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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  And, guess what? My rating has climbed anew. I started 7–1 in Division 2 of the 2011 Nationals, blew a bunch of games (or was blown out), and finished 17–14. I had winning records in all six tournaments I entered in the next year, including my best performance at a Nationals—best and simultaneously most crushing, that is. After three days, I was mired in the middle of the pack in Division 2 with a 11–10 record. On Day 4, angry, I decided not to talk to anyone, not to give the usual postgame thumbs up or down at passersby, not to rehash the bingos and botched endgames. I won all seven that day and found myself 18–10 and in sixth place with three games to go.

  My next opponent was Jackson Smylie, a rising tenth-grader from Toronto who a year earlier had won the National School Scrabble Championship. Jackson already was an assiduous studier and rigorous analyst, a future elite player if his dedication and interest held up. The bag was nearly empty. I had a small lead, the case blank, plenty of time, and just one decision to make: block a potentially high-scoring Z play or take decent points elsewhere and hope to win a race to the finish. Blocking was the smart and obvious move. I took the points. Jackson played ZIN for 35. I countered with EElS for 27 and a 396–374 lead. It wasn’t enough. Jackson went out with 18 points, took four from my rack, and we tied, 396–396.

  As I’ve explained in great, maybe too much, detail in these pages, each of my Scrabble letdowns and screw-ups feels like a tiny death, of confidence and faith and intellect and pride in mine own thine self. Of the notion that I, too, can find validation in this game. Yes, it was a tie, not a loss, and, yes, there were two games to play and I still could have finished if not second, as had been possible, then as high as fourth. But it felt fatal, as if, a year short of fifty with a fourteen-year-old kid across the table, this was my one, last, serendipitous chance to do something special: on a tear, bubbling with confidence, defying history and reputation. And I blew it. Jackson knew I blew it. The postgame congregants knew I blew it. I slunk away, heartbroken, lost the last two games, and finished thirteenth. When I think now about those few minutes over a Scrabble board, I’m not angry, just sad, sad, sad, sad, sad.

  I wrote at the beginning of this afterword about those people who have told me that I changed their lives. Well, to quote Salinger, as that last little pentimento, or whatever it is, proves, Scrabble changed mine the most of all. So let me complete the story of my rating revival and then explain my Scrabble life today. The Nationals put me back over 1600 and, after one stumble, I’m up to 1617. I’m motivated, internally, to be sure, but also externally. By my daughter.

  At eight, Chloe could play a full game without assistance; when she opened one day with a bingo, TASTIER, my heart grew three sizes. She found a triple-triple, ANCHORED, through the O, for 212 points. At a restaurant after a few games of tic-tac-toe and hangman on the paper tablecloth, I suggested she write down the twos in alphabetical order. AA, AB, AD, AE, AG, AH, AI—the three-toed sloth! I helped when she looked stumped, answered when she asked whether a word was good or not, smiled when she remembered SH and HM and MM. At X, she paused and looked up, and her eyes narrowed. Click! XI and XU scribbled in blue crayon in rapid succession. Spawn of Word Freak. Literally.

  When Chloe started kindergarten at our local public school, in 2007, I started a Scrabble club for the older grades. That first school year, I took two players to the National School Scrabble Championship, in Providence. The next year I took four. In the spring of 2010, twelve of my players competed, this time in Orlando. The same two who played in the tournament during my first year as a coach—Charlie Williamson, a travel baseball pitcher then in the seventh grade, and Lily Gasperetti, a violist then in the eighth—finished third out of more than a hundred teams, winning $1,000 each. Maybe their success confirms that those who can do and those who can’t teach. But I was as excited for Charlie and Lily as I’ve ever been for myself.

  When my first batch of players graduated from elementary school, I followed them to middle school. So I spend two afternoons a week showing forty or so kids how (and how not) to play Scrabble. I talked up the program to a senior aide to then-D.C. schools chancellor Michelle Rhee. In December 2010, the NSA sponsored, and a D.C. public school hosted, the first School Scrabble Capitol Cup. More than seventy players from California to New Hampshire competed for $3,500 in prizes. Hasbro donated a School Scrabble starter set to every public school in the city. I’m helping train teachers and afterschool coordinators in the ars magna of the game.

  I have kids memorizing stems, playing on ISC and in rated tourneys, and hosting Scrabble parties. Two brothers took the Wordbook to summer camp and returned boasting that they had memorized the threes. A chess-playing sixth-grade girl told me at the beginning of one school year that she wanted to get serious about Scrabble. A couple of months later she showed me her handwritten SATIRE and TISANE flash cards. She told me she taped them to the dry side of the glass shower door to study while she shampooed. My most dedicated nonbiological protégé, an eighth-grader named Sam Masling, is rated over 1110. He plays online with other young turks. When he beats me, I’m thrilled.

  I took eighteen players to Orlando in 2011. Though none placed as high as Charlie and Lily did the previous year (including Charlie, who with a new partner lost a rough couple of games and fell out of contention), eight of my nine teams posted winning records. At the beach afterward, Chloe set aside The Secret Garden and picked up my new copy of The Official Kids’ Guide to Scrabble. She finished it in two sittings. She said she couldn’t wait to play in the event as soon as she was eligible.

  That was supposed to be in two years, in the fifth grade. But through some twist of fate and good fortune—okay, my own intervention; call it the Chloe Rule—fourth-graders were welcomed to the 2012 NSSC. Chloe learned most of the threes and a dozen or so stems that she had, with minimal paternal prodding, recorded on index cards. In Orlando one more time, she and her seventh-grade partner won four of the seven games, a final nine-point loss marred by a bit of older-boy gamesmanship and a river of postgame tears. (Another of my teams finished tenth overall.) She’s deep into the top 500 high-probability sevens on Zyzzyva now and plays game after game on an iProduct or Quackle. We go to the D.C. club most every week and we travel to tournaments too. We’re just back from a two-day event in Durham, North Carolina. Chloe went 10–6, taking fourth in her division. Her rating, as I type, is a personal best 636.

  She thinks she’s underrated. That’s my girl.

  This journey began in Washington Square Park, so let’s end it there. The parkies still play in the northwest corner, which has a name now: Scrabble Plaza. A couple of the regulars lobbied the architect overseeing a renovation of the park to acknowledge the game’s place in its history. The new tables are big enough for two games and eight players apiece. When the parkies’ den mother, Christine Economos, held a small tournament after the opening in 2009, the architect dropped by. He received a standing ovation.

  Still, the scene isn’t what it was. Arnie Weisburg, the player ticketed by police for playing Scrabble in the chess-and-checkers area, died a few weeks before the tournament. Some of the other parkies with whom I played and kibitzed are gone too: the tournament legend Steve Pfeiffer; Jimmy Young, the Hungarian Jew who frequented the Flea House; John Bennet, the Woody Allenish figure who brought equipment but never played.

  I swung by the park the last couple of times I was in the neighborhood, but there was no action. The chess hustlers were camped out in Scrabble Plaza while their corner was being overhauled. But Economos told me that a few of the “old guard” still gather: Herb Fein, one of my earliest opponents; Aldo Cardia, whose family’s nearby restaurant, the Waverly Inn, became a celebrity hangout after he sold it to a group that included Vanity Fair editor Graydon Carter; and the sweet-hearted curmudgeon Joe Simpson, who is in his eighties now.

  Economos said that Joe’s eyesight is fading and he can’t make out the tiles anymore. In the spring of 2010, though, he was still seeing well enough to play. One day Jo
e’s opponent opened with TAWNY, placing the Y on the double-letter-score square. Joe’s rack was AGILLMU. He saw the bingo, GALLIUM, overlapping atop the T (UT) and the A (MA) in TAWNY. He also saw MULLIGAN down to the N. But Joe didn’t play either of those words. After setting up MULLIGA on his rack to attach to the N, he realized that that sequence of letters played elsewhere on the board.

  MULLIGATAWNY.

  A rich, curry-flavored soup. Famous, or at least familiar, from the “Soup Nazi” episode of Seinfeld. One hundred sixteen points. Just another of the thousands of words that Joe, in his fatigues and beret, casually laid down during a quarter century of retirement spent playing Scrabble on a picnic table in a park in Greenwich Village in New York City. MULLIGATAWNY. Incredible.

  It’s all there. The beauty of the language, the endless possibility of the tiles, the seductive magic of the next word—of your own MULLIGATAWNY or WATERZOOI or EXISTENTIALISTS or AUBERGINES.

  All of which is why I will never stop playing this game, regardless of the number next to my name.

  —Washington, D.C.

  February 2013

  Appendix

  As I mentioned many pages ago, I wrote this book according to the rules of competitive Scrabble. Whenever I wondered whether a word was a word, I consulted the game’s bibles at the time: the first edition of the Official Tournament and Club Word List and/or Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, 10th Edition. As a result, almost every two- through fifteen-letter word in the text that isn’t capitalized, hyphenated, contracted, foreign, part of a multiword phrase, or marked with an asterisk (or a pound sign) was and still is playable in Scrabble in North America.

  Occasionally, however, I ran across words that weren’t in either source or I took the liberty of creating new words. I wanted to neologize even more, but I usually bowed to the books; for instance, I wrote “wanna-be” with a hyphen, as Merriam-Webster’s prescribed, when “wannabe” is what I wanted it to be (and now, in MW11, is).

  For the sake of accuracy and anality, I included the list below of words in Word Freak that were unacceptable in Scrabble when this book was first published in 2001. When the OWL was updated five years later, twenty of these formerly unwelcome letter strings joined the ranks of the playable. They are marked with an exclamation point. I also updated the list to include Scrabble-unacceptable words in the Afterword (there are five).

  A final note: The Afterword was written using the 2006 word list. So a few words (“website,” “online,” “email”) appear differently there than in the linguistically antiquated rest of the book (“Web site,” “on-line,” “e-mail”). And though I never used the word, the ebook that you are reading would have been written “e-book” when I wrote this book.

  alphagram anamonic antigram

  bingoed boardful bonusable

  brainiacs! coffeehousing crackheads!

  cuz dammit! decommercialize

  detoxifier duh! est

  expertdom experthood filterless

  flashcard! flatlined! geekiness!

  gonna gotta homeys!

  hydroxybutyrate industrywide lemme

  logological logophile! meds!

  midmorning midtournament midtwenties

  mistracked mockumentary moneyless!

  muttonchopped neologize! neurolinguistic

  newbie! nonbingo nondeclarative

  nondictionary nonstudiers outbingoed

  outsourced! overpacked! palmful!

  parkies pentimento picolinate

  piercings! pixelated porcupined

  prefinals prematch pygeum

  pyroglutanic rainman schlumpy!

  staircasing sublist subluxury

  superexpert supergenius superhustlers

  supervocalics suphedrine tileheads

  unconflicted unenjoyable unpleated

  unspooling! wanna windowless!

  wordie zitherlike

  Sources

  This is a work of nonfiction. No names have been changed. All of the dialogue is real.

  Word Freak is based on my personal experiences over more than three years and thousands of hours of playing and watching competitive Scrabble. In addition to moving more tiles than Bill Gates’s roofer, I spent hundreds of hours in formal interviews and informal conversation with dozens of current and former Scrabble players and others affiliated with this game and the games business. Everyone portrayed in these pages knew that I was writing a book in which they might be included. Any errors, however, are mine alone.

  In the course of my research, I did rely on numerous printed sources. What follows is a list of books, manuscripts, newsletters, and magazine articles that were important to my work or that I would recommend for those interested in the many subjects I could only touch on. A few sources merit special mention. G. Wayne Miller’s excellent Toy Wars supplied essential background on the history of Hasbro and Mattel. More than twenty-five years of back issues of what today is known as Scrabble News helped fill in blanks on the history of the competitive game. Joe Edley and John D. Williams, Jr.’s, Everything Scrabble is the best how-to manual in print. Joel Wapnick’s CD-ROM “A Champion’s Strategies,” originally published in book form in 1986 as The Champion’s Strategy for Winning at Scrabble Brand Crossword Game, was a strategic guide, while expert Darrell Day’s monograph “Scrabble Tournament Success” offered indispensable practical advice. The three newsletters published in the early 1990s—Nick Ballard’s Medleys, Jim Geary’s JG Newsletter, and Brian Sheppard’s Rack Your Brain — were endlessly informative, entertaining, and challenging. On words and wordplay, Dmitri Borgmann’s Language on Vacation, Ross Eckler’s Making the Alphabet Dance, and Chris Cole’s Wordplay all make terrific bathroom reading.

  Augarde, Tony. The Oxford Guide to Word Games. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1984.

  Ballard, Nick. Medleys. Seattle: Nick Ballard, January 1991-December 1993.

  Baron, Mike, and Brian Sheppard. The Complete Wordbook. Corrales, N.M.: Wordbooks & Listmats, 1994.

  ——, and Jim Homan. The Complete Blankbook. Albuquerque, N.M.: Wordbooks & Listmats, 1992.

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  Borgmann, Dmitri A. Beyond Language: Adventures in Word and Thought. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1967.

  ——. Language on Vacation: An Olio of Orthographical Oddities. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1965.

  The Chambers Dictionary. Edinburgh, Scotland: Chambers Harrap, 1998.

  Chamish, Barry. “Masters of the Tiles.” The Atlantic Monthly, June 1987.

  Cockburn, Alexander. Idle Passion: Chess and the Dance of Death. New York: Village Voice/Simon and Schuster, 1974.

  Cole, Chris. Wordplay: A Curious Dictionary of Language Oddities. New York: Sterling Publishing, 1999.

  Conklin, Drue K., ed. The Official Scrabble Players Handbook, New York: Harmony Books, 1974.

  Day, Darrell. “Scrabble Tournament Success.” Plano, Tex.: Day Marketing Concepts, 1991.

  Eckler, A. Ross. Making the Alphabet Dance: Recreational Word Play. New York: St. Martin’s Griffin, 1996.

  ——, ed. Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics. Morristown, N.J.: A. Ross Eckler, 1968-present.

  Edley, Joe. The Official Scrabble Puzzle Book. New York: Pocket Books, 1997.

  ——, and Williams, John D., Jr. Everything Scrabble. New York: Pocket Books, 1994.

  Ericsson, K. Anders, ed. The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games. Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996.

  Frank, Alan. “The Tournament Anagram Book: Volume 1: 2- to 8-Letter Words.” Bowling Green Station, N.Y.: Matchups, 1998.

  Geary, Jim. JG Newsletter. Phoenix: Jim Geary, February 1996-February 1997.

  Goldman, Stu. Confessions of a Compulsive Tile Pusher. San Francisco: Stu Gold
man Publications, 1992.

  Grant, Annette. “Quiety Meets Rebanana in Brooklyn.” Harper’s, December 1974.

  Harridge, Barry, Lesley Mack, and Geoff Wright, eds. Redwood Scrabble International Edition. Dingley, Australia: Hinkler Book Distributors, 1997.

  Holden, Anthony. Big Deal: One Year as a Professional Poker Player. London: Bantam Press, 1990.

  Kaye, Marvin. The Story of Monopoly, Silly Putty, Bingo, Twister, Frisbee, Scrabble, Et Cetera. Briarcliff Manor, N.Y.: Stein and Day, 1977.

  Landau, Sidney I. Dictionaries: The Art and Craft of Lexicography. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989.

  Levy, David. Chess and Computers. Potomac, Md.: Computer Science Press, 1976.

  Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition. Springfield, Mass.: Merriam-Webster, 1999.

  Miller, G. Wayne. Toy Wars: The Epic Struggle Between G.I. Joe, Barbie, and the Companies That Make Them. New York: Times Books, 1998.

  Morice, David. Alphabet Avenue: Wordplay in the Fast Lane. Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 1997.

  Morton, Herbert C. The Story of Webster’s Third: Philip Gove’s Controversial Dictionary and Its Critics. New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994.

  Murray, K. M. Elisabeth. Caught in the Web of Words: James A. H. Murray and the Oxford English Dictionary. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1977.

  Norton, Clark. “Wise to the Words.” San Jose Mercury News, August 23, 1987.