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WSC 2011 Commentary: Round 2

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Go to: Before the Tournament, 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, Round 33, Round 34.

After two rounds of play, going into the lunch break, it's Allan Simmons (Sco) leading the field at 2-0 +281, followed by Brett Smitheram (Eng) +268, Nigel Richards (Wru) +261 and Ming Hui Hubert Wee (SGP) +255. Lunch is served in the hall outside the playing area, and is a very well-provisioned hot buffet. After the break, it'll be Allan and Hubert at Board 1, Nigel and Brett at Board 2. Up until now, players have been seated roughly according to seeding; from here on it will be by current position, so all the undefeated players will be close to the stage.

Defending Champion Pakorn Nemitrmansuk (Wsc) has won both of his games and is in 19th place at 2-0 +115, but is happy not to have his games annotated, for a little while, at least.

Aaron Chong (MYS) has the highest win of the tournament so far, a 639-257 victory over Naomi Landau (ISR). Dielle Saldanha (CAN) scored 484 points to lose to Edward Martin's (Eng) 486.

A note about the tiles: every table has a set of Mattel professional Scrabble tiles in an attractive red Mattel tile bag. At the lower tables, which are set with two games, the second game originally had a set of third-party tiles in a green Mattel tile bag (so that players wouldn't confuse the bags). Thanks to the efforts of the visiting volunteers last night, there were no problems with the tile counts or distributions, as players arrived in the morning to find the tiles laid out in order on each board. Unfortunately, the third-party tiles were the old rectangular style, which don't fit the new square grids, so we had to scramble to find replacements in the form of green Mattel tiles, which you may have seen in some of the board photos. They come from a popular new Mattel Poland product: a bilingual Scrabble set, with beige Polish tiles and green English tiles!