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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  “What’s TRANSMEDIA plus a V?” Matt repeats. We’ve been making fun of Marlon’s Transmedia credit card, a discount card not accepted by the restaurant, nor by a bunch of other restaurants that Marlon insisted on calling before we left the hotel that night. Marlon quickly says MAIDSERVANT. Then Matt quickly notes another, ANIMADVERTS.

  It is my initiation into anagrams. Technically, an anagram is a word or phrase that is formed by transposing the letters of another word or phrase. But Anagrams is also the name of a game, popular in the United States in the early twentieth century—Alfred Butts, the inventor of Scrabble, played it with his brothers—in which words are formed from a pool of letters written on cards or tiles and then new words are created by adding letters to the existing ones. Colloquially, Scrabble players tend to describe anagramming as the process of forming words from random tiles. Using that loose definition, anagramming is the essence of the game.

  It’s not new. The thirteenth-century Jewish mystics known as cabalists believed that the letters in the Hebrew alphabet had magical properties; assigning numerical values to each letter, they would rearrange the letters in sacred Jewish writings to reveal other truths. In Hebrew, the letters in the name “Noah” formed “grace,” while “Messiah” became “he shall rejoice.” Anagramming has been used to flatter kings and queens, or to reveal hidden secrets in a person’s name. In his poem “Cassandra,” about the siege of Troy, the ancient Greek writer Lycophron, who purportedly invented the anagram, revealed two sycophantic anagrams, one of the name of the king at the time Lycophron lived, Ptolemy Philadelphus, and the other of his queen, Arsinoe. He anagrammed PTOLEMAIOS to APO MELITOS, or “made of honey,” and ARSINOE to ERAS ION, or “Juno’s violet.” In the Book of John, Pontius Pilate asks Jesus, “Quid est veritas?” (“What is truth?”). His answer is an anagram: “Est vir qui adest” (“It is the man who is before you”). The word anagrams itself anagrams to the Latin ars magna, or great art.

  For the logophile, anagramming can be about turning words into apposite phrases. In his groundbreaking 1965 book Language on Vacation (a copy of which Matt gives me), Dmitri Borgmann, the father of modern wordplay, offers anagrams for VILLAINOUSNESS (“an evil soul’s sin”), CONVERSATION (“voices rant on”), and DESPERATION (“a rope ends it”). He also lists antigrams—words and phrases with opposite meanings—such as “evil’s agents” for EVANGELISTS and “I limit arms” for MILITARISM. The name of pop star Britney Spears anagrams to PRESBYTERIANS, which in turn anagrams to “best in prayers.” Eric Clapton is NARCOLEPTIC. “President Clinton of the USA” turns into “to copulate, he finds interns.”

  But for Scrabble players, single words are the goal, and with Matt and Marlon the longer the words and the more unlikely the letters, the better.

  “A-D-D ... R ... S-S-S ... T-U-Y,” Matt says. He has announced the letters of the word in alphabetical order, an arrangement known to Scrabble players as an alphagram.† Before Marlon (or I, but get real) can solve the first alphagram, Matt announces a second: ABHILNRTY.

  “DRYASDUSTS,” Matt says when Marlon doesn’t get the first one within a few seconds.

  “I’ve got one for you,” Marlon says. “PITTANCE with an R.”

  “CREPITANT?” Matt says.

  “It’s LABYRINTH,” Marlon says, meaning Matt’s other alphagram.

  “All right,” Matt says. “A-A-B ... L-M-M ... N-N ... O-S-T-U.” He’s doing this off the top of his head. He thinks of a word, mentally rearranges the letters in alphabetical order, and rattles them off faster than it would take most people simply to spell the word. So far I haven’t managed as much as a guess. I’ve been scribbling down the alphagrams in my notebook—a crutch Matt and Marlon don’t need.

  A minute goes by. Marlon’s still thinking.

  “SOMNAMBULANT.”

  That’s me talking.

  High-fives all around. “That’s a good find,” Marlon says, using the phrase denoting a creative, difficult, or elusive play, and then laughing his deep-throated, Fat Albert laugh. “That’s a major- league find.”

  It’s starting to feel like an initiation rite. Matt says he’s going to give me two long words with no repeating letters, known in the wordplay world as "isograms."† The term was coined by Borgmann in Language on Vacation. Matt alphagrams the first isogram: ABDEILMORSTUXY. Fourteen letters.

  Within ten seconds, I say it: “AMBIDEXTROUSLY.”

  Matt gives me the second, a fifteen-letter isogram. ABCEGHILNOPRTUY. I scribble and struggle and cross out letters and scribble and struggle some more. Matt and Marlon advise me to look for common prefixes and suffixes. I write down UN and ABLE and solve it: UNCOPYRIGHTABLE.

  It’s the longest isogram in Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition, the source used in Scrabble for long words. Borgmann, who searched the dictionary manually in his quest to manipulate the language, coined UNCOPYRIGHTABLE by placing the prefix UN before the dictionary-sanctioned COPYRIGHTABLE.

  On we go through dinner. BDEEIRSUW. There’s a bottle of it on the table. BUDWEISER, Marlon announces. CDEINORSTUY. They stay quiet while I labor. I ask for the first letter. C. Minutes go by. I finally blurt it out: COUNTRYSIDE. Another: ADEFGILRU. I see LIFE, and find it: LIFEGUARD. “It took you longer than it should have,” Marlon says.

  ADEEFGHIRU, lovely for its EFGHI string.

  “FIGUREHEAD!” I shout.

  “I’m telling you,” Marlon says. “He got talent.”

  Matt says, “GUACAMOLE plus F.”

  I ask them why they’re so good at this.

  “It’s called A.D.D.,” Matt says. “You need something that seems like a life project but you can resolve in five seconds.”

  A straight answer will have to wait, and it might not come from them. I ask Matt for the first letter of GUACAMOLE plus F.

  “No, you’re not riding on that bus anymore,” he says.

  And like a schoolchild who completes a task only when it becomes evident that help is not forthcoming, I get the answer a second later. “Oh, CAMOUFLAGE.”

  “TRANSMEDIA with an M!” Matt blurts, and then offers another combination. “If you take away the A, it’s MASTERMIND!”

  Marlon solves it. DISARMAMENT.

  “You sure picked the right credit card,” Matt says.

  By midday Sunday, I’m 11–3 and in first place of the thirty-one players in the division. My spread is +918. I’m cockier than a first-round draft pick in the NBA. My next opponent has halitosis, but I have confidence. I’m about to wrap up a win when, with my clock under one minute, I see two spots for my valuable Y. One of them creates the word YE in two directions for 20 points. The other is worth 24 points, creating YER. I choose the latter, which is unfortunate because YER* is a phony that my opponent spots instantly, leaping from his chair and shouting, “Challenge!” I lose by 15 points. I lose the next game by 34. And the one after that by 22. Nailbiters all. The day ends, and I’m no longer in first, but still in the top three.

  Dinner is another anagram fest. Matt, Marlon, and I are joined by Dominic and Martin, the Scrabble hipsters, and Eric Chaikin, who has just quit the Wall Street computer-software company founded by his father to take time off, largely to study words. Eric has been a wordie since he was a kid growing up in New York City, a Games magazine acolyte who read the dictionary for fun and subscribes to Word Ways: The Journal of Recreational Linguistics, which was founded by Dmitri Borgmann. Eric, who studied cognitive science at Brown, also seems to have an outer life, composing and recording music at a house he is renting in the Catskills. But he certainly has the anagramming skill, keeping up with Matt and Marlon.

  AACCNORSST.

  SACROSANCT.

  CGIILNNNSUU.

  Matt gets this in two seconds. CUNNILINGUS.

  Eric tosses out some “pair isograms,” words in which every letter appears twice. AACCEEHHNNPP: HAPPENCHANCE. EEIINNSSTT: INTESTINES.

  HISTRIONICS? TRICHINOSIS. Eric throws out a fifteen-letter word that he says has an ana
gram, MEGACHIROPTERAN.

  Everyone oohs and aahs, asking questions. Eric says it’s a common word. Marlon solves it in a few seconds—CINEMATOGRAPHER—and we whoop and high-five.

  “This is my favorite anagram of all,” Eric says, and he makes me write this down in my notebook: 11 + 2 = 12 + 1.

  Then he instructs me to spell it out: ELEVEN + TWO = TWELVE + ONE.

  “God put that there,” Eric says. “There is no other explanation.”

  Returning to the hotel, we join the late-night games that are ritual at weekend tournaments. People are playing Scrabble and Boggle and cards. Experts are shouting out words in two-on-two games. Matt wanders by my game. “Play DILATORS,” he instructs on the fly. Later, looking over the shoulder of a doubles game I’m playing with Dominic, who is a quickly rising intermediate, Marlon spots an impossibly low-probability word. “BUSHPIG,” he says, as if we were morons for not seeing it. “Play BUSHPIG!”

  “So, Stefan,” G.I. Joel says. “It’s ten minutes to one. Are you here for research purposes on the after-hours Scrabble life? Or are you hooked?”

  I stare at Joel for a second. Sure, I’m toting my reporter’s notebook, jotting down conversations overheard, like dozens of writers before who happened upon the quirky Scrabble subculture. But one can only take so much anagramming and so many games without caring.

  “I’m hooked,” I say.

  Joel pauses. A smile creases his sad-sack face. He nods slowly and deliberately, the self-appointed chief justice of Scrabble about to pronounce a verdict on my entry into his tight, little world.

  “Cool.”

  At 1:40 A.M., I can’t sleep, too nervous. I lie in bed. In the hallway I hear two players returning from the game room. “He tried REPUNT*,” one says. “To punt again.” I look up words. I review my games. I watch Olympic ice hockey from Nagano, Japan. The Russians win.

  The tournament is over. I’m standing in front of a large oak tag scoreboard taped to the wall in the anteroom where the late-night games were held. The poster is divided into thirty-one rows, an alphabetical listing of the names of each player in my division, and twenty columns, one for each game. A player’s cumulative point spread is recorded in the appropriate box. Win the game, and the spread is written in black Magic Marker. Lose, it’s in red. Ties are in green.

  I run my eyes along the row bearing my name, seeing a line of black interrupted only three times by red. The line, however, ends at Game 14, where a black + 918 decorates the box. Then a river of red ink begins: +903, +869, +847, +677, +364, +227. The six straight losses mark a collapse of titanic proportions, one I didn’t imagine possible in a game so larded with probability and luck, especially in the weakest division, where everyone’s word knowledge is slim and strategy suspect. I gave up in my last two games, demoralized, dejected, humiliated; in fact, I scored an embarrassing total of 179 points in the finale, having exceeded my twenty-five-minute time limit by more than six minutes, earning a penalty of 70 points.

  Dragging my sorry ass away from the evidence of my own ineptitude, I bump into Joe Edley in the hallway. Edley won the expert division. Marlon finished second and Matt third.

  I tell him that I lost my last six games. That I’m a pathetic choker, a Bill Buckner with tiles, that I will never amount to anything in a game that a few days ago I didn’t care nearly as deeply about, didn’t care about as a sport anyway. But now I’ve experienced the head-inflating rush of competitive success and the hide-under-the-covers agony of defeat—they should substitute footage of me playing YER* in Game 15 for that Yugoslav skier tumbling ass over teakettle on ABC’s Wide World of Sports. Now I want to win, win, win, I want to understand what you and Joel and Matt and Marlon and the other pros understand, I want to succeed in a way I’ve never wanted to before.

  I really just tell him that I lost my last six games.

  “You have to get out of the won-lost syndrome,” Edley says. “Did you care about losing?” he asks.

  “Yes,” I reply, because isn’t that what it’s all about?

  “Well, if you put too much stress on winning and losing you won’t last,” Edley says. “You’ll burn out. You can only make the best play you can make at any time. That’s all you can control.”

  4. 1005

  DESPITE A SWOON worthy of a silent film star, my rating after Danbury actually increases more than 200 points. Long tournaments are graded in two chunks. My 8–2 opening half sent my rating rocketing to 1069. But my 3–7 second half sent it down to 1005. Even so, the big jump seems odd; surely expert ratings don’t swing like the Dow. But Joe Edley explains that players receive something called “acceleration points” during the first fifty games of their Scrabble careers. In other words, my best chance to make a big rating jump is now.

  I’ve already burned thirty-three games of the fifty. Logic would dictate that now would be the time to prepare before playing in another event—that is, if one were concerned with earning a higher rating fast. I wanted to start my journey at the bottom in order to have a benchmark: Knowing virtually nothing save the two-letter words, and not feeling entirely comfortable with those, what sort of a Scrabble player was I? The answer was clear: not a very good one, as my six straight losses in Danbury indicated.

  But the Horatio Alger thing already seems hackneyed, and embarrassing. My new friends all seem to have been prodigies. Marlon played with his relatives for years before being dragged to a tournament, where he emerged with a rating over 1700. G.I. Joel was close to 1800 after a few events. Dominic Grillo tells me he went undefeated in his first event and after less than a year is closing in on 1600. Their numbers seem stratospheric, and mine feels pathetic, even when I fall back on my convenient “I’m just a journalist” excuse.

  Scrabble tournaments are naturally hierarchical. In the playing room, you can’t just sit wherever you fancy. The top-division tables typically are farthest from the main doors. And Table 1 of Division 1—where the players with the best records meet in the latter stages of most tournaments—is usually in the farthest corner. The quality of play descends to the weakest novices in the room’s opposite corner. And there isn’t much interdivisional mingling. Experts have no interest in novice boards, and novices, who could benefit from learning new words or watching experts analyze positions, appear afraid to cross class boundaries.

  But there’s attitude everywhere. In my very first game at Danbury, my opponent, whose 1160 rating seemed so impressive, attributed my victory to luck. How else could she have lost to someone playing in just his third tournament? My opponent in Game 3 didn’t wait until it was over. He bitched with every pull. “Look at this!” he exclaimed after one draw, showing his tiles to his neighbor. Their snarkiness is telling. Matt already gave me the no-whining lecture about tiles. And I know that in any game of chance, people will complain about their misfortune. But as Herbert O. Yardley lectured wisely in his classic The Education of a Poker Player, “I do not believe in luck, only in the immutable law of averages.” Better players tend to accept bad draws as part of the game and deal with them.

  That seems an important distinction between the Scrabble pro and the hobbyist. The pro, with his board vision and word knowledge, understands that the act of selecting tiles randomly from a bag is a crapshoot. I’ve already heard that the odds of drawing a bingo out of the bag to start the game are 12.63 percent. So if I know all of the seven-letter bingos, I should bingo one out of eight times when drawing first. Which means that seven out of eight times I shouldn’t bingo. Sometimes you get the bear, sometimes the bear gets you. Luck is considered responsible for 15 to 30 percent of the game. “You can’t control the tiles,” Joe Edley tells me.

  This given doesn’t stop pros from whinging, but it also doesn’t stop them from treating each rack, even the lousy ones, as a life-or-death riddle. You can measure skill and desire, I’ve decided, in how long players linger over a board after a game. The experts rehash games for as long as it takes to find a satisfactory solution. Was there a better strategic mo
ve here? If I had done this, then what would you have done? Experts home in on postmortems in progress like pigeons to a statue. If an acceptable solution is not forthcoming, a computer is consulted. The hobbyists, me included, quickly clear away all evidence of a game as if it were a bloody glove at O.J.’s house.

  Of course, we novices can’t see many possibilities in a Scrabble play because we don’t know the words or strategies. When I lose a tournament game by 2 points, Marlon happens to pass by. He examines the board, inspecting both my and my opponent’s final racks.

  “CRONE is your best play,” he says definitively. “CRONE wins you the game.”

  “I don’t know CRONE,” I reply. (Later, when I think about it, I realize that I do know CRONE, a withered old woman.)

  “CONGER also look like it wins,” he says.

  “CONGER? Don’t know that, either.” (It’s a kind of marine eel.)

  Since I don’t see these words, Marlon’s assessment of how I could have won is like asking what if Butch and Sundance were backed by a battalion of heavily armed troops. Like a lot of ex post facto Scrabble analysis, it is purely theoretical, given my limited word knowledge. Of course, if I hadn’t asked Marlon to help analyze the game, I wouldn’t have seen or learned CRONE or CONGER.

  I could learn those words by studying. But five- and six-letter words are a long way off. I’m following the study plan advised for all novices. First, I devour the cheat sheet. The National Scrabble Association publishes a beginner’s list that includes the two- and three-letter words; short words containing J, Q, X, and Z; and the ten U-less Q words (QAT, QAID, QOPH, FAQIR, QANAT, TRANQ, QINDAR, QINTAR, QWERTY, and SHEQEL). It also has a list of “vowel dumps,” that is, four-letter words with two I’s, two U’s, or three vowels, and five-letter words with four vowels. All of it is on one piece of paper, which I tote around until it’s stained and torn.