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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  G.I. Joel Sherman is, as he once put it, “the same’’: playing on-line word games incessantly, venturing from the Bronx rarely, climbing up on his chair at the club faithfully, looking after me paternalistically. “You played that endgame right,’’ he says one night, nodding in approbation, just as he did three years ago when he wanted to know whether I was hooked. I find Joel’s constancy a joy.

  Joel, however, sees his anchor slipping away. In seven tournaments since the Nationals—from Bird-in-Hand to Atlanta to Phoenix—Joel says he has made but two memorable plays: QUARTERING through QUA and T (which he later extended to HEADQUARTERING) and INGUINAL through the first N. “I still have moments of brilliance, and an occasional good find,” he tells me, “but I’m really feeling like my skills are eroding at an alarming pace, and it scares the hell out of me to contemplate my future if I can’t be a prize-taking force in this game much longer.”

  And me? In calculating my rating after the Nationals, Marlon was off by 2 points. I actually wind up at 1733.

  So content am I with my new number (and so overwhelmed with completing this book) that I don’t study or play for several months. When I do finally enter a tournament—in November on Cape Cod—I feel liberated from the race to a goal; I even bring along my girlfriend. No pressure, no urgency, no panic, just pleasure in playing. But this also means I’m not focused on winning. I post a 5–7 record against the other experts and my rating slips to 1710.

  Another three months go by—the book gets edited, I take a vacation, I return to my time-sucking job at The Wall Street Journal—and still I haven’t resumed studying. But it’s February, and Danbury again, and my journey suddenly feels complete: I have risen from the fourth division to the third to the second and now to the first. In the opening round I am matched against none other than Joe Edley. It’s teacher against pupil, and as we sit down to play I find myself mimicking the master’s calm. It doesn’t help. Going first, Edley plucks—no, Edley wills—both blanks from the bag. I deduce this after he plays JOrAM for 42 points; he wouldn’t have squandered a blank for so few points unless he had the other one. Two turns later, he plays FATIGUe to go up 151–20. Later, he finds DYSTOCIA and BALLONS, and I lose to my mentor, 495–317.

  I don’t play especially badly in Danbury, but I don’t draw well; in one game, my opponent, Jan Dixon, gets both blanks and 11 of the 12 E’s (not whining; just a fact). I do have one fabulous sequence: I open with QAID for 28, challenge off my opponent’s phony bingo, lay down EIRENIC for 65, watch my opponent wrongly challenge it, and then triple-triple with SCOTcHES for 158 points and a 251–0 lead. But that game is one of just seven wins against thirteen losses, and my rating slips to 1694.

  It’s a number I can’t live with. The next morning, on the subway to work, I whip out a list of five-letter words, and the cycle begins anew.

  Brooklyn, New York

  March 2001

  Afterword

  When I hatched the idea for this book—that is, when I stumbled upon Scrabble and discovered that I belonged—I figured it would appeal to people who do the Jumble or run a stopwatch while completing the New York Times crossword puzzle. I hoped it also might attract readers interested in a charming, oddball subculture. There were enough of both, I thought, to constitute a small market.

  It turned out that Scrabble and its characters weren’t just unusual; they were unusual in ways that people could relate to, or wanted to relate to, or just wanted to see. This wasn’t a Best in Show–style mockumentary. The pastime and the people might have looked odd, but then genius always does. In any case, I tapped a zeitgeist, or at least helped bring Scrabble out of the closet, literally and figuratively.

  By my count, six documentaries about the game have been produced since Word Freak was published in 2001, including Word Wars, codirected by my fellow player Eric Chaikin; it follows Matt, Marlon, Edley, and G.I. Joel, and debuted at the Sundance Film Festival. There have been short feature films about Scrabble shown in festivals and posted on YouTube, TV pieces on Nightline and CBS Sunday Morning, and too many newspaper, magazine, and internet stories to count. A bunch of them were written by me, usually to set the record straight about some corporate misdirection (in 2010, Mattel announced that proper nouns would be playable in Scrabble; the company actually was just rolling out another dumb spinoff) or to stanch a media wildfire triggered by a basic misunderstanding of the game (in 2011, an update to the British dictionary was interpreted as an update to the North American one; Scrabble “just got a lot more hip, and a little more easy,” one website wrote). And then there was ESPN. Once a year from 2003 through 2008, the sports Godzilla covered a championship Scrabble tournament. I wrote the scripts, voiced the color commentary, and made a few lamentable on-camera appearances.

  I’d always suppressed a snicker when Marlon insisted that Scrabble merited a pro tour with big-enough prize packages for top players to earn a living (“Bowling money, not golf money,” he said then and still says) and coverage on ESPN. Thanks to John Williams, there we were on the self-proclaimed Worldwide Leader in Sports. The production budgets were minuscule; the ratings didn’t threaten the NFL, or even poker; and the players, naturally, complained about the format, graphics, and time slots. But you could have knocked me over with a Protile if you had said in 1999 that in the next decade more than two million people would watch tournament Scrabble on E-freaking-SPN. Our run ended when the network dropped most of its tangential sports programming. I can’t say I blame them, but it was fun while it lasted.

  I’ve talked Scrabble at a New Jersey prep school, a New York hedge fund (where Adam Logan happened to be working), and a hipster lecture series called Nerd Nite. This book has landed me invitations to concerts by the Scrabble-loving bands Old 97’s and Barenaked Ladies. The latter even wrote an alphabet song using QAT as the standard-bearer for the letter Q. There’s a Trivial Pursuit question about the book. It’s made Who Wants to Be a Millionaire and the Times crossword. And the happiest Sunday morning of my life might have been spent filling in a New York Times Magazine acrostic, by Emily Cox and Henry Rathvon, based on sentences found in [>].

  But nothing about my blessed Scrabble experience has given me greater satisfaction than people telling me they play because of what I’ve written. I’ve received hundreds of letters and emails and Facebook messages, posed for photos, signed books and score sheets and OSPDs and T-shirts and fold-up boards. I’ve been thanked by opponents before games in which they proceeded to throttle me. Men and women are now boyfriends and girlfriends and husbands and wives because they happened to read this book and find a place in which they felt comfortable.

  One scene: August 2010, Dallas. My first visit to the Nationals in five years had just ended. I was sitting in a minivan, waiting to depart for the airport, making tournament small talk with G.I. Joel and a few other players, when a young guy rushed to the door and asked if I was indeed me. “I know this will sound weird,” he said, “but you changed my life.”

  I’m thrilled that I did, Daniel Citron, and even more thrilled that you finished second in Division 3 with a record of 21–9–1. Way to go, dude.

  Spawn of Word Freak, I call them.

  My most Dr. Frankenstein creation might be a forty-year-old freelance software programmer named Winter (just Winter). Since reading this book, Winter has played in more than four hundred tournaments in ten years, including an astonishing eighty-nine in 2010 alone. He often sleeps in his car to save money while driving the country from tourney to tourney. His rating has reached 1957. When we first met, at a tournament in Philadelphia, he dropped to his knees and bowed. (You may have run across Winter in the media. He’s trying to visit every Starbucks in the world—11,058 and counting so far.)

  But Winter isn’t representative of a new breed of young and gifted players who have infiltrated the game’s upper ranks. Sam Rosin was eight when his father left a copy of Word Freak on the backseat of their car. He read it. A year later, he was playing in tournaments. In Dallas, then
seventeen, Sam finished twelfth in Division 1. He has been rated as high as 1942 and among the top twenty players in North America. Sam also played high-school varsity tennis and was his student council president. I was flattered when he asked me to write him a college recommendation. Not that he needed my help to get into Harvard.

  Teens and preteens like Sam have not only lowered the average age of tournament fields but they have dominated them as well. Joey Krafchick was twelve when he won Division 5 at the Nationals in 2007. Bradley Robbins was eleven when he took Division 6 in 2008. In Dallas both played in Division 2 and placed higher than I did. Sam, Joey, and Bradley all were top finishers in the National School Scrabble Championship, which was first held in 2003. (The tournament is contested by fourth through eighth graders playing in teams of two.) In 2010, Bradley and his partner won the event—and a $10,000 first prize. They finished second in 2011, when Bradley joined the ranks of Scrabble authors with The Official Kids’ Guide to Scrabble.

  In 2003, Jason Katz-Brown’s brother gave him Word Freak for his sixteenth birthday. In 2004, he placed in the top twenty in Division 1 of the Nationals; his mother, an economics professor at the University of California, Berkeley, called me afterward to say thanks. In 2005, Jason finished memorizing the OWL. In 2006, during his sophomore year at MIT, where he played on the golf team, he was rated 1988 and ranked number one in North America. Jason and another young player, John O’Laughlin, wrote Quackle, which has replaced Maven as the standard in Scrabble artificial intelligence. You can download it for free. John is a software engineer at Google now. Jason worked for Google in Tokyo before joining an online travel start-up in San Francisco.

  At the Nationals in Dallas I met Nigel Peltier and Rafi Stern, both from Seattle. Nigel was twenty, about to transfer to Portland State from Arizona State. Rafi was twenty-one, majoring in psychology at the University of Washington. They’d been friends since middle school, where they read this book and started playing four or five games a day. In calculus class they fed each other anagrams. They made lists of words they wanted someday to play.

  But Nigel and Rafi weren’t nerd outcasts. They just liked the game, and the words, which came easily—from Mike Baron’s Wordbook, from a popular flash-card study program called Zyzzyva, from anagramming websites with names like JumbleTime and Aerolith. On one, Nigel once solved the top-two-thousand sevens, “literally typing without stopping,” he told me. He and Rafi each needed about ten tournaments to break 1600. It took me thirty. “Kids have more incentive to improve,” Nigel said. “They have open minds. They are more willing to think differently than they [already] do.”

  They also are the best equipped to exploit the digital revolution that has swept Scrabble in the past decade. Studying racks and analyzing games is simpler than ever: fire up the laptop and do those sevens or sim a position or play a dozen real-time games, against other humans or a bot, at the Internet Scrabble Club, better known as ISC, whose servers are in Romania.

  Nigel finished sixth in Division 1 in Dallas, breaking 1900 for the first time. Rafi played FINFOOTS (an aquatic bird) for 203 points and wound up twenty-third, his rating jumping to 1954. Six weeks later, he broke 2000. The thing about these guys? Like many of the rising young stars, they are, for lack of a better word, normal. Personable, smart, self-possessed, approachable, funny. They wouldn’t be great characters in a narrative about Scrabble. But they’re great to have around. “I think your book made it cool,” G.I. Joel tells me.

  Not everyone thinks it’s so cool. Steve Oliger, a longtime player and club director from Pennsylvania, believes this book helped make competitive Scrabble less attractive to casual players. When he took up the game twenty-five years ago, Steve wrote on CGP in 2010, living-room players “could ease into organized Scrabble without being gutted when they ventured from their homes.” The level of play, even in the bottom divisions, has become so high, he asserted, that it might be a barrier to entry, limiting growth.

  I replied, a touch defensively, that hundreds of players of all levels have joined our ranks in the last decade, and that the new experts are hardly “clones,” as Steve put it, of “the original four word freaks,” Matt, Marlon, Joe, and Joel. Another player pointed out that the proliferation of computer study aids is the main reason motivated newbies have been able to sprint up the ratings ladder. In any event, it’s impossible to know how many potential players visited a club, were intimidated by the level of play, and never returned, or were scared off after reading about the big four or watching the ESPN shows. Some maybe, but probably not a gigantic number.

  What is certain is that Scrabble is now played more than ever. Since this book was published, hundreds of thousands of people have begun swapping tiles online. Serious players congregate on ISC. Scrabulous, a beautifully designed website and Facebook application developed by two brothers from Calcutta, India, generated enormous traffic until Hasbro sued the creators for copyright infringement in 2008. (Under a settlement, the brothers were allowed to create a modified version of the game, with eight tiles per rack and a different board layout and tile distribution.) In its place on Facebook is an official Scrabble game, made by Hasbro’s digital partner, Electronic Arts. According to Hasbro, the game has about eight hundred thousand monthly users.

  Tens of thousands of people have downloaded Hasbro’s iPhone and iPad apps. Then there are independent word-lookup, anagramming, dictionary, clock, and scorecard programs with names like Zarf, JudgeWord, and CheckWord. All that digital play, Hasbro maintains, is stimulating sales of the physical board game. “We’re not seeing it as an erosion,” an executive told me. “We’re seeing it as people can participate with Scrabble anywhere, anyhow.”

  I still think Hasbro has botched digital Scrabble, and with it an opportunity to create an online home for all levels of play and to generate meaningful revenue online. Published reports said the Scrabulous inventors demanded a ridiculous sum for their game, but surely Hasbro (and Mattel and their respective digital partners) could have found a way to acquire the elegant software and the database of loyal users. Instead, Hasbro looked like a corporate bully, alienating untold thousands of new devotees. Plus, the corporate replacement is comparatively clunky and unsophisticated. As of this writing, you can’t challenge a play; the program simply rejects phonies. For several years, the downloaded dictionary contained errors. Hasbro and Electronic Arts hadn’t attempted to create a place for online tournaments. Meanwhile, Words With Friends, a digital copycat that haphazardly alters Scrabble’s tile values, tile distribution, and board design to circumvent copyrights on the game, began attracting hundreds of thousands of players a day, and even hosted online competitions. Words With Friends so effectively ate Hasbro’s online lunch that the multibillion-dollar toy and game company cried uncle: In 2012, it acquired the rights to produce a boxed board-game version of Words With Friends. Yes, instead of improving its own product and outcompeting a pixelated challenger, Hasbro capitulated, cannibalizing sales of its classic game with a cheap knockoff.

  And yet for all of this Scrabble-related robustness—lots of people playing crossword-style word-formation games—Steve Oliger may have a point. The number of people squaring off at Scrabble clubs and in Scrabble tournaments hasn’t really budged. The National Scrabble Association’s numbers—about seven thousand dues-paying members, about two thousand regular tournament players, about seventy thousand tournament games a year—were fairly constant during the 2000s. Attendance at the Nationals surged to a record 837 in New Orleans in 2004, a combination of an appealing destination, a sweet hotel deal, and ample publicity during the previous years. Subsequent championships in 2005, 2006, and 2008 drew 600-plus players. But the Nationals attracted just 407 players in Dallas in 2010; 327, again in Dallas, in 2011; and 339 in Orlando in 2012.

  The weak economy certainly contributed to the down numbers. But there’s a more fundamental reason for the lack of meaningful growth in the competitive scene: While anyone can play Scrabble, playing it this way will
always be difficult and daunting. The barrier to entry isn’t that you’ll get your newbie ass kicked at a club. It’s that competing even at the entry level demands a commitment beyond what most casual players—beyond what most people—are willing to make. I don’t want to be a party pooper, but the game may have reached every adult who, after seeing that two-word phrase, might open the current edition of Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary to check whether it’s hyphenated, then turn a couple of pages to see whether “pooper” alone is a word, then be intrigued that it’s not, then cross-reference with the OWL to make sure it’s not acceptable in Scrabble (it isn’t), then check for anagrams (none), then add a blank and discover four bingos—OPPOsER, PROPOsE, PROPOnE, and POPOvER—and then remark to himself how much fun that little expedition was.

  The competitive game, in short, is an acquired taste, and more challenging than ever given the new generation of gifted and ambitious word lovers. But more exciting too. I’m thrilled that the world is being discovered by the likes of Nigel and Rafi and Sam and Joey and Bradley, players determined to excel by powering through lists, learning strategy, and piling up ratings points. The players most affected by these young turks—the old turks—are thrilled too. “These fucking kids!” Lester Schonbrun emails me. “They are breathtaking. So much energy, and so much book knowledge. They are amazing to play against and to observe.”

  Higher-quality play hasn’t been Scrabble’s biggest problem. Far from it.

  In 2008, the day many of us had expected finally arrived: Hasbro told John Williams it would stop funding National Scrabble Association activities related to club and tournament play. The company would, however, continue to support the School Scrabble program.