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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  AEEINRT ARENITE

  RETINAE

  TRAINEE

  ADEINOR ANEROID

  AEINORS ERASION

  AEINOST ATONIES

  AEILNRT LATRINE

  RATLINE

  RELIANT

  RETINAL

  TRENAIL

  If I fail to solve an alphagram within a few seconds, I uncover the first letter of the answer, which helps. If I still don’t see the word, I place a dot next to it so that I’ll know which to review. I manage to get through about eighty words, or a full card, on a one-way commute to work if I can ignore my fellow subway riders and the overhead ads for computer training schools and skin doctors and mental health assistance and spousal abuse hotlines. I’ll repeat the same card two or three times before moving on to the one beneath it. Studying in twenty- or thirty-minute chunks, Edley and others have advised, improves retention.

  A four-letter word has just twenty-four possible letter combinations, which may seem like a lot. Understanding, however, that the combination of vowels and consonants will render most of them implausible should make the possible solutions relatively simple. And yet I stumble over common words. When I see AHLS, my first impulse is to say HALS*. The next day, when I go over the same material, I say (aloud) LAHS*, when LASH is simple and obvious. When I see AHMT, the first combination I say in my head is MHAT*. When I see AKLT, I pronounce the logical answer “talc” rather than “talk.” The brain plays tricks, and I realize that learning the words is about training my mind to be patient as well as nimble.

  After a few weeks, I tell Matt I’ve been studying for about an hour a day. “Then your rating will be a thing of the past,” he says. “Of course, you should do eight hours a day. But then your life would be a shipwreck.”

  Marlon makes a New York appearance, crashing on my floor. We rise early on a Saturday morning and drive to the trusty Comfort Inn on Long Island. This month, the attraction is especially great: nine games instead of the usual seven. In the living room, or in the park—or in a games parlor once upon a time—sessions can extend well into the double digits. Ron Tiekert recalls a nonstop, nineteen-hour session in the 1970s at the end of which he owed his opponent $6. The decade before that, Lester Schonbrun once played for two straight days, with bathroom breaks, at the Flea House against a chemist named Aaron, who, when it was over, handed Lester $100 and thanked him for the good games. But in a tournament, where you can’t just keep playing, or stop a game, or chatter, where the logistics of coordinating a large group of players slows things down, nine games in a day qualifies as a marathon. More games, however, is always preferable to fewer games.

  The groupings put me in a good mood. My 1291 rating is the second-lowest in a group of twelve players in the second division of four, and the top rating is 1667. That sets me up to earn major points. I think about my latest talk with Edley, about breathing deeply, about concentrating and remaining calm. Whether any of my new words materialize is irrelevant. The mere fact that I’ve been studying consistently has convinced me that I have improved. I have never felt this confident.

  One rack at a time, Edley says. The first one that I draw in the tournament is AEMNTX?. I’m playing Marie, the woman with the icy stare. She intimidates me. I exhale, hunch over, and shuffle. MAX, TAX, EXAM. My brain processes. I search for a bingo, but at the same time consider what would be the best possible “leave” if I can’t find one. MAX, for instance, would leave me with ENT?, a four-tile combination that is almost sure to yield a bingo soon.

  Suddenly, I have a eureka moment, the kind where your breath catches and your heart races and you have to control an urge to shout it out because what you know is a secret. Scrabble is poker with letters. It’s neither polite nor smart to gloat during a game; it’ll backfire. But when I see it, I want to leap out of my chair. TAXiMEN! The X lands on the double-letter score, and the N on the star. I have seen the word played in a game before, so I’m sure that it’s acceptable.

  “Ninety-six,” I announce. “The blank is an I.”

  Marie challenges. I know it’s going to be a good day.

  JIVER, JEW, COBS, FALL, CAW, DOG, ORZO. Short words, but my points mount. Marie can’t score. I’m ahead 303–88. I play sEQUELS and sip the nectar of revenge. Down she goes, 477–282.

  I win the next game, 431–390. And the next, 392–322. And the one after that, 382–336. And another, 411–315. And one more, 374–348.

  Six and oh.

  I’m as methodical as a contract killer, seeing words the way Ted Williams could see the seams of a baseball spinning toward him at ninety miles per hour. I’m not particularly social between games, wearing as I am a mask of cold, professional indifference.

  For a change, my opponents play the phonies (BRUNG* and FIELTIES*— puh-leeze) and I challenge them off. I play actual words, and they challenge erroneously. If I know the word, I find it. With a rack of ABIKNW? and an open G on the board, I play WINGBAcK, which draws a challenge. WINGBACK! A backfield position in football! I play FORESTED and ANTEATER and JANGLERS.

  After Game 6, Marlon trots up.

  “You win?”

  When I nod, he shouts, “Yes!” and offers a fist to bump with mine.

  I drop the seventh game (no blanks, poor tiles).

  “I didn’t think you could go undefeated,” says the pesty Mark Berg, a short, nasal, sports fanatic who is a regular at the Manhattan club.

  “Thanks for the support, Berg,” I say. But I shrug him off. There will be no YER*s this time. I know I’m going to win the tournament.

  In Game 8, I rack up 521 points—including 111 points for SKEINED—and rout my opponent. The only way I can drop out of first place is to get blown out in the final round. I don’t even consider the possibility, and I do something rare, for me: win in the endgame. A 42-point play on the penultimate turn ensures a 377–358 win.

  I finish 8–1 with a spread of +641. I capture the division by two games. I walk away richer by $80 and a game of Pictionary (for SKEINED, the high single play of the tournament). I scored an average of 411 points per game (by far a personal best) and yielded just 340. And I wasn’t even that lucky: nine blanks and nineteen S’s in nine games, in line with the odds. I was even focused enough to record my games rack by rack for later review.

  Marlon offers to calculate my new rating on the spot. From a master list that tournament directors receive, I write down the ratings of all of my opponents. Standing on the motel steps, smoking a cigarette, Marlon does the math on my notepad. I don’t understand what he’s saying.

  “Fourteen seventy. Five times two to five. Fourteen fifty and then fourteen hundred. Three. That’s a hundred. That’s three hundred. Fourteen thirty, fourteen fifty-six. I give ’em all five. One, one, four, four, five, is giving up twenty-five. Fourteen forty-two.

  “Yo, you is hundred fifty below the field,” Marlon says. That means my incoming rating of 1291 is 150 points below the average rating of my opponents that day. “That’s six-point-three. And you lost one game. That’s five-point-three. You multiply the factor—point-seven because you hundred fifty below your field—times nine rounds. Five-point-three times is your multiplier. Your multiplier is twenty—anything below eighteen hundred is twenty. That’s a hundred six. Anything over five points per round is bonusable. Nine rounds times five is forty-five. Every point you go over forty-five is bonusable. You had a hundred six. That’s sixty-one. Add it to the one-oh-six. You’re going to do about a hundred seventy points.”

  My new rating, by Marlon’s calculations, will be 1461. Goodbye, blue-hairs.

  “That’s living the dream, baby,” Marlon says. “Fuck winning the tournament. Hundred seventy points! That’s goooood. You should be skipping home.”

  “About time, wouldn’t you say?”

  “Worth the wait. Wow! Hundred seventy points. That shit is mind-boggling. You had your kick-ass tournament.”

  “Took me a year.”

  “So what? Doesn’t matter.”

  I feel reli
ef and, for the first time that day, anxiety: Now I have to live up to the new number. I drop off Marlon at the apartment of a Scrabble player in Queens and lend him half of my winnings; he says the IRS is mailing him a check for $2,200 and he’s going to break down and take a job working with his uncle at an insurance company. I’m dubious.

  We soul-hug, and I drive off, believing that my rating accurately defines who I am.

  “Okay. I’ll take credit for that.” Joe Edley laughs. It’s Monday morning, and Joe has heard about what happened over the weekend. “So how’s the method?” Edley asks, referring to alphagram study.

  “Great. It’s helped me see the words better,” I say. And it has. During the tournament, I believed I could anagram with more skill than before. “I don’t know if the studying made a specific difference, but my attitude was totally different.”

  “How’d that happen?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t do what I normally do, which is think about the outcome in advance. I stayed focused.”

  “That’s certainly one of the things you need to do.”

  I give Joe my opening rack. “TAXIMEN!” he says. “That’s nice. The X on the double letter. Beautiful.” Then I set up the ABIKNW? rack with the open G on the board. “WINGBACK,” he says after a few seconds. It had taken me a couple of minutes to find it, and another minute to ponder how sure I was that it was a legitimate word. “You make high-class plays like that, you’ll win.”

  “Even when I was trailing I felt I was going to win.”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised if you exceed your expectations.”

  “We’ll see,” I say skeptically.

  “But the typical sixteen-hundred player isn’t going to see TAXIMEN or WINGBACK,” Edley says. “Anyway, I’m pleased. I hesitated to believe it was anything I said. But it was a pretty dramatic change. You’re on your way.”

  My new rating arrives in the mail one week later, on one of the computer printouts with which I’ve become so familiar. I rip open the envelope and study the page for several minutes, scrutinizing each of my wins and the performance of other players. Then I look at my individual tournament scorecard, the one I filled out after each round, which is returned with the ratings cross-table. The long string of W’s interrupted by one L, my game-by-game scores and those of my opponents, my cumulative record and cumulative spread. All of the letters and numbers are handwritten neatly. Cold, unemotional, and businesslike. Each of the W’s appears absolutely identical. Saving the best for last, I run my finger over the cross-table and find the number. Marlon was right: 1461.

  10. The Words

  JOSEPH LEONARD looks much younger than his sixty-five years. He has smooth, light skin and a full head of sandy gray hair parted on the left and brushed forward. Joe wears gray slacks, a short-sleeved white button-down shirt, and black slippers when he greets me at the door at the precise time we had arranged via snail mail. Joe doesn’t have a telephone because he finds interruptions disturbing. He can’t afford a computer.

  The walls of his one-bedroom, government-subsidized apartment in Center City, Philadelphia, are white and bare. There is little furniture. The living room contains a small, rickety bookshelf that bows under the weight of dictionaries and other volumes, a stand holding folders and more dictionaries, a bench bearing a stereo and record player that Joe bought in 1967, and a desk with a manual typewriter and rows of pencils that Joe frequently rearranges during my four-hour visit. The apartment is spotless, solvents lined up like soldiers on a kitchen ledge. Joe keeps the shades drawn because he suffers from extreme astigmatism, though he pulls one back a few times to peer into the street below. He tells me he leaves the old, brick walkup only occasionally, to buy food, mail letters, examine books in a Barnes & Noble or a library, and pick up the medication he takes to treat anxiety and panic disorders.

  Joe was raised in northeastern Pennsylvania coal country by an aunt and uncle; his father died of cancer when Joe was eight, and his mother died three years later after falling through a basement grate at a supermarket. He was a county champion speller in the tenth grade, and he recalls playing Scrabble as early as 1949. He can’t play now, though, because the pressure of the game makes him panicky. At Lehigh University, Joe was hospitalized after a nervous breakdown. He graduated with a degree in chemical engineering and worked in Philadelphia for the Defense Supply Agency in the 1960s and early 1970s, first as a chemist and then in a medical group in which he wrote specifications for dental equipment and other supplies. As the Vietnam War wound down, Joe was reassigned to the chemicals lab but didn’t like the job. The stress was too great. Joe hasn’t worked since.

  I have come to visit Joe because no one has been more devoted to words and to the dictionary used to play Scrabble than he has. I first heard about him through Matt Graham and Mike Baron, who dubbed Joe the “Word List Master General” and dedicated the first Wordbook to him. We’ve been corresponding for months. Joe responds to my letters with long, single-spaced missives composed on a manual typewriter. Nearly all of his letters include at least one page-long explanation of mistakes in various Scrabble dictionaries or other word lists that I ask him about.

  “He has a personal relationship with words,” Matt Hopkins, a Philadelphia player who has befriended Joe, tells me. “His word knowledge is staggering. He understands the etymology of words. He once explained to me the derivation of MYNHEER and MIJNHEER from the Dutch.” But Joe’s treatment of the words about which he knows so much is narrow, detached, and inflexible. He’s attracted to the rules of lexicography and list making, not the beauty, wonder, or irony of language.

  Joe has scrutinized every page of well over a dozen dictionaries, including a few unabridged ones, by hand. The first was a rhyming dictionary, into which he handwrote additions. He shows me his copy of a dictionary of pseudonyms, to which he has added hundreds of his own entries. He has scoured telephone books for names that are palindromes, atlases for place names that contain each of the letters AEIOU just once, and almanacs for errors in population tables.

  When the original Official Scrabble Players Dictionary was published in 1978, Joe tells me, he immediately found numerous errors, and set about cataloguing them. But first he drew on the OSPD for the pioneering word lists he contributed to the incipient Scrabble newsletter.

  Joe wrote down all 21,734 seven-letter bingos in the OSPD. He would type a word and then handwrite its alphagram below it, cut up each pair, and sort them alphabetically according to alphagram, placing the slips of paper in what turned out to be five hundred Baggies. Then he typed up the alphabetized alphagram list, the first of its kind. He did the same thing with the 26,455 eight-letter words. Subsets of these lists graced the newsletter.

  “It was rather time-consuming, but I enjoyed it,” Joe tells me, kneeling on the floor of his living room with his legs splayed behind him.

  The original OSPD was created when the growing tournament scene highlighted the need for a reliable, easy-to-use word source. The official arbiter of the time, Funk & Wagnalls Standard College Dictionary, was confusing. Some words were found only on long lists of undefined derivatives starting with UN, RE, or MIS, or ending with ER or MAKER. Comparatives were allowed only if the first part of speech listed was an adjective; so SMARTER could be challenged off the board, while MAINEST* was allowed. Some words lacked parts of speech, and other words were just missing, including BUSLOAD, COVEN, and SURREAL. Foreign words like JA*, OUI*, NYET*, and BITTE* were allowed.

  Selchow & Righter, which owned the game at the time, chose Merriam-Webster Inc. to oversee publication of a new dictionary. It was decided that the book would contain words that could be found in at least one of five collegiate dictionaries in print at the time— Funk & Wagnalls (1973 edition), Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eighth Edition (1973), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969), Webster’s New World Dictionary, Second College Edition (1970), and The Random House College Dictionary (1968).

  Player volunteer
s did much of the compiling, and they and Merriam-Webster made lots of mistakes. Joe Leonard found scores of them. There were omissions; several words, including GRANOLA and MELTDOWN, could be found in all five of the source dictionaries but somehow didn’t make the OSPD. Misprints were copied from the source dictionaries, such as DUODENAS*, WAEFU*, and PAPULAN*, which turned out to be a sixty-year-old typo in Funk & Wagnalls. New misprints were created, like CRESIVE* instead of CRESCIVE. There were missed parts of speech, words overlooked because of complicated or confusing entries, erroneous plurals—name a mistake, the OSPD had it.

  Many of the errors were corrected in addenda printed in the Scrabble newsletter. Joe kept his own master list. Scouring the source dictionaries page by page and matching them against the OSPD, Joe by 1982 had compiled a list of two thousand words that should have been in the OSPD. As new editions of the source dictionaries were published, Joe checked them for new words and other changes and passed his findings on to the Scrabble association. By 1989, Joe’s master list was fifty-five hundred words long. A final typed version, starting with AARGH and ending with ZYMOSAN, came to forty-four pages, two columns of words per page, including part of speech, inflections, and source dictionary. Leonard sent it to Joe Edley, who was coordinating efforts for a second edition of the OSPD.

  Leonard’s list had to be refined because Merriam-Webster didn’t want to include words in the OSPD2 if the source dictionary was no longer in print. For instance, some words contained in the eighth edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate but not the ninth, such as DROPPAGE* and MAINLINER*, were disqualified. More oddly, words found in the original Funk & Wagnalls which inadvertently had been missed by the compilers of the original OSPD were excised from Joe’s list, too.