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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  Landsberg was awarded $800,000, payable over two years. The decision withstood appeal.

  Selchow could afford it—by the time the company paid, Trivial Pursuit had filled its coffers—but it was a big embarrassment. “There wasn’t twenty-five grand in the whole thing,” Landsberg says of the original book. In the summer of 1987, Landsberg was in Las Vegas when he stumbled onto the Nationals. His settlement money was in the bank, and Coleco had just bought Selchow, so his antiScrabble (hyphenated) feelings were softening. And, he learned, he was a Scrabble celebrity. One player asked for his autograph. Another had followed the case closely. “Do you know who you are?” she asked.

  Landsberg played in the tournament (he finished 11–10) and decided to get back into the game. But the game had changed, with the word lists and regular tournaments and player ratings. What hadn’t changed was Landsberg’s love of words. In the 1970s, he had copied all of the seven-letter bingos out of Funk & Wagnalls and had a friend enter them into a computer; he still has the enormous green-paper printouts. His wife used a paper cutter to make thousands of flash cards. Landsberg just liked learning bingos, so he did. “I like impossible tasks,” he says. “I wanted to learn every word.”

  And he played in an old-fashioned style: wide-open and bingo-friendly. Unlike all the new expert Scrabble sharks worried about their ratings, Landsberg just wanted to play. At Leisure World, he spots the retirees 100 points a game for fun. He invited Marlon Hill to his house for a week; the two played more than a hundred games. Landsberg revels in unspooling eight-letter anagrams from a computer study program in front of a crowd, as he does tonight in Reno.

  “I’ll tell you a secret,” his wife says in Reno, the clock past one. “He’s doing the nines now.”

  “To me it’s like Disneyland,” Landsberg says. “LOXODROME and APISHNESS and FENUGREEK and FEETFIRST. I played one the other day. IRRIDENTA.

  “The game doesn’t develop any intelligence. Except the study of the words keeps your mind in shape. That’s why I’m going to do the nines. It’ll take me maybe two years and I’ll know all the nines cold. And then maybe I’ll do the tens.”

  Another late night in the tournament room. The rainmen, and me, are playing Anagrams. That’s the game in which players shout out words from a pool of tiles (two sets, no blanks) turned over one by one. Players take possession of the words they find and try to capture other players’ words by adding letters from the pool and creating new ones. Whoever has the most words when the tiles run out wins. It’s the same game I played one night at the Chicago Nationals, and was complimented for finding WATERLILY*. Here in Reno, the competition is even tougher. I don’t have a prayer.

  TRUNDLE changes to UNDERLIT, then to INTERLUDE, and to DEREGULATING.

  DIALECTS becomes LACERTIDS.

  G.I. Joel gets RAWHIDE. He turns it into HEADWAITER.

  “He was waiting for it,” Marlon says. Marlon steals LACERTIDS by changing it into DISTRACTABLE, using an A, a B, and a T from the pool.

  Joel steals RIDGILS by making DIRIGIBLES.

  “What is a DIRIGIBLE anyway?” asks Trey Wright, a concert pianist in his late twenties who finished second to Cappelletto in Chicago.

  How could he not know what a dirigible is?

  “It’s a blimp,” I say.

  “Like a blimp in the sky?” Trey asks.

  “A zeppelin,” Joel says.

  Someone forms UPGAZED.

  “This is stealable,” Joel says.

  “With one letter,” Marlon says. “GAZUMPED.”

  Joel has ten words in front of him: WEDGIES, JURATORY, ECLIPSES, FIXATION, HEADWAITER, VAQUERO, ATARAXY, MAFFICK, DEREGULATING, and DIRIGIBLES. After creating MASCOTS, he has eleven. Then someone steals ECLIPSES by calling out SPECIALIZES, and Joel is back to ten. Marlon takes MASCOTS with IOTACISMS. WEDGIES becomes EDGEWISE. Eight.

  “I’m a get it,” Marlon says. “I’m a get your SPECIALIZES.”

  While Marlon is talking trash, Joel blurts out, “CONVEYOR!”

  “Damn,” Marlon says.

  “You’re too busy talking while I’m anagramming,” Joel says.

  Sometimes I can’t believe these guys are in the same room together, let alone socializing. Yet they share a skill so central to their disparate lives.

  Joel adds FOOTIER and GEOGRAPHY. “GEOPHAGY with an R,” Marlon notes. Joel turns SCIUROID into RIDICULOUS. Then he gets MEZQUIT, bringing him to thirteen. Marlon has five. He says he’s fixated on stealing CHAPERONES, which someone else has formed.

  “OVERPREACHINESS,” he says. It’s challenged. “Aw, that’s a good word,” he says, after the Merriam-Webster’s Tenth stored in someone’s laptop says it isn’t.

  Joel shouts “VIXENISH!” a split second before I do.

  “Man, I saw that,” I whine. “I finally saw one.” But Joel won’t give it to me. Rules are rules.

  He picks up FLUNKEY. Joel has nineteen words in front of him. I have zero.

  Scrabble is like the pole vault. You’re proud to have cleared one height, to have set a personal best, but then those damned officials raise the bar an inch higher. And when you dislodge it, and free-fall limply onto the mat below, you can’t remember what it was like to have soared.

  I don’t believe, all evidence to the contrary, that I’ve improved at all. My doubts are reinforced on day seven, when I put together a 2–4 stretch, dropping to 16–20 for the event. When I’m blown out in Game 35 by Eileen Gruhn, a charming, witty, longtime intermediate player from Seattle, whom I’d beaten earlier in the tournament, the dejection must be obvious. Eileen gets maternal, or, more accurately, grand-maternal. “You have the skill and drive,” she says, trying to cheer me up. “You’re an excellent player. You’ll be in the expert ranks soon.”

  A sucker for a compliment, I believe her for a minute—all evidence, again, to the contrary. With a few sentences, sweet Eileen has made the week worthwhile. Maybe she’s right. Maybe I do have what it takes. What’s not clear is whether that’s a good thing or not.

  During a walk along the pleasant, tree-lined Truckee River that cuts through downtown Reno, away from the casinos, an active but perpetually novice (and content to stay that way) player notes that I already have the hallmarks of an expert. I think I’m better than my rating. I declaim how the top players deserve a larger share of the prize money (a long-running debate in Scrabble). I rehash game positions. And I do it all a bit too energetically.

  “You’re slowly becoming not normal,” she says.

  I finish with an 18–21 record. Cappelletto wins the expert division with a 30–9 mark, reaffirming his dominance. He receives a standing ovation, high-fives, and hugs when he collects the $2,000 first prize. Marlon goes 19–20, out of the money—and out of money.

  Afterward, he complains to a crowd about the terrible tiles he drew throughout the tournament. He needed a top-three finish, he says, to earn bus fare back to Baltimore. “The tiles,” his fellow expert Joel Wapnick notes, “don’t care about the bus.” I lend Marlon another $100 to get home.

  14. Lester

  LESTER SCHONBRUN is a lanky man in his mid-sixties with a wispy, gray beard, a bald pate always covered by a floppy baseball cap, and a knowing smile. He has a deep yet gentle, inquisitive voice bearing the faintest traces of his New York upbringing. He wears circular wire-rimmed glasses with thick lenses, open flannel shirts over earth-tone T-shirts, and baggy pants, and he shuffles pigeon-toed in Teva sandals with socks. Lester looks like what he is: an old radical.

  I hitch a ride from Reno to San Francisco with Lester, who has just finished third in the tournament, and his partner, Joan, an intermediate level player herself. Lester and I have been communicating by e-mail; he’s been telling me, in installments, intimate facts about his life. An avowed if not card-carrying Communist, Lester has done everything from operate card-sorter machines for IBM mainframes to drive for a hippie cab company in Berkeley to manage the office of the party newspaper, The People’s World. These days, he and Joan work
as legal secretaries for a progressive Oakland law firm.

  Lester is great company: well read, opinionated, honest, and generous. He has set aside afternoons away from work to take me around San Francisco, introduce me to a game-world legend friend of his, and attend a meeting of the purportedly wacky local Scrabble club. He also is my link to Scrabble’s distant past and an old New York where you could wander into an establishment any time of day or night and get a game. The escapist allure of such a place—well, it’s something I dream about.

  Lester represents, for me, a saner side of the game. He’s the most considerate and self-aware of my Scrabble comrades. He doesn’t ramble on selfishly about racks. He compliments his opponents when they deserve it and is hostile only when they’re jerks. (When one especially self-absorbed expert finally discovered Lester’s political persuasion, he said, “I hear you’re a Communist.” Lester considered replying, “If you weren’t always engrossed in recounting blowouts and marveling at your opponents’ luck, you would have heard me chanting ‘All Power to the Soviets’ long ago.”) Commie or not, Lester can admit that he likes playing for money. (“It screws things up in some ways,” he says. “But I wouldn’t go to a tournament if there weren’t prize money. I hate to admit it, but a ten-thousand-dollar prize does seem to validate it in some way.”) And, perhaps the biggest indication that Lester is socially housebroken, he can enjoy a good meal without calculating everyone’s share to the penny.

  Most significantly, Lester is candid about how this game has shaped his life. It’s pretty simple. Lester has always felt as if he never fit in—in his family, in schools, in social situations, in the workplace. Scrabble offered structure in both the way the game is played and the universe in which it is played. Scrabble helped Lester escape from the world and make sense of it at the same time.

  “The parts of life that are hard for me are when I don’t know what I’m supposed to do,” Lester tells me as we eat Subway sandwiches in the office of one of the law firm’s partners. “In Scrabble, you’re being tested. There’s a very specific test at every step. The rules are crystal clear compared to other parts of life. It takes place in an area of my mind that I feel very comfortable with, that I feel very confident in.

  “Plus, there aren’t some of the complicating factors. Am I doing this for myself or am I doing it to make someone else rich? Does it have any positive or negative social connotations? In that sense, it’s true.”

  Nearly forty years later, Lester can still conjure the scene: the decrepit walkup on 42nd Street next door to the New Amsterdam Theatre; the drab, second-floor room overlooking the sex shops and the porno theaters of Times Square; the faintly urinous odor in the stairwell; the old men hunched over their chessboards; his heart racing as he vaults the steps two at a time. The Chess & Checker Club of New York, a.k.a. the Flea House, was open twenty-four hours a day. There was a main room for chess, with checkers in the rear. An adjacent room housed bridge, and another more chess and Scrabble. It was the most vivid symbol of a time when games parlors offered a viable, if not altogether respectable, diversion for men of a certain age and temperament.

  Lester began frequenting the place in the early 1960s. The proprietor, John Fursa, charged 20 cents an hour during the day to rent equipment to play. At midnight, the rates went to 30 cents, and then 60 cents at 2:00 in the morning. The Flea House was where the unheralded and, by conventional societal standards, unsuccessful, but often brilliant and charismatic, gathered to do what they did best and loved most: play games, usually for money. It was a smoky, stimulating refuge from the confusing world outside.

  For Lester, the Flea House was a kind of home he had never had. He was born to working-class Hungarian immigrant parents in Astoria, Queens, just after the Depression. Lester’s father, a carpenter who loved baseball’s New York Giants and drank a bit too much, died when Lester was eleven. His mother ran a neighborhood candy store that failed, then worked as a seamstress in small, dingy factories to support her six children. For a time, seven family members crammed into a one-bedroom, one-bathroom apartment on the same ugly block as a Borden’s milk plant.

  At Bryant High School, “everyone was on track for the welding shop,” but Lester was bright and his best friends were the richer Jews from Sunnyside who lived on tree-lined streets and taught him the guitar, chess, and leftist politics. When the mother of one of his friends said, “North Korea? North Korea didn’t start the Korean War,” Les realized they were Communists. Having watched his own mother sew toy parachutes in sweatshop conditions, he liked the working-class mantras of his middle-class friends. “I’d see people in my neighborhood working their balls off so the people I went to school with could have a good life,” Lester says. “I thought, Why shouldn’t they have a good life?”

  Lester got into Queens College, but he wasn’t motivated, and quit. A series of unrewarding jobs only hardened his political beliefs; working for a zipper company, Lester saw forty immigrants toiling for almost no pay behind a closed door. Lester took a test and won an entry-level job at IBM. But he couldn’t stand wearing a suit and tie, and didn’t fit in socially, so he quit after a few months. The training qualified him for other data-processing jobs, and then he learned some programming, and he would take one job after another to support himself, never for more than six months at a time. “Just being confined to a job was too hard for me,” Lester says. “Too many authority problems.”

  After a failed early marriage, Lester in his late twenties was living near Columbia University in a $40-a-month single-room-occupancy hotel when he met a group of chess-obsessed graduate students. They would play chess in the back of a bar called the Gold Rail from 10:00 at night until closing time at 4:00 in the morning. Then they’d head over to a player’s apartment, drink tea, and play speed chess—five minutes per player—until midmorning. One night, when the apartment wasn’t available, they went to the Flea House.

  Lester was a competent chess player, good enough to beat all comers when he was a teenager, and to hold his own with his new friends. But against the Flea House hustlers, he was a patzer. Les could solve specific problems with the skill of a master, but he couldn’t stomach the book learning required to excel in competition. “If I’m playing a whole game, I’m lost,” he says. So when one of the Gold Rail guys showed up at the bar with a Scrabble set and a Funk & Wagnalls dictionary, Lester was game. “They play Scrabble at the Flea House,” the friend announced, “and they use a clock!”

  “I remember playing ORGANIZE down from the triple in one of the early games and feeling a pulse,” Lester says. “An even sweeter memory was playing THROMBIN. I used to read Scientific American regularly, although I seldom got through any of the articles. But I picked up words, and that’s where THROMBIN came from, just popping into my head. I remember with pleasure the worried and disgruntled look on my friend Henry’s face as he challenged, and his disgust when it was good.”

  Lester would watch the Flea House Scrabble players and thrill at their ability to create so many seven- and eight-letter words. “I remember Henry saying, ‘Just look for prefixes and suffixes.’ Click. Bingo production soared.”

  With serial jobs and serial relationships, Lester found himself drifting more and more frequently to the Flea House, which changed for him from a gray, unhealthy lair populated by wacky old Eastern Europeans to an addiction “as strong as any drug.” Soon, the men who seemed so aged and odd the first time he visited took on personalities. There was Freddie the Fish and Frank the Nazi Criminal and Israeli Jack and Sidney the Simian and a little man everyone called Mr. Rubenstein. Mr. Rubenstein would say, “Hello, how are you?” to no one at all, and he would tell the same joke over and over: “I went to a movie.” “What did you see?” “It was dark in there, I couldn’t see anything.” The old Eastern Europeans “probably struck me as benign versions of my father, or my father at his most benign,” Lester says. “Something about their whimsical, absurd humor struck a chord.”

  The Flea House was a meet
ing place for European Jews who had fled their homelands during and after World War II. They would trade intelligence about the Cold War and news of relatives back home, and argue about everything from politics and science to literature and sports. “If you wanted social intercourse, if you wanted information, it was the place to go,” one of the regulars, a Hungarian Jew who fled after the Soviet invasion in 1956, tells me in Washington Square Park one day. “That was back when games players were intellectuals,” adds Matthew Laufer, the poet and Scrabble player.

  But mostly the Flea House was a place to play. One chess titan is said to have lost his delicatessen in a game. Huge, bald Nick the Wrestler, who had a role in Stanley Kubrick’s early classic The Killing, said “check” whenever he made a move and “mate” whenever he had a check. Kubrick himself sometimes played at the Flea House, as did the conductor Leonard Bernstein, who would turn up after concerts. (“He wasn’t much of a chess player,” one of the old-timers tells me.) Bobby Fischer played there. The Flea House regulars were an eclectic mix of successful professionals, lost souls, brilliant misfits, certifiable crazies, inveterate gamblers, and convicted felons. “World-class people who knew how to play games and knew how to make it fun as well as interesting,” Lester says. “It was an art.”

  Lester would order a bowl of Campbell’s green pea soup, which John Fursa inexplicably served with a cube of sugar, and a salami sandwich (70 cents) and play chess, getting hustled for a quarter or half dollar a game. Players would spot him a knight, a rook, or play with less time on their clocks than Lester, but still he would lose. “That was the code, of course. If someone gives you odds, they’re supposed to win,” he tells me. “With the odds came the recognition that they had great contempt for you.”