Then hopelessness and panic set in, and no mantra can stop them. My next opponent is Marie, a forty-something woman with a gum-chewing, Pinky Tuscadero toughness that’s accented by a look of perpetual disgust. When she drops down SAUSAGE and then UNGREEDY, which I challenge, losing a turn, she’s up 205–67 and I’m psyched out. I have drawn three S’s at once and used two of them on low-scoring plays. Now I have to pass. She plays AGITATER,* which I don’t challenge. I’m on the short end of 277–67.
I sink lower in my chair, resignation washing over me. I can’t remember a thing Edley told me—about playing every rack, about the beauty in just finding the plays, about being optimistic. I have the letters EILSTTV on my rack, and if ever there was a time to ask for help, it’s now. I see VITTLES. Or is it VITTELS? I inexplicably choose VITTELS*. It’s challenged off the board, and I sink lower. I play another phony bingo, in a futile attempt to cut the deficit, only to see it widen, 348–79. Then I play a phony three, KEV*, one of the five threes just excised from the dictionary (it’s an acronym for kilowatt electron volt): 366–79. For good measure, Marie then picks up the J, X, and Z, and I eat the Q. Final score: 591–228.
In almost every Scrabble tournament, you face an unwinnable game. Even the Edleys of the world do. Usually, however, it isn’t a 363-point drubbing, because better players know how to stanch the bleeding. This defeat may be the worst I’ll ever suffer, and the right thing to do is forget about it. Immediately. It has no bearing on the next seven tiles I will pull from the bag. As Edley said, you have to be prepared to lose, and know how to overcome negative thinking.
But the rout takes root, and I just move tiles the rest of the afternoon. Lose, win, lose, win. I attribute the victories to my opponents’ incompetence (one spelled REPELLED with one L, another tried RESTONED*), the losses to my own ample failings.
The 4–3 record isn’t terrible; I finish fourth in the group, and my rating will increase. But that feels secondary. I’m ready to dismiss Edley’s message—the breathing, the mantras, the power of positive thinking—as New Age doublespeak that can’t work for me. But after one tournament, why should it work? Why should I expect to win when I won’t devote the time required to improve my chances of winning? Why should I be satisfied, anyway?
“You can always come away from tournaments thinking you could have played better,” Edley had said.
“Even you?”
“Of course me. I’m always saying that. If I didn’t feel like I could play better, what would be the point of continuing?”
6. 1191
IN A BALLROOM big enough for the Reverend Sun Myung Moon to hold a mass wedding, on pink carpeting below five crystal chandeliers, the Scrabble masses have gathered. The high church of Scrabble is the ritzy Fairmont Hotel in downtown Chicago, where I am one of 535 people who will be married to the game for the next week. It’s the Nationals, the every-other-year event for which players of all ratings take vacation, spend thousands of dollars on airfare and hotel rooms, and gather with the similarly afflicted for a marathon of their favorite game. The 1998 event is the biggest and longest to date—the most players, up from four hundred two years earlier, and the most games, thirty-one. It is also the most money, nearly $500,000, that Scrabble’s corporate owner, Hasbro, will spend on a single event promoting its product.
The opening-night reception is part family reunion, part carnival sideshow. Everyone gets a Scrabble tote bag, complete with a T-shirt, which some players don immediately, and a special fiftieth-anniversary-edition board. (No one likes it; too tall, too brown, too ugly, too glary.) A guy spinning a giant flower on his finger walks by. A woman in a tight red dress and high heels leads her husband by a leash attached to a collar around his neck. G.I. Joel, in a powder blue suit, totes the trophy that he won in Thailand. A heavy, bearded guy in a wheelchair and a Cat in the Hat stocking cap whizzes by.
I greet Lester Schonbrun, the veteran of New York Scrabble in the 1960s, an erudite, easygoing avowed Communist, and his partner, Joan Mocine. They sell me a copy of their Scrabble humor ’zine, The Daily Astonisher. (One piece reports that Joe Edley has switched from tai chi to Irish clog dancing. “It really loosens up the old biceps and triceps,” he says.) I see Marlon Hill, who has been boasting in recent months, “Chicago is mine. They can write me out a check with four zeros on it. I’m ready. I’m fucking ready. I’m ready to win.” Marlon and Matt Graham took Amtrak to Chicago together; they’re both afraid to fly. I see the Washington Square parkie Richie Lund, who less than two months earlier had quintuple-bypass surgery. Richie celebrated by getting a tattoo of Bruce Lee on his upper right arm. Lee is in a fighting pose, wrapped in dragons with three bloody gashes across his face and chest, in a scene from his film Enter the Dragon. It’s Richie’s first Nationals since 1992.
“I’m dazed and confused,” he says.
The first North American Scrabble championship was held in 1978 in New York. There were sixty-four invitees. Selchow & Righter paid a $1,500 first prize to David Prinz, who was one of the main compilers of the OSPD, which was published later in the year. The next two Nationals—won by Joe Edley in 1980 and Joel Wapnick in 1983—were limited to thirty-two qualifiers, and from then on, a basic principle applied: As goes the company that owns Scrabble, so go the Nationals.
Flush with cash thanks to the unexpected and unprecedented popularity of Trivial Pursuit, Selchow in 1985 made the Nationals an open event. More than three hundred players competed for $52,000 in prize money. Selchow fed the players a sit-down hot lunch every day, held two cocktail receptions, and hired a guy dressed in a town crier costume who delivered a “Hear ye! Hear ye!” proclamation to open the event. Ron Tiekert won the biggest-ever first prize of $10,000 with a remarkable 20–2 record. Edley took fifteen of his last sixteen games to finish second. Lund, then an unknown, shocked the field by finishing third.
A year later, Scrabble’s fortunes reversed. Selchow & Righter, unable to manage the growth caused by Trivial Pursuit, sold itself to Coleco, a brash company known for its boom-and-bust cycles which was trying to buy respectability in the form of other toy and game manufacturers. Coleco didn’t care about the competitive side of Scrabble; it dropped ownership of the Scrabble Association and canceled the 1987 Nationals in San Francisco. John Williams, who had taken over stewardship of the Association, already had booked a hotel, ordered coffee mugs as gifts for the players, and printed a special edition of the OSPD. Coleco promised to hold the event the following year.
“We are confident that this timing will ultimately contribute to the advancement of the Scrabble brand name, and that someday [the Nationals] can be elevated to a Wide World of Sports type profile, with our two best word experts battling it out for prize money before a national audience,” the company announced.
The players revolted. Edley and a Californian named Johnny Nevarez organized an alternate nationals in Las Vegas. Some 320 players attended, and Coleco was shamed into donating $5,000 for first-prize money. The event was won by Rita Norr, a Brooklyn mother of three and a student, the first and only woman ever to win the Nationals. To the players, the message was clear: The game transcended its corporate owner.
Coleco did keep its promise. Though the company teetered on the brink of collapse, it held a 1988 national championships in Reno anyway. Two weeks afterward, Coleco filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy-court protection. Coleco was still in bankruptcy court a year later, but John Williams, who had gone into debt himself to keep the players association afloat, scheduled another Nationals anyway. It was a bare-bones affair held in a grimy hotel across the street from Madison Square Garden in New York. There wasn’t even enough money for a reception. “We had no funding,” Williams recalls. “I remember going out and buying potato chips and the hotel not allowing us to bring them in.” Some 220 diehards turned out.
But there was reason for optimism. Hasbro had just agreed to acquire most of Coleco’s assets, including Scrabble. Under Coleco, the game had languished. Coleco sold just over three hu
ndred thousand sets of basic Scrabble in its last year of control, the fewest since 1952. Distribution channels had dried up. Advertising was nil. It took Hasbro three years to rebuild sales to the one-million-a-year level, but it happened. Over the objection of some senior Hasbro executives, who didn’t understand why Scrabble needed an outside association when other board games didn’t, Williams received a commitment for financial support from Hasbro’s Milton Bradley division. The Nationals stabilized and grew.
Players expected a lavish and well-organized affair, and they got it, even if they weren’t always happy. The Nationals became the forum for a “town meeting” that Williams began holding so players could air their gripes. Once the tournament was even the site of a demonstration, in 1994, after Hasbro agreed to expurgate the so-called offensive words from the OSPD. Given its burgeoning size and the growing ranks of top-level experts, the Nationals also became the place where legends were made: Wapnick won seventeen straight games in 1992 only to drop his final three, and the tournament, to Edley, who won his second title; the quiet, self-effacing David Gibson won the 1994 event and then shared some of his prize money with fellow players; twenty-one-year-old Adam Logan became the youngest champion, in 1996, with Marlon Hill behind him as the highest-finishing African American.
In 1998, the oddsmakers—okay, the oddsmaker, Jim Geary, a young, poker-playing expert from Phoenix who operates a book on the tournament—have cofavorites: Logan and another former whiz kid, Brian Cappelletto, an options trader in Chicago, with odds of 5 to 2. G.I. Joel is 3 to 1 and Edley is 7 to 2. Matt Graham is 10 to 1, Marlon 25 to 1.
There is no betting on the third division of four, which is where I’m situated. I’m seeded 117th of the 133 players, which means there are but sixteen players in the division with ratings below my 1191. That’s because I am “playing up”; the division technically is for those rated between 1200 and 1500, but players can play up a full division. I could have stayed in the bottom division, whomped the blue-hairs and newbies, and maybe even been national novice champion. Or I could play to what I think is my true skill level and give my rating a chance to spike higher. The choice was easy.
One problem: I am not prepared. I have spent much of the summer in France covering the World Cup soccer tournament. I toted my Franklin, OSPD, and word lists to the Continent but didn’t study at all, which surely must be to my credit as a human being, if not as a Scrabble player. Upon my return, burdened by work, I didn’t visit the club or the park. I reviewed the threes, began the three-to-makefours, and studied a few more stems from Mike Baron’s Top 100 list—AINERS, SENIOR, TONIES. When Marlon stops by my hotel room, I page through one of his notebooks, which contains every six- letter word—the last thing most players learn, if they even bother—and the gap between me and the top players once again becomes frighteningly evident.
But the gap between my peers and me doesn’t feel so great. Despite the rating disparity that places me at the bottom of my field, and despite my lack of preparation, my expectations remain high. In a game in which luck is a factor, in which logic and intelligence play a role, I’m finding it hard to accept that there are other, larger, empirical reasons for failure. I still want to overlook the seminal rule of Scrabble: There is no substitute for word knowledge. I have very little but still believe that can be overcome, that I am somehow different—smarter—than the other assorted blue-hairs, hobbyists, and expert wanna-bes in my division.
Inside the ballroom, official boards and tiles (red and blue, alternating in color from board to board so that players don’t inadvertently reach into neighboring bags and grab the same color tiles), supplied by Hasbro, are arrayed on the evenly spaced and numbered tables. There is a bank of computers for entering results, a big 1998 National Scrabble Championship banner, and a giant Scrabble board that reads DAY ONE: STOP BY FOR A SPELL.
From a podium, John Williams thanks us for making this tournament the biggest Scrabble event ever. He then announces the death of two prominent Scrabblers: Joel Skolnick, “one of the founding fathers if not the founding father of the tournament scene”—Skolnick organized the first big New York tournaments in the early 1970s—and Mike Wise, “the founding father of Scrabble in Canada.” John’s voice cracks. It’s a touching scene, a reminder of how important this game is in people’s lives. After a moment of silence, G.I. Joel races up and announces a prize in honor of the men: $20 for the highest-scoring word containing JOEL or WISE. “JOWLIEST would qualify for both, yes,” Joel says.
As if to prove I’m better than my rating, I start 6–3. But on day two of the tournament (AS GOOD AS YOUR WORD, the giant board says), I botch three endgames, and fall to 7–7. At 10–8 on day three (THE WORD IS OUT. WE ARE SPELLBOUND.), I hold a lead but can’t find ETESIAN—SATINE plus an E, one of the most basic Scrabble racks. I lose three turns passing and searching for a bingo, and finally lose the game. Two games later, I get and play ETESIAN, but lose anyway. I lose four in a row. I win four in a row. I lose four in a row.
As I lumber through the event, nothing makes sense. I play phonies almost every game, an addiction that seems to be worsening; guessing is generally a bad strategy, but I can’t seem to help myself. I challenge acceptable words. I lose two games by exceeding my time. I’m confused as to what letters to keep and what to trade, often opting mistakenly to hang on to more vowels than I should. After three days, my record is 10–11, somewhere in the middle of the pack.
Ah, but the nightlife is fun. Dozens of players while away the evenings doing what they just spent all day doing, playing Scrabble, as if thirty-one games aren’t enough. For the first time, I see big money changing hands over a board; there are $100 doubles matches involving a few of the best players. Matt and Marlon are their usual opinionated, codependent selves. (And, as usual, they’re both broke; I agree to cover the hotel room they are sharing.) Eric Chaikin shows up midtournament, straight from his overseas travels. One night, Dominic Grillo and Martin Smith throw a party in their hotel room. The one socialized under-thirty woman in the tournament shows up, so it’s not all men. We order pizzas and play Scrabble and Anagrams. I find JAILBIRD and CAUSEWAY, and shout out WATERLILY, for which Matt praises me, even though it turns out not to be acceptable (it’s two words).
In Division 1, Matt and Marlon are as out of contention as I am. Brian Cappelletto is proving the oddsmaker correct. He’s 17–4 and threatening a runaway.
If the rules of Scrabble are the hundred thousand words, then Brian Cappelletto learned the rules faster than anyone.
At age thirteen, in 1983, Brian began playing against a neighbor, a tournament player, but it took two years to get him to the local club in Phoenix. After his first visit, not realizing there was a printed cheat sheet, Brian culled from the OSPD all of the two-letter words and all of the three-letter words they formed. “Somebody gave me SATIRE and RETINA and that crap,” Brian says, and then an early book of seven- and eight-letter bingos. Within a few months, between sessions in front of his favorite video arcade game, Centipede, Brian was memorizing the fives, which he transcribed from the dictionary.
Brian’s father, an aerospace engineer, died of cancer when Brian was three years old. His mother is an architect. Brian wasn’t especially bookish. He was just attracted to the words.
“It was a hundred twenty degrees outside,” Brian tells me. “There was nothing to do out there. I’d go swimming and then it would be, ‘Let’s do some Scrabble.’” Brian would turn on the radio and compile lists for a couple of hours, sometimes twice a day if he hit a particularly interesting stretch of words. It came easily. “I could memorize stuff pretty well,” he says. “We’d go over something in class and I’d go over it once before the quiz and that was all I needed to do.”
We’re sitting on a bench in a park in downtown Chicago adjacent to Lake Michigan. It’s a cool summer evening. A breeze is blowing. Brian is cruising through the tournament. “Stop it and give it to him,” Marlon said earlier in the day. “Give him his check.” Brian is mod
est but honest. “I feel like I’ve been in the zone for most of these games.”
Brian doesn’t have the outer quirks that distinguish so many top players. He dresses neatly and boringly: khaki shorts, tucked-in golf shirts, and New Balance cross-trainers. He wears his thick black hair short. Brian could be any clean-cut suburbanite or member of the preppy frat house. He is twenty-eight years old, but talks younger. He can be shy, a low-energy foot shuffler who turns red easily, makes eye contact reluctantly, and seems nervous and un-self-assured in conversation, answering questions in short bursts and not articulating thoughts in depth.
But Brian also works in the frenzied options pits in Chicago, where fellow traders place bets on whether he can solve anagrams in five seconds or less. When he’s comfortable, he’s loose, and even funny. Brian does dead-on impersonations of fellow Scrabble players. And he is relentless over the board. Brian just sees more words, more possibilities in his racks, and more places to put them than others. Says Lester Schonbrun: “He’s from Mars.”
Brian’s first rating was an expert-level 1812. Within months, he was beating top experts, playing words like KOUMISS, PINNULAE, POLONIUM, and INTROMIT. When one opponent opened with ENTASIS, Brian calmly laid down REALISE atop it, forming seven two-letter words. As a party trick, he would tell people where on a page of the OSPD a particular word could be found. At sixteen, under the headline “Prodigious Start for Cappelletto,” Mike Baron profiled him on the front of the Scrabble Players News. At seventeen, his rating hit 2000, the youngest player ever to crack that plateau, and he finished fifth in the Nationals. He went to UCLA, and kept studying, flashcarding every seven-letter word in the OSPD and then every eight-letter word.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 10