The decision was compatible with a cold reality: Competitive Scrabble might be a glorious extension of a classic American game, but its contribution to the financial performance of its owner is negligible. Hasbro invested millions of dollars in the NSA and tournament play over three decades. Whether it did so because it believed it would see a real financial return from media hits and brand exposure or simply because it was the right thing to do, I was never sure. But the company was never much interested in the hard-core players.
Dropping competitive play instantly saved Hasbro more than half a million dollars a year. In a four-billion-dollar corporation, that might seem like Monopoly money. But in a cost-cutting economy, every budget line matters. Ultimately, Hasbro knew that the tournament players would play regardless of whether it supported an organizing body. School Scrabble, by contrast, would create new consumers. In the long run, the kids were a better investment than the diehards who were already committed to the game.
I understood the rationale, but I still saw it as a disappointing and shortsighted bit of corporate abandonment. Others, however, saw an opportunity to redress the historical belief that Hasbro and the NSA didn’t represent the players’ best interests. So a committee of players formed by John Williams turned down his proposal to create two units under the NSA umbrella: a club-and-tournament division run by the players and a school division run by the NSA staff. Instead, the committee looked to Chris Cree, who formed a new organization, the North American Scrabble Players Association, or NASPA, based in an office above the garage at his well-appointed Dallas home. Hasbro granted the new group an exclusive license to use the name Scrabble in its title and activities, and it promised to contribute to the Nationals prize package. It looked like what the players had craved for years: operational freedom from the distant, soul-crushing owner and some of its money too.
But the task wasn’t simple. Cree had to build from scratch a nonprofit business that would subsume the NSA’s myriad jobs: tournaments, rules, ratings, disciplinary matters, membership outreach, corporate sponsorship, marketing, advertising, event planning, dictionary updates, and more. Cree and several dozen volunteers spent thousands of hours getting NASPA incorporated and operational. Within a year, it had thirty-two hundred members, almost twice as many as projected. (By 2013, the number was up to forty-seven hundred, but almost half weren’t current with their dues.) Hasbro agreed to put a flyer mentioning NASPA in every box of Scrabble and a link from its website to NASPA’s. Tournaments continued; the Nationals were held without interruption.
And criticism mounted: NASPA was created without review, discussion, or vote by the playing community. It didn’t have a single elected official. Membership dues were higher than before. The tournament fee for directors was too high. There wasn’t enough financial disclosure. Cree and his copresident, John Chew, an erudite, even-keeled, and tireless Canadian computer and operations maven who worked extensively with the NSA, made all the decisions, and did it brusquely to boot. A small group of disaffected players formed a rival group, the Word Game Players’ Organization (WGPO), which pronounced itself fully democratic, with free membership and a limited mission: to recognize clubs and stage tournaments. (WGPO sanctioned about forty tournaments in North America in 2012, compared to more than three hundred fifty NASPA events.)
Cree and I have remained friends through the years. I’ve stayed at his house and he’s visited mine. His only complaint about this book is that I quoted him swearing, behavior of which his mother didn’t approve. I viewed most of the gripes against him as overblown and the splinter group’s platform as self-righteous and misleading (WGPO, after all, was utilizing intellectual property—rules, rating system, lexicon—created and owned by the NSA and NASPA). But like other players I did grow concerned with NASPA’s management style. At the annual town meeting at the Nationals in Dallas in 2010, a longtime player commented that the creation of WGPO was worrisome and asked Cree what NASPA planned to do about it. The answer: nothing. If club and tournament directors leave NASPA, NASPA will recruit new ones. “So there’s nothing to reconcile?” the player asked. “No. Absolutely not,” Cree replied.
In Cree’s view, he established NASPA under a corporate model, with a buck-stops-here executive. His name is on the articles of incorporation and the tax return. When Hasbro required legal indemnification, he switched his personal insurance to the only company he could find willing to write the new group a policy. He’s the one working sixty hours a week for no salary. He’s the one personally guaranteeing $100,000 against hotel bookings for the Nationals. He’s the one explaining to a Jewish community newspaper why that offensive word meaning “to bargain with” is playable in clubs, and he’s the one responding to hostile emails from suspended players and aggrieved directors.
So the vitriol stung. “I feel like I’ve done something noble and great, but that’s not what everybody thinks,” Cree told me at the end of 2010. “And that’s pretty hard to take.” But he wasn’t willing to bow to a disgruntled minority with “keyboard courage” and little else. If the rabble-rousers managed to persuade a few hundred or even a thousand players to defect, so be it. He wasn’t seeking compromise. “You know me. I’m ‘no.’ And it’s not only ‘no,’ it’s N as in N-O and O as in N-O, and N-O as in ‘HELL, NO.’” At the same time, Cree knew it wasn’t smart to alienate his constituency, NASPA’s main revenue source. He knew he had a public relations problem. And he recognized that a Scrabble civil war is, if not entirely surprising, then certainly ridiculous.
Competitive Scrabble is about words and tournaments and championships. But, for better or worse, it’s also about licensing and marketing and sponsorship and PR and, not incidentally, balancing the wants and needs of an eclectic collection of passionate and deeply engaged people. So I told Cree that allowing the players to elect a few representatives to an advisory board wouldn’t be an act of capitulation but one of inclusivity. (That happened in 2011.) That hiring an executive with a background in sports or games wouldn’t only help find sponsors and expand the competitive game but also create a buffer from the complaints and infighting. That taking such steps would free him to focus on other important, long-term work: attracting and retaining young players when they age out of School Scrabble; luring into the fold the hipsters who play in bars in Austin and Brooklyn and Cambridge and the oldsters who play at libraries in Xenia and Yuma and Zanesville; pressing Hasbro and Electronic Arts to create a sophisticated—and income-generating—place online where competitive players can gather for real-time games and tournaments.
Cree said his gut told him to let things play out—that a few years wasn’t enough to assess an organization’s performance. By 2013, the infighting over WGPO had abated and Cree felt NASPA was on solider footing. In his annual State of NASPA message, he even articulated a long-term goal, one that I found unlikely if not impossible: getting Hasbro to once again fully fund the competitive game.
Enough Scrabble politics. Let’s talk Scrabble.
On October 12, 2006, in the basement of a Unitarian church on the town green in Lexington, Massachusetts, a forty-three-year-old carpenter named Michael Cresta scored 830 points in a game. His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who worked at a supermarket deli counter, scored 490. Together they set three North American records: the most points in a game by one player; the most total points in a game, 1,320; and the most points on a single turn, 365, for Cresta’s play of QUIXOTRY.
The game rocked the Scrabble world. Mark Landsberg’s record of 770 had stood for thirteen years, and it had been threatened only infrequently. Cresta’s 830 was the anagrammatic equivalent of Wilt Chamberlain’s 100-point National Basketball Association game in 1962: a remarkable, highly aberrational event with potential staying power. The tile gods were smiling that night at the Lexington Scrabble Club’s regular Thursday session.
Here’s the amazing thing: Cresta and Yorra weren’t experts. Cresta at the time had played in just three tournaments and had a rating of 886. He had memorized
hundreds of obscure words, like those ending in WOOD or starting with OVEN, by reading, writing down, and tape-recording pages from the OSPD. While working at carpentry jobs, he transcribed dictionary entries onto walls and sawhorses. But he hadn’t even bothered to learn the threes. Yorra was rated 841 at the time. He was known for trying implausible words and hoping they turned out to be acceptable. “These are not guys who have low ratings because they haven’t played in many tournaments,” Mike Wolfberg of the Lexington club told me for an article I wrote about the game for the online magazine Slate. “They have low ratings because they aren’t very good.”
So how did it happen? Yorra opened with a 96-point bingo, JOUSTED. Cresta traded seven. Yorra bingoed again: LADYLIKE, to the E in JOUSTED. The first L landed in the second position in the triple column, and Cresta played the triple-triple FLATFISH for 239 points; he remembered the word from reading the F pages in the OSPD. Cresta traded on two of his next three turns; he held an I, an O, a Q, a U, and an X. “I wanted to get QUIXOTE down bad or QUIXOTIC,” he told me. (He had been reading the J, Q, X, and Z words.) Yorra, meanwhile, bingoed again: SCAMsTER, slotting the R in another triple lane. Cresta saw the possibility of QUIXOTRY through the R. He traded two letters in hopes of drawing a T and a Y—a 1-in-513 shot. Yorra left the spot open to play his fourth bingo, UNDERDOG. Down came QUIXOTRY. Cresta had made three plays for a total of 614 points. He burst through the 770 barrier four turns from the end.
Yet when the play-by-play was posted on CGP, it was easy to see that the players’ lack of expertise had created the conditions for the record. When Yorra hung the R in the triple column, he could have played dEMOCRAT instead for an additional 29 points. An expert never would have held the Q for multiple turns while fishing for some improbable, once-in-a-lifetime play. He would have dumped it immediately, as Cresta could have. Even a lower-rated player might have done so in a tournament setting. The implication: Cresta wasn’t terribly worried about whether he won or lost. “If they weren’t really trying to win,” an intermediate player named Mike Eldeiry wrote on CGP, “then can we really consider it our record? Fun, yeah. Neat, sure. Promotable, why not? But record, ummmmmmmm, I don’t know.” Eldeiry told me the game reminded him of a 600-foot batting-practice home run. If experts always shot for the moon, he said, “I think they’d have cracked 850 by now. But they’d have lost a lot of games in the process.”
Most CGP posters defended the record setters. Lexington club regulars said they just played differently than Joe (or Joel) Expert might have. The message: even someone who doesn’t study high-probability word lists for hours on end can achieve greatness. “Nonexperts often make suboptimum plays,” wrote Rod MacNeil, a top-hundred player who witnessed the game. “This time that resulted in some pretty eye-popping plays. But they found them.” Another expert, John Van Pelt, wrote, “When faced with the possibility of playing a Q-X triple-triple, they see it as a good opportunity to advance their winning chances. So they go for it.” Cresta, for his part, didn’t understand the fuss. “It was really just one of those freak games,” he said. “It’s really not that big of a deal because I’m really not that great of a player. If you get two experts together, that game’s not going to happen.”
The consensus in the Scrabble community was that, as incredible as 830 was, Mark Landsberg’s 770 should still be recognized as the tournament record. And it was—until July 1, 2010, when Edward De Guzman, a twenty-nine-year-old expert from San Francisco (who, back pat, started playing competitively after reading this book), scored 771 in a tournament game in Reno. De Guzman played five bingos: EVINCED for 71 points, SALINITY for 94, GOATEES for 81, the triple-triple NEOLITHS for 158, and, on the game’s final play, CARDAMoN for 74. He also scored 75 for LOQUAT and had three other 45-point-plus plays. He didn’t play any phonies, got no extra turns from challenges, and exchanged just once. He didn’t realize he had set the record until adding 10 points from his opponent’s rack at the end.
A few days later, Mr. 770 himself posted to CGP. “Congratulations, Ed,” Landsberg wrote. “Get yourself a 771 hat.”
The new record lasted one year and five months, until December 9, 2011, when someone scored 803 points. That someone: G.I. Joel.
Facing young Bradley Robbins at a tournament in Stamford, Connecticut, Joel bingoed seven times, including four in a row after his first play: CRUMPIED for 101, OUTRATED for 72, COTHURNI for 92, and TRAVOISE for 95. After five plays, Joel led by 408–205. He later played SHAKING for 111 and aVENGED for 84, and went out with AIRLINE for 75. Bradley was stuck with the Q and two single-point tiles, allowing Joel to crack 800.
When I asked Joel about the game, his email reply began: “Aargh!! My feelings, then and now, are it’s one of the worst things that’s happened to me.”
Joel put the game in the glass-half-empty context of his (Scrabble) life: two or three high-scoring games per tournament, “and the rest of the time, I draw just poorly enough to lose just enough games to cost me prize money.” Which, Joel said, is precisely what happened at that event, in which he finished second. “I would gladly trade a record like that for a more even distribution of the points I score—I could have won that game with a 400, so spread the wasted 400 points over say 30 other games at 13 points per game, and I have about $30,000 more prize money in the bank, and maybe one more major title.” Joel reminded me that he started 14-0 at the 2011 Nationals only to finish 19–12 and out of the money. “The typical illustrative example of my all-or-nothing career,” he wrote. “So I need 803 points in one game like a hole in the head.”
As for the game itself, Joel said, “I just stuck my hand in the bag.”
“The degree to which 803 is representative of skill level is pretty low—yes, I had to know and find COTHURNI to avoid a distruption in my scoring pace, but most of the big scoring words I got down were thoroughly pedestrian.” (And Bradley stopped tracking and didn’t block Joel’s blockable out-bingo, which allowed him to break the record.) “Yet like Landsberg, I’ll probably be remembered more as Mr. 803 than Mr. Two Major Championships, and poor Edward De Guzman barely had any time to be known as Mr. 771.
“I know, I sound whiny. Still want to write about it? Cuz there’s nothing I can honestly say about it that won’t sound that way; well, perhaps a summary quote: ‘It did not make me happy, because it probably did cost me money, and recognition for more difficult accomplishments that are a truer representation of my overall ability.’”
Don’t worry, Joel. You’ll be remembered for much more than 803.
According to the Scrabble records website cross-tables.com, a total of thirty-one 700-plus games were reported from 1980 through 2005. From 2006 through January 2013, the mark was achieved the same number of times, including the two record setters and an 801 club game by veteran player Robert Kahn and Joel’s 803. Yes, play has improved and study tools have multiplied. But there’s one other logical explanation for the growth of the 700 club: the dictionary.
Ten years after the previous update, Merriam-Webster published a fourth edition of the OSPD and a second edition of the OWL, which was introduced for tournament play in 2006. This time, M-W agreed to use not only the new, eleventh edition of its Collegiate Dictionary but also the latest editions of the American Heritage College Dictionary, Random House Webster’s College Dictionary, and Webster’s New World College Dictionary. To be included in the new Scrabble sources, a word could appear in any of the four books.
Player volunteers combed the dictionaries, recording new entries. The result was the addition of 10,797 words of two through nine letters, plus extensions, for a total of 131,097 words. Add the 47,661 words on a separate list of ten- through fifteen-letter words—the Long List, compiled in 2003—and, eliminating overlap, the number of playable words in Scrabble in North America as of this writing is 178,691.
Two of the shortest of the new words altered the game the most. You can find one of them in the Author’s Note at the start of this book, where I used QI as an example of a word acc
eptable only overseas. No more. (DREAMBOAT, another word that I cited as needing an asterisk, also is now good, as is EMAIL. INTERNET*, however, remained a proper noun in all four source dictionaries. RENITENT is the valid anagram. But I digress.) Defined as the vital force in Chinese thought inherent in all things, QI flipped the Q from albatross to potential game changer. The other big new two was ZA, short for “pizza.” Late in his 830-point game, Michael Cresta played it on a triple-letter-score square for 66 points. More words equals more scoring.
Three other twos joined the lexicon: FE (a Hebrew letter), KI (qi), and OI (oy). There were forty-one new threes, including AHI, APP, CIG, DIF, DUH, EEK, FAB (from my MATADORS game in [>]), PST, VID, and ZZZ; 126 new fours (BLOG, DIFF, JUCO, MEDS, OAKY, PERV, QADI, YUTZ, ZINE); 289 new fives (AMPED, ANDRO, BURQA, COPAY, CYBER, HIJAB, JELLO, JIGGY, KVELL (finally), LOGON, LYCRA, MAXED, POBOY, SUCKY, UNWET, VOCAB, WIFEY, ZOOEY); 901 sevens, and 1,333 eights. Basic stems and anamonics had to be reconceived; SANTERO messed up the thematic symmetry of SENATOR-ATONERS-TREASON.
But the rich and mutable beauty of the English language and American culture was affirmed once more: ADWOMAN, ALFREDO, BABYSIT, BANDAID, BARISTA, BIGTIME, BREWPUB, CERVEZA, CHIPOTLE (anagram: HELICOPT), CHUNNEL, CLEARCUT, CRAPOLA, DUMPSTER, FLATLINE, HALFPIPE, HAZMATS, IRONMAN, JETWAYS, KICKBOX, KLEENEX, LOVEFEST, MAQUILA, MUDFLAP, OFFLINE, PALMTOP, PANINI, QABALAH, SCOOCH, SHARIAH, SNIGLET, TANKINI, THERIAN (RETINA plus H), TOFUTTI, TOOLBAR, UNBOILED (joining UNILOBED), UNSPOOL, UNTIMED (famous phony no longer), WANNABE, WEBCAM, ZIPLOCK, and so, so many more, including everyone’s new holy grail: MBAQANGA, a South African dance music. (CINEPLEX*, which I mentioned in [>], didn’t make the cut. It was changed in MW11 to a proper noun.)
The usual complaints—so much to learn! so much linguistic weirdness!—faded quickly. Players loved having the new words in their quiver, especially QI and ZA.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 44
