Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313)

by Fatsis, Stefan

  But Joel will play whether or not ESPN shows up in the Bronx to profile him or Hasbro begins making a G.I. Joel action figure. He has no other purpose in life. After winning the Worlds, Joel had his fifteen minutes of fame—a New York Times profile, an appearance on the Today show, a visit to his old elementary school, P.S. 89, to receive a citation from the state assembly as an “outstanding citizen.” One expert reported that his doctor, after learning he was a competitive Scrabble player, asked him, “Have you gone up against that Sherman guy?”

  Since the championship, Joel seems happier, chattier, friendlier. And cockier. He signs his e-mails “G.I. Joelgernaut.” After Joel bragged about scoring 600 at the club and trashed his opponent, one CGP wag wrote, “So nice to see that being the World Scrabble Champion has heightened Joel’s sensitivity to his opponents’ shortcomings.”

  But who could begrudge the Joelgernaut a celebratory sack dance? It’s all he’s got! “I’m an accidental overachieving underachiever. An unlucky person with a failure complex,” Joel tells me, “who somehow managed once in his life not to.”

  9. 1291

  THERE ARE 3,199,724 unique combinations of seven tiles that can be plucked from a virgin Scrabble bag of ninety-eight letters and two blanks. That’s the good news. The bad news is that you can draw only one of those combinations at a time. It could be AEINST? with its sixty-seven possible bingos. But it also could be IIUUUWW or any other rack of dross.

  Mathematicians have determined that the possibility of choosing an acceptable seven-letter word from a fresh bag is 12.63 percent, or just over one in eight, and that’s pretty good news, too. Except for one other thing: Those seven letters could be EEEGRUX or CMMOPSY and you don’t know that EXERGUE and COMSYMP are acceptable words. Even worse, they could be AELLRSY and you see RALLYES but chicken out and learn later that it is a word and means exactly what you thought it meant (the plural of a kind of auto race). Or, even worse than that, the tiles could be AAFIWY? and you fail to see the one obvious bingo, FAIrWAY.

  “You,” of course, is me. And I can’t help it. Despite the downside, I am attracted to the combinations and what they represent: boundless possibility, the opportunity for success, the test of the mind and of the forces of probability. I like playing the odds, reaching into the darkness of the Scrabble bag and extracting my destiny. I like knowing that there’s a chance of something great.

  The problem is that the better you get, the more your frustration grows. You see greatness, but you can’t touch it. It’s happened to me before. I quit playing golf when I couldn’t get my game down to the low eighties; it was just too frustrating. I was constantly reminded of my shortcomings. It’s the same in Scrabble. The scorecard tells you when you fail. The Franklin tells you when you fail. A Greek chorus of second-guessers hovering over the board tells you when you fail.

  “YONIS was a forty-eight-point play,” one of the Washington Square Park regulars informs me in the middle of a game early in my playing career. “You missed a forty-eight-point play.”

  “I didn’t know the word,” I demur. “I don’t know the fours yet.”

  “YONI, yeah,” he says, repeating the word, which is a Hindu symbol for the vulva. “It’s some Indian pussy.”

  In a way, the living room player is lucky. He has no idea how miserably he fails with almost every turn, how many possible words or optimal plays slip by unnoticed. The idea of Scrabble greatness doesn’t exist for him.

  But greatness is a vanishing point on the horizon, an object that recedes just a little farther when you think you’re getting closer, a desert mirage. The best players can’t stop racing toward it. They are driven by the possibility of solving something that in truth might be insoluble. They can learn more and more words, maybe even all of them, but there’s always the risk that the crucial one will prove irretrievable at the necessary moment. They push and push and push anyway, because they have no choice. Perfection may be the goal, but it’s really about the search, about the chance of wringing something magical from those 3,199,724 racks.

  I want to join the race, and I guess I have. But when I play the game, I play scared. I don’t see the possibility of greatness in 3,199,724. I see instead the threat of humiliation, the dread prospect of failure. And that—as much as my word knowledge, my performance at tournaments, and my rating—is what must change. I need to believe.

  The cumulative evidence is incontrovertible. In eighteen tournaments in eighteen months, I have compiled a record of 104 wins and 115 losses, a winning percentage of .475.

  I’m as predictably mediocre as a low-revenue baseball team. Call me the Minnesota Twins of Scrabble. My rating is stuck in the 1200s, inching up and falling back. In seven tournaments in the previous seven months, I have lost rating points (I poked my head above 1300 for one tournament), which in the “enthusiast” division, as the netherworld of Scrabble is euphemistically referred to by some, is okay for enthusiasts—the blue-hairs and the hobbyists, the nonstudiers, hoi polloi. But it’s not okay for a supposed comer like me, who hangs out with the experts as if he were one himself, a sportswriter who confuses covering a team with playing on it. In one stretch, I dropped a remarkable seventeen out of nineteen tournament games (albeit against higher-rated players).

  “I still can’t believe you aren’t stomping on those lower divisions,” my now-expert friend Dominic Grillo tells me. “You seem to have the desire to learn and a decent word knowledge. You should be doing better.”

  But I’m not. I’ve even become something of an enigma among other players climbing the ladder.

  “We were talking about you on the way over here,” a young Boston-area player named Scott Pianowski, a chunky sportswriter, tells me during the annual Waltham tournament. I have a 4–5 record in the third of four divisions when we talk on the final morning of play. (I go on to lose all three games that day.)

  “You were?” I say.

  “Yeah, that you’re a better player out of competition,” Scott says. “I mean that as a compliment. Really. I’ve seen you study boards and come up with anagrams I didn’t see. I wish I had your word knowledge.”

  Indeed, my word knowledge probably is better than my rating. In other words, despite my lackadaisical study habits, I know more words—more fours, more bingos—than someone with a similar rating. That’s why, despite my personal dissatisfaction with my play, I consider myself underrated. As do others. At Waltham, Ron Tiekert picks me to be on his team in “rotisserie Scrabble,” a $5-per-person pool in which entrants select two players from each division and tally their combined results. And yet, I also know that if I can’t win games during tournaments—as opposed to kibitzing a board in a casual late-night game, when Scott is impressed with my play—I don’t deserve a higher rating.

  I candidly assess my game, and here is what I find:

  I am plagued by recklessness, thinking it a substitute for word knowledge. My score sheets are filled with phonies. SOLDATA*, DECOATED*, RECOATED*, MAILORS*, LAYE*, LIVIDEST*, GAVELER*, AVARICED*, CENTERER* (actual word: RECENTER), ARIETIC*, EVEREST*, ARRRG* (AARGH, AARRGH, AARRGHH), MOXIEST*, RETONES* (ESTRONE). Sometimes I get away with this junk. Most of the time, however, I am unmasked. As Edley pointed out after that last Catskills tournament, I’m even getting a reputation as a player of phonies.

  I also lose because I don’t challenge words (such as CUELIKE*, TRAMPIER*, and ENTEROLS*). I am cowed by my opponents’ ratings; at the Hartford “team tournament,” where individual games count toward a team performance, I played “fourth board” on an expert division team with Matt, Marlon, and Matthew Laufer, the Washington Square parkie, and posted a 1–11 record. I demonstrate that I really don’t know the fours, because I routinely miss them in endgame situations, when they can be valuable ways of “going out,” or getting rid of all your tiles before your opponent does. I exceed my time limit regularly. I fail to execute tactical maneuvers that could yield victory. I chicken out on plausible bingos, such as...

  “RATLIKE?” I ask M
arlon between rounds at one event.

  “Yes,” he replies, meaning it is indeed an acceptable word.

  “Fuck!” I say.

  After the last game in Waltham, I retreat to my car, angry. I lost the finale in classic fashion. I couldn’t find the high-probability bingo INULASE. I misplayed the endgame. And I went over on my clock by five minutes, costing me 50 points. I bang the dashboard, dislodging the face of my compact-disc player. “Well, that was a three-hundred-dollar loss,” I say to myself, shocked back to reality. I pick it up off the floor and stick it back on. It still works.

  “Somehow I find a way to be intimidated,” I confess to Joe Edley.

  “If you’re intimidated you can’t compete,” he replies.

  “I want to win,” I whine. “I really want to win.”

  “It’s not only thinking it,” Edley says, “it’s feeling it and not having any other distractions.”

  I have journeyed back to National Scrabble Association headquarters. It’s time to get serious. Edley and I are sitting in his office. It is a cramped, paper-strewn space devoid of personal touches. On the bookshelf are Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, the British word sources Official Scrabble Words and The Chambers Dictionary, and other word books, including the two Edley has written. Tacked to the wall is the score sheet from the Waltham tournament where Edley lost his first eleven games and finished with a 2–11 record.

  Edley isn’t the dangerously thin, bearded ascetic he was in the 1980s. The beard, for one thing, is gone. With his circular, bumpy face, hairy ears, and inquisitive head tilt, he looks less like Darth Vader than Yoda. Edley is wearing unpleated, baby blue slacks, black aerobics-style Reeboks, a too-tight short-sleeved white oxford shirt with blue stripes, and a navy blazer, collar askew. A few weeks earlier, he had surgery to repair a detached retina, a scleral buckle. (“That’s a good word. CALLERS, RECALLS, CELLARS,” he says, noting its anagrams.) He had to lie face-down for several days. When I ask him about it, he responds with a shrug of acceptance. “If I lose one eye, I’ll have another eye. If I lose both eyes, I’ll be blind and that’ll be another challenge in my life. That’s how I look at life.” That equanimity, genuine or not, helps explain his success at Scrabble.

  I tell Joe that I’ve moved from over-the-board anxiety to what seems to be an actual fear of success. When I’m leading, I think the game is over and I’ve won; when I fall behind I think it’s hopeless and I’ve lost. In either case, I imagine the moment when I will make a crucial blunder.

  Edley lectures me anew about entering a happy, confident state of mind that will allow me to find the words when I need to. “If you at least believe that it’s in your power you will do far more to find the creative best play than someone who thinks it’s beyond them,” Joe says.

  Like a doctor searching for a diagnosis before he can suggest a remedy, Edley moves on to a different aspect of my Scrabble corpus. He wants to analyze my study habits. “What have you been doing?” he asks. “Because you’ve developed a certain level of skill now. You’re pretty good at anagramming.”

  I let the compliment slide. I think I’m a lousy anagrammer, particularly after observing Matt and Marlon and Joel.

  “I’ve basically been paper-studying,” I say. “I’m up to number twenty on the high-probability stems,” meaning Mike Baron’s list of the Top 100 six-letter combinations that take a seventh letter.

  “How do you study?” Edley asks. “What do you do?”

  “I mostly read and reread and test myself by writing them down.” “Give me an example, like if you want to study a stem, what do you do?”

  “I go through it in my head or on a piece of paper. I’ll familiarize myself with the stem by reading all of the words it forms. I’ll write down the stem and the letters that go with it and then fill in the blanks. The four-letter words I’ve been doing mostly by reading on the subway, reading them and reading them and reading them. I’ve written down all the ones I don’t know twice.”

  Not a foolproof method. In one game, I challenge the word FIDO and lose because of it. It means a defective coin. After the game, I check my study list. “The real indignity,” I write in my notebook, in capital letters, which I do when I’m upset, “is that FIDO isn’t on my list of fours. I must have skipped it inadvertently. So of the hundreds of fours I copied down, the one I missed kills me.”

  Rather than looking at words and trying to memorize them—the lazy man’s idea of studying, my idea of studying—Edley recommends that I combine studying with anagramming. He pulls a red, 8½-by-11, spiral-bound word book off the shelf, one that groups words by length and lists them according to their alphagrams. The alphagram of a word is listed in one column, with the correct answer or answers in another column to the right.

  “There are only four or five pages of fours,” Edley says. “There are more fives. I would xerox the page and blow it up a hundred and forty percent. Then I’d cut it up into pieces and have cards. I could make a deck of cards out of four-letter words and five-letter words. You have the alphagram and the word next to it. Just by spending a certain amount of time going over anagrams, that’s how you learn them.

  “What you’re doing with the stems is not bad, but it’s not time-effective at all,” Edley says. “It’s better that you have the words you want to learn and you look at them in alphagram form. You can’t look at the words spelled correctly. It’s a big waste of time. It’s not going to help.”

  “It’s not training my brain?”

  “That’s right.” Studying by unscrambling alphagrams, by contrast, is “a can’t-lose proposition,” Edley says. “It’s why I love to study. You get a thrill from it. You see a jumble of letters and you suddenly figure out what the word is. Eureka! Oh, wow! That’s a positive experience. You feel better. It’s something biological.

  “Basically you have to get to the point where you can visualize the letters in your head, manipulate them in all of the common ways you can think of, and don’t allow yourself to get frustrated. And look at the answer if you can’t find it in a short time. And just go back over them.”

  “A lot of the people who play this game seem to have this predisposed anagramming ability,” I say, “or have the mental alacrity where they are drawn to creating a study program.” I mention a postdoctoral researcher at NYU named Mark DiBattista, who showed me a computer program he wrote that generates all of the seven-letter bingos containing single-point tiles only and all of the bingos containing six single-point tiles and one two-point tile. “I don’t have that bug.”

  “You don’t have the interest in studying that way?” Joe asks.

  “It’s not the lack of interest. It’s the feeling of being overwhelmed and not knowing where to begin—and this is after a year of playing. Should I be studying seven-letter words? Should I be studying the fours? Should I weave in the fives? It’s the feeling that it’s too big to even break down.”

  Joe gets Zen on me. “Studying Scrabble words is like walking around the world, but as you start walking your feet start getting bigger. Every step you take is taking you farther. The more you study, the more ability you develop and the easier it becomes to learn more.

  “But you want to maximize your use of time. Don’t go over words you’re never going to miss. Don’t waste your time going through letters that aren’t anagrams. Only look at the combinations that are words that you want to know. Decide which words you want to know.”

  “How do you decide?”

  “Okay. There is a huge number of words. You just have to decide to take small quantities. One hundred words at a time or two hundred words at a time and study them and move on.”

  Edley takes the word book and leaves the room. Down the hall, he begins photocopying on giant yellow cardboard the first few pages of seven-letter bingos, which are listed in order of their probable emergence from a full bag. Unlike learning Baron’s stems, there’s no easy way to create mnemonic devices; you just have to learn to unscramble the words. Each page in th
e book is divided into eight columns, the alphagram on the left and the word or words contained therein to its right:

  EHINRST HINTERS

  EIIMNRT INTERIM

  MINTIER

  TERMINI

  EEINRTV INVITER

  VITRINE

  “You can just start studying this list and go through it,” Edley says. “This book is all about learning the words. If you were to start studying the sevens, the first few pages of these, you’d be doing all right. The other thing is you should really learn all the fives.”

  “Ugh.”

  “It’s not that hard.”

  “The fives seem so overwhelming. The fours seem completely manageable and I’m still only halfway there.”

  “You’re blocked by that feeling, and that’s hindering you. You’re telling yourself things that are defeating you. First of all, you have to tell yourself that it’s not overwhelming. You’re hypnotizing yourself to defeat yourself. You have to start telling yourself, ‘I can do this.’ If your reality check wants to seep in, you can say, ‘It’s a lot of work, there’s a lot to learn, but I can do this.’ You don’t have to be a genius to do it. You just have to spend the time to practice.”

  When I suggest that not everyone is a gifted anagrammer, Joe agrees that specific skill functions are necessary.

  “And I’m clearly not a natural,” I say.

  “You think so?”

  “I’m not. But maybe that’s just more of a defeatist attitude.”

  “Start studying and you might see things differently.”

  Edley sends me off with a sheaf of cardboard bearing the fours, the fives, and fifteen hundred sevens. As soon as I get home, I chop them to the size of tarot cards, four columns of words to a card, two each of alphagrams and solutions. I start studying with the sevens. I take the bottom card from the deck, flip it over, and cover the right-hand column of the first list on the top card. Then I try to unscramble the alphagram. The first card is easy, mostly review: