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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  At least it’s not the main event. There are thirty-nine games to go. But playing in a long tournament when things aren’t going well is like enduring the stages of grief. My inauspicious 4–8 record in the early bird speeds me past denial and hope and straight to resignation. Sure, I made a few nice plays—spotting KANGARoO down from a K, turning ETIC into ENERGETIC—but most of it feels random, out of my control. Talking to Joe Edley and being Joe Edley are not the same thing.

  I had longed to escape the novice division to get away from the blue-hairs, but I’ve discovered that they are among the intermediates, too, just with inflated ratings. The trick to avoiding them is to get out to a fast start, because the players with the best records play one another, and the little old ladies never have the good records. In the main event, I do that, racing to a 6–4 start.

  One mystical sequence in Game 3 is memorable. On my first turn, I play a seven-letter word, PArOTID. On my second turn I play an eight-letter word, DREARIER. On my third turn I add ING to my opponent’s previous play, making a nine-letter word, REVOLTING. And on my fourth turn I make a ten-letter word, placing UN in front of my opponent’s earlier bingo, REALIZED. Seven, eight, nine, ten. The sequence combines all of the joys of the game: creativity, symmetry, linguistic flexibility, mathematics, and luck. I win the game, 490–403.

  The effects of study are immediately apparent: four-letter words like CUIF, WEIR, YECH, and VROW all instinctively fly from my fingers in early games, as does OUTBARKS (I’ve studied the OUT words...) and OVERFAR (...and the OVER words). And when my higher-rated opponents win with plays like OUTHOMER and SUBRENT, well, what can I do? But then I endure a 2–5 stretch after the 6–4 start. My slump isn’t about not “knowing the ledge” but losing the cool, playing phonies (like ZINCE*, when ZINC would have done) and failing to think through winnable endgames, blinded by a haze of complexity and worry.

  At 6–7, I write in my notebook, “Back to playing the blue-hairs.” At 7–8, I scribble, “Breakout is turning into a breakup.”

  I’m not the only one struggling. In the middle of Game 19, over in the expert section, Chris Cree leaps from his table and storms out of the playing room, shouting “Goddamn it!” and slamming the door. The tile shuffling stops, and for a moment the room goes hush.

  Chris Cree is best known in the Scrabble world not for his steady run of top-notch play, his folksy Texas twang, or his successful forklift business. Nor for his golf-course attire, country-club Republican politics, endless cigarette, unfailing generosity, adept guitar strumming, or well-timed Goddamn!s when the tiles don’t fall his way. No, Cree is a legend because of what happened at the Scrabble Superstars Showdown at Bally’s in Las Vegas in 1995.

  It is 7:30 a.m. Cree has been drinking beer and playing blackjack all night. In the last forty minutes, he’s come back from the dead, from $15,000 in the hole, to pull even. Then the cards really start falling, and Cree keeps betting, $5,000 per hand, three hands at a time. Then eight or nine hands at a time. He can’t lose. From 8:00 to 9:00, Cree wins $177,500, pushing his winnings during the Scrabble tournament to nearly $200,000. Mike Baron has been monitoring his inebriated friend, prodding him to stop—not because he’s drunk, not because he’s just won two hundred grand, but because the Scrabble tournament is about to resume.

  “They’re starting your clock,” Baron says. “It’s time to go.”

  Cree hasn’t even been winning in the Superstars. But after collecting his check at the cashier’s window, he goes to play Scrabble. He wins two of three, races down to the blackjack table at lunch, wins another $62,000. He plays four more Scrabble games in the afternoon, goes to his room, eats a shrimp cocktail and a cheeseburger, washes it down with a Pepsi, and sleeps. By the week’s end, Cree has won $250,000—five times as much as David Gibson wins in the most lucrative Scrabble tournament ever.

  But when a Sports Illustrated reporter who is writing about Scrabble asks what he would have rather won, the gambling money or the Scrabble tournament, Cree doesn’t hesitate. “Tournament,” he says. “Glory. Glory. Glory. I want that glory.”

  Cree has had his share, taking big events like Reno in 1990, when he started 18–1, and the Grand Canyon in 1984. He finished fourth in a Nationals in the eighties, and he always seems to wind up near the top of the top division. But Chris has been on a year-and-a-half-long run of bad luck, and he’s happy to tell you about it. That’s why I love him: Among the expert Scrabble players, Chris Cree may not be the biggest whiner, but he’s the biggest whiner who should know better. Either that, or the man who won $250,000 playing blackjack has been truly screwed by Lady Luck.

  Over dinner in Reno in a hotel where his room is comped—one far swanker than the Sands Regency across town, and racier, too, this week thanks to the convention of swingers it’s hosting—Chris explains why he can’t stand Scrabble’s unfairness. Take the game he lost that day to a weaker player. Chris sacrificed a dozen points to make what appeared to be, based on the tiles unseen to him, a logical late-game play. But his opponent beat the odds, hooking the word he had just played with SCENERY, an improbable combination based on the information Chris had.

  “It just goes down as an ‘L,’” Chris says. “No one will ever know all the anguish and thought and pain that went into it.”

  “And that frustrates you,” I say.

  “Very much. It does.”

  “But that’s built into the game, isn’t it?” I reply.

  Chris points his steak knife at me in a mock threatening manner. “Perhaps,” he says. “It. Is.”

  At age forty-five, Chris golfs to a handicap that fluctuates between six and twelve. He closed down the offices of his forklift sales company a year ago and now runs the business from his big suburban Dallas home. His devoted girlfriend sits behind him during Scrabble games, listening to the postgame tile talk with the patience of a priest in a confessional. All in all, a pretty good life, he admits. And yet this goddamn game.

  Chris is as good as anyone at assessing Scrabble’s probabilities. He is one of the most meticulous tile-counters around, not only tracking which ones have been played but keeping a running count of how many have been played. By doing so, Chris is seeking to minimize the odds of something unexpected happening. “When the odds don’t go the way they’re supposed to, that just pisses me off,” he says.

  Chris admits his word knowledge is inferior to that of the top twenty players. What turns him on is calculating those in-game odds —based on vowel-consonant ratios, the opponent’s previous play, the unseen tiles—and winning despite them. “I want to win the game when you draw both blanks and all the S’s. The games where the odds are against me,” he says. “That’s what gives me glory. Who cares about getting both blanks, four S’s, and scoring six hundred points? That’s not even fun.”

  In one game in Reno, Chris had the rack ADKMNNU. He deduced by his opponent’s play that the one remaining tile in the bag had to be the J. So he played off his D and went out with JUNKMAN to win. Afterward, his opponent said, “How’d I lose this game? I had everything!” “Yeah, I know you did,” Chris replied.

  That’s why he can’t take it when the odds betray him, because he’s thinking and his opponent isn’t. He’s not drawing blanks; he’s expecting not to draw blanks, so he’s playing more defensively.

  “I keep track of it. I watch it,” he says the next day, chain-smoking Marlboro Lights in the Sands Regency coffee shop. “Every tournament in the last year and a half, I’ve had fewer blanks than the number of games played. Today, I had two blanks in one game. I had no blanks in the other five. I came within ten or twenty points in the other ones. That’s really frustrating when you have a chance for that glory, to win a game where somebody’s luckier than a two-dicked dog, and you just can’t do it.”

  “Why does it matter so much?” I ask.

  “I want a return on my investment. I want a return of glory on my investment of time.”

  The next day, I happen by Chris’s table during a game
and notice his rack: AEEEEOU. Across the room, someone in the expert division yells, about something else, “Shit!”

  “That wasn’t Chris Cree!” Chris announces, and everyone in the packed playing hall laughs. “But I’ll show y’all how to do it in juuuuuuust a minute.”

  Day five, 10:00 P.M. The tournament room. A few friendly afterhours games are in progress.

  One of the players, a fiftyish Manhattan club member named Sally Ricketts, feels light-headed. She sits in a chair, and someone brings her water, but she starts getting woozy. Larry Sherman, Joel’s brother, props her up in his lap, but Sally’s fading. Finally, we lie her on the red carpeting. I call a player who is a physician, and he comes down from his room.

  Meanwhile, the games go on. Players glance over at Sally lying on the floor being tended to by paramedics, but no one stops playing. Arguments over racks and moves and bingos and strategy—all continue uninterrupted. Sally is carted out on a stretcher, and over her protestations is taken to a hospital.

  “That’s fucked up. I’m sorry,” Marlon says. “The lady lying there on the floor and we keep playing. Me, too. She could have been dying right the fuck there and we would have still been playing Scrabble. That’s fucked up. We just kind of stuck with that bug a little bit too bad.”

  G.I. Joel, who is Sally’s friend, asks, “What should people do? Stop playing? Crowd around, not give her air, pretend to care? At least they’re honest.”

  Ira Cohen, a Los Angeles expert, has a practical concern. If Sally doesn’t make it back to tournament in time for the morning rounds, “The pairings will be all messed up,” he says.

  Fortunately for the pairings, Sally is okay. She returns to the hotel later that night and plays in the morning.

  Playing fifty-one games in eight days— in a casino —is a time-bending experience. A moment arrives where your quotidian anchors come loose, and you’re not sure what day it is, or how much longer this can go on. You add up the numbers and figure it’s got to be over soon, and then you realize you’re 13–11 in the main event, out of the running. And there are still three days and fifteen games to go.

  I’m not sure what day of the week it is; not that it matters. Play starts at 9:00, and Marlon has to wake me. “It’s after eight,” he says. “Get up.”

  “I don’t want to play,” I respond.

  “I hope a lot of other motherfuckers feel the same way,” he says. “Bring it on.”

  Marlon has shamed me. I do want to play. I always want to play. It’s just that I’m sore, aching, and exhausted. My back is stiffer than Al Gore. The black, puffy rings below my eyes look as if they’ve been applied by a makeup artist for Kiss. My legs and arms feel atrophied, as if my reentry capsule has just plopped into the Pacific Ocean after a week in space. All of this means I’m doomed.

  Failure, in other words, is a self-fulfilling prophecy, and I’m very much in self-fulfilling mode. The low point comes in Game 25, when I challenge a common three-letter word (FIZ) and then play back-to-back phonies against a woman for whom English appears to be a second language. Late in another game, I fail to block the only spot for my opponent’s otherwise-unplayable Z. In yet another, I miss a wide-open play of QUAY for 36 points on the penultimate turn, playing QUiET for 23 instead, which sets up my opponent’s winning 44-point QUIZ.

  After Game 30, I’m 14–16, and I scribble some capitalized obscenities in my notebook. Not only have I reverted to my old playing habits, but I’ve given up.

  In the quarter-century of organized Scrabble, only a dozen or so players have scored more than 700 points in a sanctioned game in North America. Nick Ballard, the Scrabble theoretician who published the newsletter Medleys, scored 792 in a club game in Chicago in 1980, but he used four phony bingos and never bothered reporting the result. When a skinny, nineteen-year-old, University of Cincinnati student named Bill Blevins, who worked at a Big Boy restaurant, scored 724 points in a club game, it was big news. Blevins made page 1 of the Scrabble Players News, but the game was tainted: His opponent was an eighty-three-year-old club newcomer, Daisy Webb, who totaled 176 points and let Blevins get away with five phonies. The tournament mark of 719, set earlier that year, stood.

  In the next thirteen years, despite an enormous talent surge, the proliferation of study materials, and the addition of more than five thousand words to a new, second edition of the OSPD, the 700 club would be joined only seven times. Scoring 700 was nearly as rare as a round of 59 in a professional golf tourney or an unassisted triple play in baseball. You had to know some words, but, more important, the tiles had to flow favorably and there had to be available spots to play them for a lot of points. You had to be damn lucky.

  So when Mark Landsberg scored 770 points in a tournament in Pasadena, California, in July 1993, it wasn’t just rare, it was shocking: 770! And not against some overmatched blue-hair, but against the highest-rated player in the tournament, Alan Stern. Landsberg started with a bingo, SHAMEFUL.

  On his third turn he made a triple-triple, WOBBLIEr, for 176 points, through the second B, which he had placed there on his previous turn.

  After Stern passed, Landsberg played INTRADAY, a doubledouble worth 98, which Stern unsuccessfully challenged.

  Then Landsberg drew the second blank and played another tripletriple, UNCInATE, for 131, which Stern also challenged.

  After five turns, the score was 512–113. The word judge who ruled UNCINATE acceptable rushed over to the tournament director and reported the score with a trembling voice. The final was 770–338—the highest single one-game score ever, and the highest total of winning and losing scores. But Landsberg had no idea he was making history. “No one ever talked about the highest game,” he says. “There was no such thing.”

  There was after that. Landsberg has dined out on 770 ever since. The license plate on his black Mercedes 560SEC reads MR 770. He shows up at tournaments wearing a matching cap and T-shirt bearing the number. He hired an agent to try to negotiate appearances with the National Scrabble Association, attempted to publish a book about the 770 game, and talked about it on CNN.

  Whenever Landsberg sees anything priced $7.70, he buys it, like the chocolate silk pie he came across at a bakery in Laguna Hills, California, where he lives in a retirement community called Leisure World. The kid behind the counter gave Landsberg a look when he said he buys anything that’s $7.70. Landsberg dragged him to the parking lot and showed him his car. “That’s why I have to buy anything that’s $7.70!” he exclaimed. “I’m Mr. 770!”

  In Reno, Landsberg holds court one midnight in the tournament room before a dozen or so players who hang on his stories. Landsberg is in his early sixties. He wears eyeglasses with magnifying lenses that give him a bugged-out, Mr. Magoo look. An oversized, button-down denim shirt hangs to his knees. A few days before, Landsberg won the early bird and called John Williams to announce his retirement from tournament play. (Williams thanked him for the call and for his cooperation over the years, but he was perplexed; it wasn’t as if the NSA had to prepare a spot for Landsberg’s bust in some hall of fame.)

  Landsberg says he started playing Scrabble seriously in the early 1970s in Los Angeles. He was studying English as a foreign language at UCLA after two years in the Peace Corps in Iran and five more years traveling around Asia and the Pacific. Doing what exactly? “I can’t tell you,” he says. “You have this tape recorder on.” He describes himself as a “retired philosopher,” and offers only that he worked as an independent games inventor, creating more than two hundred games, a handful of which made it to store shelves. From their sales he draws royalties.

  Landsberg played at a place in the Westwood section of L.A. called the Word Club. Shortly after moving to California in the early 1970s, Lester Schonbrun found himself there looking for a game. He was flummoxed. The players had their own rules—75 bonus points for an eight-letter word, 100 for a nine, 150 for a ten. They also decreed that, based on an inquiry Landsberg says he made of Funk & Wagnalls, RE could be affixed to any verb
, and UN and ANTI to any noun. “So you could be ANTICAMEL,” Landsberg says.

  Landsberg wrote down his ideas about the game, enough for a twenty-five-page pamphlet. When he sent the material for approval to Selchow & Righter, which he knew was zealous about protecting its trademark, the manufacturer’s newly formed subsidiary Scrabble Players Inc. said it was working on its own book, but was interested in working with Landsberg.

  “We’ll make you Mr. Scrabble,” Landsberg says he was told. After a year of periodic, uncompensated consultation, Landsberg’s lawyer told Scrabble Players it needed to pay Landsberg. “They said, ‘We’re sorry, we dropped the project,’” Landsberg says. But a year later, the association published The Official Scrabble Players Handbook.

  Landsberg claimed the company ripped him off. “Everything was paraphrased,” he says. “Everything was in the same order, including key words and the annotated games. The strategy part of this book was all mine. It was a derivative work. They couldn’t have done their book without mine.” He sued Scrabble Players for $10 million. He says the company offered to settle for $5,000.

  For the next twelve years, Landsberg didn’t touch a tile. The case of Landsberg v. Scrabble Crossword Game Players, Inc. went to trial in federal court in Los Angeles in 1975, and Landsberg won. The judge found that Scrabble Players had copied from Landsberg’s work and awarded him several hundred thousand dollars in damages. But the Ninth U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals reversed the lower-court ruling, finding that what Scrabble Players had taken “was at most uncopy-rightable ideas,” like the notational system for games.

  The court did order a new trial to determine whether Selchow had breached an implied contract with Landsberg. Three more years passed, and Landsberg again won at trial, though Selchow’s lawyers tried to make him look like a word wacko. “Is it true that you believe REBANANA is a word?” he recalls one lawyer asking him. “No, no,” he replied. “ANTIBANANA is a word.”