Scrabble Stalemate

My wife is a world class Scrabble player. 

She plays on line regularly and enjoys the competition. 

She likes to win.

I'm not bad at Scrabble myself. We get out the physical gameboard occasionally and battle it out. She wins some...I win some.

I guess you could say that our relationship to real world Scrabble is a bit uh winsome.

When Lynn is playing on line she occasionally gets her ass kicked by a player who is using words that she has never heard before. Lynn assumes that person is cheating and stops competing against that particular person.

I can't see why in the world, a person would cheat while playing Scrabble. The games are not for money. The games are for fun and skill and vocabulary building. What fun would a person have who is "cheating" at Scrabble by using a program that plays the game for you.

That, I don't get.

I rememeber playing chess for awhile just for grins.

I played against a guy I knew who proved to be as big an asshole as myself but in a different way.

It seems this guy knew a short cut that if his opponent made a couple of moves at the very beginning of the game, those moves would eventually lead to a checkmate and the checkmate would come quickly.

The first time that I played this guy, I innocently made those fatal  moves and the guy checkmated me and laughed his ass off.

We played another game and the same thing happened.

He laughed again.

We played again and the same thing happened.

I asked the dude what was the point of checkmating me without playing an actual game.

He responded by asking me why I kept making the same opening move and falling into the same trap.

I responded to him that the trap wasn't the game. The trap was a trap and if he wanted to play an actual game, he needed to stop using the trap.

He said that if I wanted him to stop using the trap, I should just stop moving into it.

It;s kinda like the story of the lady who walks down the same street every day and keeps falling into the same ditch every time she walks down the street until she finally changes her life by walking down a different street.

I was aware of that story.

We began to play another game.

I told him that there were infinite amounts of ways the game could be played with me using the same opening move and him restraining from the trap response and it would be intersting to explore one of those infinite others and in doing so he could help me learn the game.

We started another game.

I made the same opening move.

He trapped me.

The whole fiasco was a stalemate.

I lost interest in chess and for the rest of my life regarded this guy as an asshole much more concerned with winning and laughing at me than in teaching and learning.

I probably wouldn't have been any good at chess anyways so I had to look at other ways to use my time and hit upon whatever took the least amount of effort for me to win.

Although I haven't found that place yet

And it's getting late.