Susi explains that I'll enter the tournament with no rating and compete in the novice division, where the ratings cutoff is 1200. From 1200 to 1700, she says, is the intermediate division. (The unofficial designation of “expert” is 1600, but division breaks at tournaments vary according to the number of players and the director’s discretion.) Above 1700 is the expert division. Susi says it took her three frustrating years to climb out of novice and eight more to get out of intermediate. “You get the hell out of that division and move to a better board,” Susi says of the beginner group. “These people have no respect for the board whatsoever. I can’t tell you the dumb things they do that bring tears to your eyes. They can fuck up the board and it’s terrible. It’s like Kafka.”
Call me Franz. A week later, as nervous as a kindergartener on the first day of school, I make a mockery of the board. I know that I don’t know the three-letter words, which are crucial to scoring well, but I think everyone else does; when I guess and play EXO*, my opponent immediately challenges it off. I lose the first three games but salvage the final three, including a small-consolation-department victory over a junior high school kid. Yippee.
Still, I'm exhilarated. I love the prematch suspense and the clocks and the rattling tiles and the in-game tension. In the park, the judgments are harsher but less final. Here, a loss matters for reasons beyond credibility and acceptance in the park clique. In the end I will be judged on paper, with a rating, which will be entered into a computer and listed with thousands of others for all to see. That rating will define me.
I do learn one lesson that day. Walking to the subway with Matt Graham, who won four out of six games, I complain about one loss in which my opponent drew all eleven power tiles—the two blanks, the four S’s, and J, K, Q, X, and Z. “Don’t ever let me hear you whine about not getting tiles,” Matt says. Luck, if it exists at all, is part of the game; sometimes you get it, sometimes you don't. Worrying about it won’t make you a better player. And complaining about it won’t make you a more serious player.
This journey is going to take time. A few weeks later, my inaugural rating arrives in the mail from the National Scrabble Association. A cross-table lists every player in the tournament, ranked by division and order of finish. I flip over the sheet of paper to find the results of Division 3. I scan the first column until I find my name. There it is, in sixteenth place, out of twenty-eight. Under the header “Old Rating,” there’s a zero. Then come the game-by-game results. Then the total number of wins. Finally, in the far-right column: “New Rating.” I run my finger across the page and see it: 761.
Scrabble isn’t like any of the other thinking-person’s board games, for one reason: Someone owns it. Chess and backgammon, which have been played and studied for centuries, are nonproprietary. Anyone can make a copy. As such, there’s a sort of theoretical purity about them, as if they were handed down from the gods for humankind’s analysis and bemusement.
There are more than two dozen legends associated with the invention of chess, from patricide to war to diversion from war to intellectual struggle to mater dolorosa, or the grieving mother. In many stories, chess is linked with backgammon, which was invented earlier, probably as an outgrowth of the ancient Indian game pachisi. In the battle between intellect (chess) and chance (backgammon), chess won out among the ancient elite. According to one Muslim scholar, backgammon was all about fate. “The player,” he wrote, “when the chances are favorable, secures what he wants; but the ready and prudent man cannot succeed in gain what a happy chance has given to the other.” After its invention, chess supplanted backgammon as the kings’ game of choice because “in this game skill always succeeds against ignorance.”
Scrabble hardly has a romantic or mythic history. The game was invented by an unemployed, young New York architect named Alfred Mosher Butts during the Depression. The timing was right. A new game, one of skill and chance, Butts figured, would be a welcome diversion for down-on-their-luck Americans like the inventor himself. He tinkered with the game for years, but never was able to generate interest from the game companies. Eventually, Butts cut a deal with an aspiring businessman named James Brunot. Brunot made the sets in a small factory in rural Connecticut, but when Scrabble took off in the early 1950s, he handed over production and marketing to Selchow & Righter Co. That company acquired the game outright when Brunot decided to retire about twenty years later. Scrabble was passed on to Coleco Industries Inc. in the mid-1980s, when Selchow & Righter went out of business. Hasbro acquired it out of bankruptcy court when Coleco went belly up a few years later.
No medieval intrigue or philosophical heft there. Just a twentieth-century American business story. But Scrabble isn’t Battleship or Monopoly, either. The National Scrabble Association’s player ratings list contains the names of about seven thousand current or former tournament players, twenty-three hundred of whom have played in a tournament in the past year. That may not sound like a lot, particularly compared to the United States Chess Federation, which claims eighty thousand members, and I quickly meet devoted Scrabble players who insist that with more money, better organization, or a dictionary that didn’t include so many strange or obsolete words, the ranks of the initiated would be far fatter. Regardless, it’s more people than gather formally to play any other packaged board game, by far, and more than any other mind game besides poker, bridge, and chess.
I have never been a serious games player—never attended a club, played on a school chess team, or read a strategy book—but I dabbled in the classics. Along with millions of other Americans, I watched the Bobby Fischer–Boris Spassky chess match on public television in 1972. I can still visualize the giant cardboard pieces that the commentator Shelby Lyman would affix to the giant chessboard after each move in this match between two eccentrics representing capitalism and Communism. Lampros and I would record the moves on the chessboard in our living room, and for a time we would play. I was nine, he was seventeen. I never won a game. The problem was that I never learned to “see” the board, to visualize the next series of moves and aggregate the spatial relationship among the pieces. Backgammon, though, I could play. Summers on the Greek island of Chios, where my father was born, passed with endless sessions of the game in three variant forms—standard backgammon, plakoto (Greek backgammon), and moultezimi (Turkish backgammon). I recall sitting in the coffee shop in the central square of the ancestral village eating sweets and beating local men sixty years my senior. I never analyzed the mathematics or probabilities. I just grasped the game intuitively. I played, and won.
Observing the parkies and the Worlds, and now playing in a tournament, I was learning that Scrabble offered some of the best of both games. Chess has a catalogue of hundreds of standard sequences that have to be memorized; Scrabble has the words. Chess has its 64 alternating black-and-white squares; Scrabble has its 225 multicolored squares. Backgammon has the roll of the dice; Scrabble has the drawing of new tiles. All of them share a critical aspect of game theory: battling for control of a board in an effort to subjugate an opponent.
I don’t have a clue, though, about how intricate the battle can be. I play and play at the Beverly, and lose and lose. To get the hell out of that division and move to a better board, as Susi so delicately advised, would take work. I would have to study thousands of words, learn fundamental techniques like rack balancing (maintaining a healthy balance between vowels and consonants) and rack management (knowing which letters to dump and which to keep), and understand board-game strategy. In short, I’d have to take the game seriously. And while I've always been competent at most skill-based pursuits—from playing soccer and the clarinet to completing New York Times crossword puzzles—I’ve never been exceptional at, or exceptionally dedicated to, anything. I've lacked inner drive and the killer instinct; while I love competition, I usually expect to lose.
Still, what was missing as a child in chess and other pursuits surely, I think, can be manufactured as an adult. The skill component of the game, learning t
he words, should be a snap, I figure, because I already love language; and the chance component, the hope of drawing seven magical tiles from the bag, is inherently seductive. In Scrabble, like poker, you can bluff, a maneuver for which I also discover an affinity. I sneak SPENDFUL* past another novice at the club one Sunday afternoon and correctly guess that TRIAGED is a real word. “Nice find. That was added with the last dictionary update,” Ron Tiekert, who won the national championship in 1985, tells me. And in Scrabble you can get lucky: I nearly beat Ron in that game, and the same day nearly beat another former national champion, Rita Norr, who won in 1987.
There is one more attraction: That 761 makes me about two thousandth of the twenty-three hundred active players. Surely I can do better than that.
In a bland hotel meeting room just off Interstate 84 in Danbury, Connecticut, shortly after midnight, G.I. Joel is showing Marlon Hill a stack of snapshots from his recent trip to Bangkok, where he won first place and $5,000 (in local currency) in a major international Scrabble tournament. Scrabble is popular in Southeast Asia, even among people for whom English is a second language, after Thai or Tagalog, and the prize money is more generous there than in the States, so Joel travels. After his recent world championship, Joel is on a roll. These last three months have been the most esteem-building of his life, and for all of his frumpy sadness, Joel is reveling in his success. Here’s Joel with the tournament director in Thailand. Here he is with a woman who played a zitherlike instrument at a reception. Here he is at the royal palace. Here he is lying on his Bangkok hotel bed after the awards ceremony, a pile of baht scattered around him. As Joel shows Marlon the pictures, I notice that he’s wearing his nametag from the Thai tournament, which bears the logo of a sponsor, a chicken company named Brand’s.
Marlon politely looks at the photos, then the talk turns to the tournament at hand, the Eastern Championships, which start the next day. “I’m a knock your ass out in the morning,” Marlon says. He plays Joel first thing. Someone makes fun of Marlon’s speech. “What?” Marlon says, dropping the T. “We all speaking the Queen’s English?”
It’s my first big tournament. Four divisions. One hundred fifteen players. Four days and twenty games of Scrabble. Players greet one another like long-lost friends as they stumble around the hotel lobby toting too much luggage for a three-day trip. They carefully inspect the goody bags the local tourist board has prepared. They confusedly look for their rooms. They make silly demands of the hotel staff. They are, in short, typical American hotel guests, yet they also bear custom Scrabble boards—heavy wooden ones, ultralight plastic ones on lazy Susans, boards adorned with drawings or names or sports team logos, some stashed in expensive cymbal cases to protect against wear and tear—and $150 digital clocks and multicolored plastic Protiles and magnetized tile picker-uppers to clear the board and mesh bags straight out of Martha Stewart into which to dump a boardful of letters.
Players wear nametags crafted from wooden Scrabble letters, and T-shirts with slogans like SCRABBLE PLAYERS DO IT ON THE TILES. A tall thin player in electric blue drawstring pants hiked up past his navel and a tie-dyed tank top zips into the playing room carrying a fancy wooden board as a waiter would, with two sets of tiles arranged on the squares. I secretly hope he trips, just to see what two hundred flying tiles looks like.
My rating is now 779. A month earlier, I played in a one-day event at a cheap motel hard by Exit 48 of the Long Island Expressway. In the lowest division, I posted a 4–3 record, including a loss to a fourteen-year-old whose doting parents hovered over him between games as if he were a child actor at an audition. At the Beverly, I can't win a game unless it's against a newer newbie than I. I drop six in a row to Diane from the park. I see a player pick her ears with her finger and wipe it on her pants. An apparent narcoleptic falls asleep while we play; I kick him under the table when it's his turn. I watch G.I. Joel and Ron play in what seems a foreign language, when I discover that it sort of is—SOWPODS, the combined North American–British dictionary.
The club and the one-day tourneys feel like spring training. Danbury is Opening Day. I’m in Division 4, which seems to consist of newcomers like me and blue-haired ladies who have been shuffling tiles since the Truman administration. There is little in Scrabble more humiliating than losing to a blue-hair.
I drove from New York with Matt Graham (whose rating is 1942). Matt consumed most of the two-hour drive with a convoluted story about a bartender at the Greenwich Village college bar he frequents whom he dated and continued to obsess about after the relationship ended. It was hard to follow; Matt can ramble, pausing only for affirmation. But the defensiveness and insecurity apparent in the story made me wonder.
Matt was raised in Indianapolis. His mother is a lawyer, his father an actor who used to program computers. They divorced when Matt was in the seventh grade, sharing custody. Matt wasn't into sports or schoolwork. He had a couple of close friends, but was mostly introverted and antisocial. He was, however, interested in the high school quiz bowl. “I loved recall and trivia,” he says, adding, “I got completely screwed.” As Matt tells it, he made the quiz-bowl team in the ninth grade (and dominated), but the matches were televised and the coach told him he was too immature to appear on TV. “I think that was the beginning of the real bitterness,” Matt says. The next year he made the team again, but was declared academically ineligible. By then he pretty much had stopped attending classes. “When I realized I didn’t have to go to school, I just didn’t.” Matt slept in, ate junk food, watched television.
He did like comedy; at age four, he was mimicking a Woody Allen routine about a moose. After he was expelled from high school, he began doing standup. Soon after, he moved to Boston, where he attended open-mike nights and played Scrabble with his girlfriend, also a comic. Though he’d never been much interested in the game growing up, now, in his midtwenties, he found himself searching the OSPD for the two-letter words. After about a year of playing at home, Matt tracked down a local club, and a month later, in the spring of 1991, he entered a tournament in the Boston suburb of Waltham. It happened to be one of the key tournaments on the Scrabble circuit, featuring a special “premier” division of top players. Matt, playing in the novice division, wandered over to the premier section in the rear of the hotel ballroom.
“Their boards looked different from the [novice] boards, which were all congested, tiles moving down to the corner in blocks,” he says. “Theirs would have these spider shapes, shooting out to the ends. Someone played ANTEFIXA to an A, and the other guy bingos back with ATROPINE. It blew me away. That was the turning point. I said, ‘I want to be really good at this game.’”
Matt began dedicating himself. He played against an electronic Scrabble game called Master Monty. He fell asleep reading the dictionary. “Nothing magic,” he says.
But something clicked. In six months, his rating soared from 1170 to over 1700, and six months after that, at the 1992 Waltham event, he finished fourth in the expert division, right below premier. At the Nationals in Atlanta the following summer, Matt went 12–15, 114th out of 176 players, but his point spread was an astonishing +891, fifteenth-best in the field. In one game, he defeated the defending world champion by 350 points.
For an underachieving high school dropout like Matt, Scrabble was a way to show up the perceived geniuses. “I always feel they look down on me and a lot of these guys think they’re so much smarter than me,” Matt told me over lunch shortly after the Worlds. “I look at Joel and I look at Adam [Logan, the Harvard Ph.D. candidate and 1996 national champion], and on the surface they’re much more people’s idea of brainiacs. I do worry about it. I don’t get respect from them, but I try to control myself with that thought.”
By 1994, Matt was winning tournaments regularly, and his rating was among the top fifty in the game. He slumped at the Nationals that year and failed to qualify for the 1995 Worlds. But he won a couple of big tournaments in 1996 and finished respectably at the Nationals in Dallas. Then came his sec
ond-place finish at the Worlds. Matt won $13,000 playing Scrabble in 1997. No one could dispute that he was now one of the best.
“Comedy is so subjective,” Matt says. “Two people can look at the same thing, and one person can say, ‘That’s great. That guy’s a genius. That is terrific.’ And the other person can say, ‘That sucks.’ That was a big appeal with Scrabble in the beginning, that it doesn’t matter what people think, that if you’re really good at this that’s all that matters.”
“What’s TRANSMEDIA plus a V?”
Matt, Marlon, and I are sitting on barstools at a small, round laminated table in a cheap Mexican restaurant in Danbury. It’s Saturday night, and the second day of play in the tournament has just ended. I’m ecstatic: I’m among the novice division leaders with an 8–2 record. After one of the losses, I overhear the winner whisper to another player, “I beat Fatsis!” as if this is the 1972 Winter Olympics and I’m the Russian ice hockey team. Larry Sherman, G.I. Joel’s older brother and himself an expert, stops to congratulate me in the hallway. Marlon holds up his fist to knock with mine. “Mr. Eight and Two,” he says. “Kicking ass.”
And I should be 9–1, having blown a game by attempting a silly phony, FUTZIeR*, for 94, to open the game, rather than playing FRITZ for 54 (which I didn’t see until later—two years later, as I typed this paragraph), or even FUTZ for 32 (which I did see). But my game isn’t so advanced that I beat myself up over missed opportunities, mostly because I usually don’t realize when I miss opportunities. I don’t play fast or confidently enough yet to keep track of the tiles played. And I don’t write down my racks—that is, all seven tiles from every turn, a practice that allows players to review their games and see what they “missed”—just the words that my opponent and I play. In a seating area outside the playing room, for the first time I see players—two young guys in their early twenties, one a short engineer with shoulder-length slacker-style hair named Dominic Grillo, the other a tall and thin African-American schoolteacher with dreadlocks named Martin Smith—energetically re-creating each sequence from their games on a full-page, photocopied grid of a Scrabble board. Dominic records the date of each game, his opponent, the score, and a few comments. There is so much I don’t know.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 4