Aren us (fill in geographical area)-ers underrated?
Perhaps. As the Scrabble rating system currently stands, players rated much higher than their opponents are unable to perform to the necessary expectation to maintain their rating. This produces the following phenomenon: • Expert from “small town” does well at tournament in “big city,” picking up points. • Expert goes back to “small town” and redistributes points to lower-rated players. • Once again underrated, expert goes back to big tournament to get more points. • If expert has one bad “big city” tournament, he/she may well be buried rating wise. Note: “small town” and “big city” are based on scrabble tournaments rather than population. They could well be equivalent to Houston and Reno respectively. There is one prominent expert from Houston who consistently does quite well at nationalish events but is bled to death while winning 75%+ of her local tournaments. If you are the only big cheese in town, there is a chance that you could be locked in the above-outlined rating struggle. If
