 robberies per 100,000 people. Last year the rate was 119.1. The most recent year lower than that was 1967.

The rate of vehicle thefts is similarly down from its peak, and lower now than in 1964, despite the ratio of cars to people being considerably higher than it was then.

And all these numbers are rapidly trending downward.

It's not my point here to speculate on why the crime rate has fallen so sharply in the past 20 years - the rate of crime in a society as large and diverse as ours is an exceedingly complex thing, and anyone who attributes the drop to one or two pet causes is, well, I'd say he's talking out of his ass. I don't know very much of the answer, and neither do you, and neither do the politicians or the pundits or the cops or the criminals.

But we never, ever hear about this. I would bet a good sum of money that if you polled a random sample of people my age or close to it (I'm 41), the majority of them would guess that crime in the U.S. has either stayed about the same or increased since they were kids. And, as the statistics above show, they'd be ludicrously wrong. (I would also bet that those respondents identifying as social conservatives would be even more likely to get this wrong than the sample average; however, before we heathens get too giddy about that, if the same poll were conducted in 1995, the reflexive "the world was better when I was six" response would have happened to be correct. Crime did go way up before it went way down.) How is it that perhaps the biggest societal shift in the past twenty years has glanced off our skulls?

People freak out nowadays even more than I remember them doing when I was little and they were scaring us with the specter of the Soviets nuking us. Terrorist attacks. School shootings. Mexican drug cartels. And every time they turn on TV news, it's another story about some crazy woman killing her 3-year-old or something else horrific and a half dozen commentators in suits are dissecting the crazy woman's court case in the tone used by studio analysts at halftime of NFL games...well, yeah, if you drink a steady 24-hour diet of that psychological poison, which now you can, you're bound to think, oh my god, the world is gonna end. And even if you can ward off the assault well enough to avoid consciously being paralyzed by fear, well, fear operates well below the conscious, does it not? Ask any advertising exec or political speechwriter, they'll tell you. Scaring people for no reason pays. People eat that up.

I was in high school in the 1980s. Yeah, yeah, the world back then had drugs and gangs and child abuse and serial killers and all that dark side biz, trust me. Quite a bit *more* than we have now, apparently. My parents' world had less of it than that, but their world was far from perfect or sustainable and the social upheaval that followed happened for good reason, despite some of its more troublesome side effects...and if you go back five or six hundred years, you were WAY more likely to die a violent death by another's hand than at any time in the last century. (Steven Pinker's latest book discusses this.) What is it? No news is good news, therefore good news is no news? The overall rate of violent and property crime, in a multicultural nominally democratic society of over 300 million people, is down over FORTY PERCENT from just 20 years ago, and the next parade or Nobel Peace Prize awarded to this mind-boggling achievement will be the first. Yeah, I don't get it. Shouldn't *somebody* throw out a high five or two for this?

This isn't to say we should sit on our laurels. Of course not - we should keep trying to get those numbers down. I'm in favor of longer sentences for most violent crimes than we have now, and more resources toward early intervention for those at risk of becoming violent offenders. Even with our recent massive improvement, the U.S. is still far behind most other industrialized nations, though we have some challenges to a degree most of them don't. But jeez, when I was a kid, yeah, the boogie man stories existed, paranoia existed, dead animals with open eyes on the side of the road existed, but at least I was allowed to play outside. And, by the numbers, I was more at risk than the kids of today are.