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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  In the car, Matt is edgy. He pulls out some bingo flash cards, but he’s slow in solving them while Geary is virtually automatic. (I beat them all to one: EFHIILST—TILEFISH.) After arriving in Providence, we go to a catered reception for players hosted by Hasbro and the NSA. Matt has a few beers, and I hear him carrying on about how well he’s been playing and how Geary was making mistakes and deferring to him during warmup games.

  A bunch of us walks over to a rock club a few blocks away owned by Rich Lupo, who introduced Eric Chaikin to the game when Eric was an undergraduate at Brown in the 1980s; Lupo has entered the tournament despite not having played competitively in more than a decade. At his club, Lupo has laid linoleum tiles on the dance floor in the form of a Scrabble board. Matt has a couple more beers, and becomes progressively more hostile and angry; I think he’s mad because I dissed the oxygen tank; he accuses me of being anhedonic, that is, unable to experience pleasure.

  Frankly, he’s making me nervous. I had chosen to room with Matt, for journalistic reasons, but now I’m regretting the choice. I feel as if his presence is interfering with my preparation. Our room is better stocked than a nutrition store—smart drugs cover the bedroom and bathroom counters, fill two drawers, and spill onto the floor. I sleep badly; Matt snores, and I’m nervous about the tournament, and words are flying through my head like gnats at a picnic. I wake up at 5:00, toss until 7:00. When Matt leaves for his ritual two large cups of Dunkin Donuts coffee, I put on a classical music station. Maybe, I think, the music contains the alpha waves I’ll need for the tournament. Or is it beta?

  John Williams had boasted that the 2000 Nationals would be the most impressive yet, and it is. Playing in the Rhode Island Convention Center—a sleek, modern centerpiece of a downtown revival led by the city’s ex-con mayor—and not a hotel ballroom makes it feel like a world-class sporting event. The NSA came to Providence to showcase Scrabble for Rhode Island-based Hasbro, which is spending about $500,000 on the event, including close to $90,000 in prize money. Hasbro Chairman Alan Hassenfeld is expected to make an appearance, which would be the first time a senior Hasbro executive has shown up at a Nationals.

  The thirty-thousand-square-foot playing hall, nearly half a football field, is breathtaking. There are more than 150 tables—two games to a table—for the six divisions of competitors. The top three divisions are to the right as you enter, the bottom three to the left. The NSA persuaded Hasbro to print special boards for the event, replacing the dark, glary design made for the game’s fiftieth anniversary which players consider unusable. (During the taping of an episode of her TV show devoted to Scrabble, which she loves, Martha Stewart off-camera called the old board “really ugly.”) The center square of the special board—white background with the traditional red, pink, and blue premium squares—features a commemorative Providence logo. At the front of the hall, on a raised platform, data-entry workers record the results of every game on eight computers and a program spits out results and pairings. The NSA’s Webmaster and an Internet reporter post continuous updates. The familiar giant Scrabble board bears the message HAVE A WORD WITH US.

  Over the public-address system, Williams welcomes the throng and drops some stats. We’ll play more than 9,000 games over the next five days and make more than 13,000 challenges. “And I expect 163,000 complaints about drawing bad tiles,” he says.

  “But the number we’re focused on is six hundred players,” Williams says. “Just for context, ten years ago at the national championships, we had two hundred forty players. Just amazing. One of the reasons we wanted to have this in Providence is to demonstrate that tournament Scrabble is dynamic, cool, fun, and exploding. I think we’ve done our job. Now let’s play Scrabble.”

  Two years of playing, studying, and obsessing have come down to this moment. I want to do well, not only for myself, but for Edley and G.I. Joel and everyone else who has tutored and encouraged and taken me to school, as it were, over a board. I feel a debt to these people for whom Scrabble is life, who have helped to make Scrabble my life. They are like a pack of wolves raising a human baby: They took me in and taught me to hunt and gather and shielded me from the taunts of others. Now they’re sending me out into the woods to fend for myself.

  I high-five my buddies, Eric and Dominic and Scott and Marlon, who tells me to just do it. I’m focused, determined, pumped. Twenty-three wins in the thirty-one games should be enough to win the division—and I still believe I can do it, even though I’m seeded 49th out of 105. I’m determined, but also realistic, so twenty wins would make me happy. Twenty wins undoubtedly would place me in the Top 10. Twenty wins would send my rating skyward. I join the crowd around the bulletin board outside the playing room that lists the pairings. I scribble down the names of my first four opponents and their ratings: 1720, 1733, 1758, 1784.

  Suddenly, a voice in my head says, You could lose all four of these games.

  And then I do.

  In Game 1, I call “hold” when my opponent, Ann Sanfedele of the New York club, lays down RANGLED*. I know this isn’t good (DANGLER and GNARLED are the only words therein), but then I doubt myself, and I let it go. I lose by 11 points. In Game 2, I miss the easy bingo in AINOTT? on the second turn of the game (sTATION) and pass up the one I do see (ANTIpOT) because it slots the second T in the triple-word-score column. Then I miss the easy catch in BDEILLU (BULLIED) and lose by 92. In Game 3, a comeback falls short. In Game 4, I play perhaps my worst game of Scrabble ever, inexplicably opening with the phony YEY* (shades of YER*), challenging an acceptable three-letter word, falling behind by 160 points, and still managing to blow a chance to win, when both blanks materialize on my rack late in the game.

  Eric Chaikin also starts 0–4. We are not rocking at the big dance.

  In Game 5, after lunch, I manage a win, by 3 points, finding IN NArDS with my time dwindling. In Game 6, I miss another late-blank bingo that would win. And I wrap up the day from hell with a blank-less, S-less nightmare in which I lose by more points (239) than I score (218). Before it ends, I stare across the vast hall, just wishing it over. All the preparation. The lists, the games, the angst. For this? For a 1–6 record and a—546 spread? What happened to the confidence? The stoic demeanor over the board? The assiduous word study? Had I just been lucky? Could I really be this bad when it matters?

  “Bet you twenty bucks you’re not worse than me,” Eric says afterward.

  “No way,” I say. “Well, I know you were oh and four. But you can’t be worse. Okay. A dollar. I’m one and six.”

  “Oh and seven.”

  I hand him the dollar.

  Joe Edley, who won all seven of his games, spots me looking suicidal and offers some advice. “Go work out, have a good meal, and get a good night’s rest,” he says. “And start over tomorrow.”

  Start over tomorrow. Easy for him to say. I have six losses. I’m out of it. And I’m incensed. I angrily hoist my bag and walk back to my hotel room. Matt Graham follows. I don’t even ask how he did, because I do not care.

  “I don’t know why you and Eric are so upset when I’m the one with something on the line,” he says, meaning he has no money and needs to win, he believes, in order to support himself.

  That does it. I think, Fuck you, Matt. Just because you’ve chosen to stake your financial well-being on the remote possibility of winning a goddamn Scrabble tournament against the world’s best players doesn’t make your games more important than mine. “Why shouldn’t it matter as much to us as it does to you?” I bark. “Are our losses any less meaningful than yours?”

  Now I’m furious. I work out, have a good meal, and get a good night’s rest. Tomorrow I will kick ass.

  “Dude,” Eric says the next morning as we peruse the standings and write down our pairings. “This is not us. We’re better than this.”

  I’m in 101st place. Eric is in 104th.

  “Yesterday,” I say. “It’s over.”

  “I’m looking forward to making up all of this ground,” he says.


  I’m still angry, but now I channel my anger. I quickly, confidently play a phony bingo on the second turn of Game 8, and it stays, and I romp. My record goes to 2–6. I draw great tiles in Game 9, get away with GOFERED*, and win 553–298. I’m 3–6. I stay mad in Game 10 and win by 30. Now I’m 4–6. In Game 11, I play superbly. I find DILATIVE from the D. PLEADING through the I. Off the board come two phony bingos attempted by my opponent, the second of which leads me to play HEY, creating a hook down the first column for the T that I possess and she doesn’t. Boom. SHORTIA for 94, and a challenge (it’s an herb). On the penultimate play of the game, I play two tiles—a blank and the Q, making SHORTIAs and sUQ across a triple-word score—for 63 points. Final score: 588–267. Record: 5–6. A perfect morning ends.

  Another win after lunch, when I find BWANA in the endgame. And then I lose—my OVERsUP being too little, too late to overcome some early misplays. That makes me mad again, and in the day’s final game I hoard the last two S’s and the final U and pick the Q, as I’d planned, capitalizing on a deliberate, unstoppable setup that allows me to play SQUIBS for 63 points and a win. I finish the day with a 6–1 record and a spread of +819. I’m back to even and up to forty-fourth place. Thank you, Joe.

  “That’s great,” says Edley, who is 11–3 and in second place in Division 1. “You did it. Wouldn’t it be something if you won it after a 1–6 start?”

  “One day at a time,” I say.

  Eric’s comeback began that afternoon. He had plunged to 1–10, and then he, too, just decided to stop losing. Eric discovered that it helped to think bad thoughts about his opponents. Really bad thoughts. That they would be contracting fatal diseases or that their spouses would be leaving them. It wasn’t quite like having a parapsychologist stare down opponents, the way Russian chess champion Anatoly Karpov used to do. But it worked. Eric won all three games.

  The following day, after the morning session (me: 2–2; Eric: 3–1), we take a long walk up College Hill to the Brown campus, where Eric reminisces about his undergraduate days and tries to deduce why he (we) isn’t (aren’t) better at Scrabble. Eric says something just seems to happen when he’s playing; he focuses so intensely on scouring a rack for bingos that he loses sight of the game’s purpose: to make the best move.

  Part of the problem, Eric reasons, is that he’s always been infatuated with wordplay rather than competition. He demonstrates that devotion one night at the tournament, when he explains to other math-brained word lovers his concept of “supervocalics,” a word he coined to describe words or phrases containing the letters A, E, I, O, and U once each (Julia Roberts is a supervocalic actress; Mozambique and Belorussia are the only two supervocalic countries; Hair Club for Men is a supervocalic ... hair club). Eric is a patient, dedicated linguistic analyst, but over the board, in competition, something goes awry. “Maybe I’m just not good at games,” he says.

  So frustrated with his performance, Eric vowed to quit the game entirely when his record plunged to 1–10. His word obsession had eaten up too many hours of life. Studying wasn’t paying off, so why bother? Now that he had rebounded to 7–11, he was less definitive.

  And me? I still wanted to win twenty, as unlikely as that seemed with a 9–9 record. Regardless, we return to the playing room relaxed. Eric takes two out of three to improve to 9–12, and I play sharply. In Game 19, I catch a big break when, with the bag nearly empty, my opponent transposes the D and T in VELDT. His right hand is in the bag drawing fresh tiles when I spot the mistake, and I shout “Hold it!” before his hand emerges, and then “Challenge!” It’s a game-saving play, because after I play QUEUE for 48 points in the same spot, there’s dreck in the bag. Not only would I have eaten the Q but probably the K and a Y, too. I eke out another win in Game 20, helped by back-to-back bingos, LOCATORS and REFeRENT. And I prevail in a cat-and-mouse endgame in the next round when I calculate the odds of my opponent bingoing if I open a fresh line (for an eight-letter bingo ending in E, which I want to do because I have strong tiles). I determine that his only possible bingo is AcCURaTE, using both blanks, so I open the new line. It works out. I draw one of the blanks and play dISTANCE for 80 points with one tile in the bag.

  I’m 12–9 and up to thirtieth place. Walking purposefully to the front of the hall to turn in the score sheet, I pump my fist like Tiger Woods and squeeze an angry “Yes!” through gritted teeth.

  Brian Cappelletto was everyone’s favorite to win it all. Joe Edley wasn’t. But Edley had prepared for the event as only Edley could. He eliminated dairy from his diet. He began visiting an acupuncturist, who porcupined him regularly in the weeks before the tournament. “Twelve or thirteen needles,” Edley tells me. “Four in my head, one in my neck, two in my chest. It did open me up.” He maintained his qi gong, breathing, and meditation regimen. He studied and was confident in his word knowledge. “I felt like my body was opening up and I was able to get the energy in my head in a way it hasn’t been for a while.”

  After Game 21, Edley has a 17–4 record and a one-game lead over Cappelletto, Adam Logan, and the Nigerian émigré Sammy Okasagah. After Game 25, Edley is 20–5, two games ahead of Logan and three ahead of six others, including Cappelletto, whom Joe has just defeated, 495–425, in what he called “the perfect game.” And it nearly was. Brian played BLUNGERS and NOVERCAL and LACE-wOOD, while Edley found NEgATRON, MATTOIDS, TRAILSIDE (through the R and L), and, in a 68-point winning play, SHOWBIZ down from an existing S. A computer analysis later gave Joe an efficiency rating of 96.5 percent for the game and Brian 98.9. Remarkable.

  “I feel like I’m the old guy,” Edley says. “But when I feel good, I feel I can win.”

  He tells me this after dropping the last three games of that day, to fall to 20–8, in first place by just 44 spread points over David Wiegand, a quiet twenty-six-year-old mortgage underwriter from Portland, Oregon. Randy Hersom, a round, bearded forty-year-old computer programmer from Morganton, North Carolina, also has twenty wins, but is way behind on spread. Cappelletto has nineteen. There are three games left to play the following morning. “Ideally, I’d like to come in first, second, third, or fourth,” Edley says. “If I can win two, I can win the tournament.”

  I ask Edley if he is motivated to prove that he’s not over the hill, to stick it to his detractors who snipe behind his back. In truth, he hasn’t played well of late, failing to win a tournament since Danbury more than two years earlier. There was the 0–11 run in Waltham, the detached retina, the lackluster performance in Australia. Other experts had proclaimed Edley washed up. “I would [think that] if I were them,” Edley says. “But I don’t feel like I needed to show anybody anything. I’m beyond that. I’ve won so much.”

  Of the forty people who bet on the tournament with Jim Geary, not one took Edley at 5 to 1 (including me, who squandered $20, split four ways, on Matt, Marlon, Lester Schonbrun, and Geary himself).

  “I have goals that are reachable,” Edley tells me. “It’s a reachable goal for me to win it. If it doesn’t happen, it doesn’t happen.” He goes off to eat dinner alone.

  If you’re not fatigued after twenty-eight games of Scrabble in four days, something is wrong; I caught even Edley napping in the hallway after lunch. I’m running on fumes. After lunch on day four—a win-loss-win-loss morning leaving me 14–11—I sit on a park bench across from the convention center and watch the Scrabble players return to the building. They look like the zombies in Night of the Living Dead.

  I continue the up-and-down routine in the afternoon, when Alan Hassenfeld of Hasbro does indeed show. He watches me slam down my pen and storm off after blowing Game 27, but I invite him to pull up a chair to watch me during Game 28—after I’ve amassed a 170-point lead. I’m 16–12, and while I won’t win twenty, it’s about as good a showing as I could have hoped for after the dismal start. When I break it down, it looks okay: 1–6 followed by 15–6. Eric has his best day yet, winning six of seven to raise his record to 15–13. We’ve both been shying away from Matt, though his perfor
mance and mood actually have improved since day one. After a 7–7 start, Matt is 17–11, but with no chance to win significant lucre he doesn’t much seem to care.

  From thirtieth place, where I am again, I still have a chance to creep into the top fifteen in the division, and I’m determined to win the final three. But I also want to soak up the Scrabble scene. The after-hours games room buzzes. People sit on the floor playing because the dozen or so round tables in the room are filled. Others make and steal words in energetic games of Anagrams. There’s a constant crowd around the bulletin boards where the standings and pairings are posted. I play speed Scrabble—five minutes per player, so frenetic you need someone else to keep score—and laugh and talk trash. G.I. Joel belts out Billy Joel’s “I’m Moving Out” on the piano. Paul Epstein takes over with “Bésame Mucho.” More Scrabble is played. Show tunes are sung. I stay out too late. But I love this place, and these people.

  On the final morning of the 2000 National Scrabble Championship, Joe Edley rises at 4:30. For one hour, standing in the closet so as not to wake his wife, he meditates—knees bent slightly, arms spread to the sides like Steve Martin doing King Tut, eyes closed, and lungs modulating deep, steady breaths. Forty minutes of seated meditation follow. Then tai chi. Then a breakfast of organic sourdough bread and water.

  For the final three rounds, the top forty players in each division (me included!) are paired in a king-of-the-hill format: first place versus second, third versus fourth, fifth versus sixth, and so on. The pairings are redone after each round. In Game 29, despite absent-mindedly playing EE* early on, Edley beats Wiegand by 64 points. Cappelletto bingos out with GEoTAXIS to defeat Hersom. In Game 30, Wiegand downs Edley by 84 points, while Brian beats Jim Kramer, the proofreader from Minnesota, who also has twenty wins. It sets up the closest finale in Nationals history. Heading into the last round, the standings look like this: