Despite all of our big talk, the Mercury’s Scrabble team was a big loser in Saturday’s tournament at Gotham Tavern (a benefit for Oregon Literacy).

In the first game, Courtney and I were paired up against Ty and Teddy, a father-son duo. Ty, an attorney, was eager to chat about city politics (thanks!) while his son, nine-year-old Teddy, schooled us all. The kid was a prodigy, sipping a root beer while he cranked out words like chit, daze, verge, and quay (were those words in your vocabulary when you were in 3rd grade?).

Moreover, Teddy could tally up his score in his head in about .2 seconds. It takes me about 10 times longer, and I need all of my fingers to add up our points—which, in the end, totaled 286 to their 306.

In our defense, we had a series of awful racks of tiles—combinations so bad, we documented them in photos:

On to round two! We faced off against Duncan and Dan, who appeared to be another father and son duo. This time, however, the son was our own age—and he drank real beer. We still lost.

Again, we had rack after rack of awful letter combos, like this one:

Seriously? What do you do with that? We’d get rid of two vowels, and pluck two more out of the bag. It didn’t help that Duncan and Dan had all the consonants, and no vowels. We contemplated making up our own rule—allowing us to trade a few tiles under the table—but resigned ourselves to low scores instead. Our game ended quickly, and we busied ourselves with a few rounds of speed Scrabble.

Once both games were tallied, Courtney and I had a grand total of 538 points. That put us in the top half of teams, but it wasn’t nearly enough to snag first prize—team Legoholics cleaned up with a combined score of 1018, boasting two 500+ point games. Yowsa!