Larry is deadpan and imperturbable. I’ve never seen him lose his cool over a game, more often than not defusing frustration with a self-deprecating joke. At the club a few months earlier, plagued by a bout of slow play, I had scribbled “PLAY FASTER” at the top of my notebook. Larry happened by at that moment, grabbed my pen, and added “STUPID!” But he’s always been a trusty adviser, including on the subject of time. He knows it’s my Achilles’ heel. When I find Larry awaiting me outside, it’s as if I’ve just walked into the principal’s office.
He patiently listens to my self-hating tirade, smart enough to know that advice won’t help now. Instead, he artfully spins my negative into a positive: “You know, the better you’ve gotten, the more seriously you seem to take it. That’s good.”
Sure, I think, but getting better hasn’t stopped me from screwing up. And because I’ve improved, the magnitude of the screwups seems greater—particularly when they’re the same mistakes I made as an amateur. I seem to be approaching both Scrabble expertise and Scrabble neurosis in lockstep.
I head back inside. I’m mathematically eliminated, as they say in baseball, but with a couple of wins I still can finish as high as third place. I open my next game with an aggressive, 46-point phony, VEXILY*, which stays on the board, flustering my opponent, whom I have to shut up more than once when he coffeehouses. I win, 438399. Now I’m 11–8. My final opponent is Noel Livermore, who has been rated as high as 1899 and whom I beat earlier in the tourney. We’ve got a nice one going, one with a little beauty (I play ILIA, he plays CILIA, I play CILIAE*, which stays on the board). He’s ahead by 80 points when I draw the first blank and play EROTIcA. I follow up by pulling the second blank. After a couple of small plays, I’m down 252–199. My rack is AMNSTU?, which makes plenty of words on its own (fourteen, actually). But the board isn’t bingo-friendly. Noel has been shutting the tap, but he’s left one unlikely opening: through the first I in CILIAE*, which would require at least one hook, an R or S onto NEVE. I shuffle and shuffle and then, in what in replay feels like a continuous slow-motion sequence, like the Six Million Dollar Man in full stride, my brain seeing and my hands grabbing and the letters moving, I lay down hUMANIST.
Noel looks stunned. He thought he had shut down the board entirely. He compliments my 78-point play. I have moved ahead 277252, but Noel counters with HM for 32 (above the MA in hUMANIST). I follow with FOWL for 20 to retake the lead. The Q is unseen. I know it’s going to come down to the Q. I draw the last two tiles: no Q.
All I need to do to win is prevent Noel from playing the Q. But there are two available places for it, and Noel also has the last U. I block the first spot (above IRE) and then Noel, inexplicably, misses the second one. I have plenty of time. All I have to do is play a single tile in front of AT. Which I do. And then I place an S at the end of it: 4 points.
I don’t know why I put down the S. I thought I had figured it out. I thought I had considered everything. I thought there was no way he could play the Q. But he can. He places SUQ atop my S. Just like that, I have given him the game. Noel wins 357–332, but the final score is irrelevant. I have blown it in the most horrifying fashion: failing to execute an elementary Q-stick. I have demonstrated that I’m not worthy of being an expert. That I’ll never reach my goals. That I can’t play with Matt or Marlon or Joel. That I don’t have it.
I politely rehash the endgame with Noel, who’s appalled at his own failure to see QAT. Slumped over the table, I rearrange the tiles in the routine what-if scenario that follows tight games, but I move them like a kid shifting peas around on his dinner plate. I can’t explain to Noel what happened, muttering that maybe I mistracked the S’s, thinking I had the last one. But my score sheet indicates otherwise. I knew he had SUQ. I panicked and screwed up.
I have just enough frustration left in me to scrawl a two-inch-tall “FUCK” across the bottom of my score sheet. And then I abandon my board with the evidence of my incompetence still on it and morosely exit the playing room. I’m not mad; I’m devastated. Joe Edley asks what happened. I brush him off; I can’t talk. Inconsolable, I beat back tears.
Three blown endgames in the last five games, to Ann, Trevor, and Noel. Instead of 14–6, which would have been good for second place, I finish 11–9, in ninth place. The same 11–9 as in Danbury two years earlier, in the second tournament of my career, when I lost my last six games. Sure, I’ve gone from fourth to third to second division in three appearances in Danbury. To what end? Still choking. Only now the magnitude of my chokes has grown.
Larry Sherman is right: The better I get, the more upset I get. The game now defines me. The higher my rating climbs, the greater the pressure. The more I succeed, the heavier my failures feel.
After I regain my composure and reappear in the playing room, one of the New York experts notes that it’s possible my rating will climb over 1600. (Danbury is rated in two ten-game blocks, so my first-half 7–3 will propel me close to the next hundred mark while the second-half 4–6 shouldn't hurt too much.) “You’ll be an expert," he says. I immediately scoff at the notion. While 1600 technically is considered expert status, everyone knows that 1700 is a fairer benchmark. Plus, I’m not worthy of the designation. And more than anything, I want to be worthy.
As I drive away from the hotel, I shudder at the realization.
I am become Joel: I need this game to validate my existence.
20. 1574
ATLANTIC CITY. The casinos, the beach, the boardwalk, the mob, the Miss America Pageant, the Scrabble talent show. It’s an annual rite. But it will be hard to top last year’s winning performance: the ninety-six two-letter words sung to the tune of “The Star-Spangled Banner.” At midnight after Friday’s opening rounds at the Holiday Inn—just off the boardwalk, low rollers only—the Scrabble players gather in the main tournament room for the big show. Wine and cookies are served. Anyone can enter, a problem that is apparent immediately.
The first contestant is an introverted player whom I once saw standing outside a playing room holding a sign reading HOOTERS; he was looking for someone to join him at the restaurant for dinner. Here, he does “impressions” of almost every character on The Simpsons. Another player tries Johnny Carson’s old Carnak the Magnificent routine. “Havana,” he says. “What does Pat Sajak do when he laughs at Vanna White.” The audience hoots. Next comes a parody, “Who Wants to Be a Scrabbillionaire,” with inside jokes about G.I. Joel and Mark Berg, which gets a few chuckles.
I’m not sure whether the sight of the Scrabble players attempting humor deserves praise or pity, whether it unabashedly displays the camaraderie of the subculture or reveals its dark, pathetic center. Or maybe my reaction reflects a double standard; if I’m happy to play Scrabble with these people, shouldn’t I accept them on this level, too? Shouldn’t I hop up on stage and sing show tunes with Scrabble lyrics (“The blanks’ll come out / Tomorrow! / Bet your bottom dollar / That tomorrow / There’ll be blanks!”)?
Well, no. The eccentricity of Scrabble players is, naturally, a question of degree. At the club one Sunday, a handful of players remain after a full afternoon of play. Someone notes that a certain player always brings along a Scrabble board even though there are plenty of boards at the club.
“Maybe he’s playing somewhere else afterward,” another player says.
“Maybe he’s just weird,” I say.
“We’re all weird,” G.I. Joel replies.
“He’s weird enough to be called weird by the weird,” Matt says.
As in any subculture, the extent of people’s devotion and involvement varies. Most Scrabblers have a Scrabble life and a daily life, and the twain meet at clubs and tournaments or on-line. For others, Scrabble is the social center of the universe. Three middle-aged Scrabblers even share a house in New Jersey.
My friendships with Matt, Marlon, Eric Chaikin, and a few others certainly transcend the game. We talk about more than words and racks and anagrams. I pay for Matt’s and Marlon’s hotel rooms or meals when they ask
not because I’m trying to buy their journalistic cooperation, but because they’re broke and I trust them to repay me (someday). When Matt is at his emotional lowest, he phones, I hope, because he considers me a friend. I’m proud to call friends many of the people I play against at Club 56 on Thursdays, even if we don’t go to the movies together or share intimacies about our inner lives. There are days when I’m sure they’ve forgotten that I’m a reporter. There are days when I know I have.
So even though I’ve gone native, I draw the line at talent shows. But just when I’m feeling too hip for this, it gets legs. Sheldon Silverstein, a retired accounts payable clerk from Brooklyn, does fabulous impersonations of Alfred Hitchcock and Humphrey Bogart. (“Of all the Scrabble joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine,” he says.) Jim Piazza, a New York writer who, on his day job, vets movie scripts for a Hollywood studio, recites a funny advice column, Dear Dr. Jim. Finally, with the clock approaching 1:00 A.M., Sal Piro, the Rocky Horror Picture Show fan club president, asks me to check his makeup, which I do, before he races into the room shouting, “The bitch is back!” Dressed in drag, with an orange wig, Sal introduces the Piro-ettes, three New York players who back him up on fifties songs set to Scrabble lyrics. My favorites: “Hey la, hey la, the Q is back” and “Going to first table, and I’m gonna play Edley.”
Sal is truly disappointed when the audience awards the $50 first prize to Dr. Jim over the Piro-ettes.
After Danbury, my rating climbs to 1574, leaving me one good tournament short of the magic 1600 mark.
I’m glad, in a twisted way, that I’m not yet there. To have jumped from 1416 to “expert” in just two months after struggling so mightily for so long would feel cheap. An expert is supposed to be someone, according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate, with a special skill or knowledge derived from training or experience. I don’t have it. I want to earn whatever reward comes from being defined by a number. If that means slamming a few more doors and screaming a few more profanities, so be it. It means too much to me for it not to be genuine. No flukes allowed.
In Scrabble, there really aren’t any, anyway. Some players bitch relentlessly about their misfortune. And, to be sure, chance is real; at a Sunday session at the club before Danbury, I drew a total of three blanks in nine games—about a 100 to 1 shot—and lost every game. Three blanks out of eighteen! The injustice! At the same time, Scrabble players like the fact that the game is orderly—one hundred tiles, strict rules, familiar patterns and procedures. “Scrabble is a sort of determinist world,” Bob Ellickson, the Yale law professor, tells me over breakfast at a tournament. “It appeals to the people in it. Everything adds up to clean sums.”
Ratings are nice and clean, too. Players can protest all they want that they are over- or underrated (usually the latter), but water seeks its own level. Players have miracle performances that catapult their ratings heavenward, but it usually doesn’t last. Diane from the New York club went 11–1 to win my division in Atlantic City and her rating zoomed above 1700. She was back in the 1500s in short order.
At the annual Port Jefferson tournament on Long Island a few weeks after Danbury, an opponent says as we sit down to play, “I thought you were rated higher.”
“In my mind I am,” I reply.
I’m seeded second in the second division of the fifteen-game event. I have come for the usual reasons—the competition, the quest for experthood, the fact that I have no choice but to play. I’m starting to feel like a Scrabble mercenary: unswerving, driven, single-minded. I love the atmosphere, but fun is beside the point. At this event, there will be no distractions. I’m staying at Joe Edley’s house nearby rather than in the hotel.
There is little hanging on the walls at Joe and Laura’s two-story condo, no shelves displaying books or tchotchkes, and no end tables in the living room, just two aging sofas and a coffee table adorned only with class pictures of their preschool-age daughter, Amber. Her toys fill an adjacent room where Joe keeps a desktop computer, at which he plays and studies Scrabble while sitting in a metal folding chair.
For Edley, who lived under a tree for five months, I think material things are immaterial. He probably could live happily without the big television in the living room or any of the few other possessions he has. It’s enough for Joe simply to wake up early, meditate, stretch, and perform tai chi in the living room. And, of course, study words.
Joe understands that I want to succeed, and Laura understands Joe. So they are accommodating. They let me decide what meals we’ll eat together over the weekend. They insist I sleep in their bedroom. At dinner with them on Friday, before the first rounds, Edley approves of my decision to pass up dessert. He sends me off with a reminder to breathe deeply, concentrate, and be patient.
Thanks in part to Edley, something is clicking: I’m spotting bingos faster and more frequently, and absorbing the ones I read and anagram while riding the subway, pedaling at the gym, or couch-potatoing in my living room. The stack of seven- and eight-letter bingo lists that I tote everywhere is growing fatter. And I know I’m learning, because when I review the words highlighted in fluorescent green or orange they are surprisingly familiar. I find myself thinking, I didn’t know that word? as if I were looking at a high school photograph and can’t believe I ever wore my hair like that.
The idea that my brain is in training sounds obvious, but it’s not something I consider as I pore over my lists. The day before Long Island, I sat in a Department of Motor Vehicles office (waiting for a new driver’s license) and examined a three-and-a-half-page printout of the 1,322 acceptable five-letter words containing the letter Y. It turns out that I don’t know 311 of them, from ENSKY to MUHLY to YIRTH. But where learning the words used to feel like a hopeless task, I now see how much I already have learned, and that it’s not impossible, even if it’s not easy. I accept now that learning words could be a lifelong process. After two decades, Edley still carries tiny flash cards wrapped in rubber bands, some handwritten in the seventies and eighties. While I’m at his house, Laura finds one on the floor and hands it to Joe. “This one is bingos ending in ER,” he says. “I did this one years ago.”
Achieving expertise doesn’t require a secret password or some supernal force. I call Neil Charness, a Florida State University professor who studies the performance of experts. Charness tells me that researchers studying chess masters in the 1940s made what was then a monumental discovery: Chess expertise didn’t result from greater intellectual capacity, as prevailing wisdom had it, but from the players’ ability to retrieve patterns from memory. In other words, the more you know, the more you know what to look for. Knowledge is acquired in what memory experts call “chunks” and then applied to specific situations. (Chunks are familiar patterns or units of information.)†; That knowledge becomes part of the routine cognitive processing that occurs during various activities, from playing chess to Scrabble to badminton to the violin.
Charness says I’m building the ability to make expert decisions. I’ve moved beyond “maintenance practice,” or simply playing a lot of Scrabble, which is what hobbyists do (and what I did on my living room floor early on), to “deliberate practice,” what Charness calls the “technical, draining, attention-demanding” work that can only be conducted in short sessions, a maximum of three to four hours a day in the case of writers and musicians. In a pioneering study in 1973, Herbert Simon and William Chase of Carnegie-Mellon University concluded that attaining an international level of expertise in chess requires about ten years of preparation, and they suggested it was no different in other domains. (Einstein had been studying physics for ten years before he published his first paper on special relativity.) Other studies put the amount of requisite practice for expertise in many fields at ten thousand hours.
“Clearly, there are people who get there in less time,” Charness says. “We’re only beginning to start thinking about what might differentiate the speed with which people get to those points. There are probably individual diffe
rences among masters. But if I had to guess, my hypothesis wouldn’t be innate differences but specific types of training they’ve engaged in.” As for simply becoming an expert, he tells me, “the real predictor seems to be serious study alone.”
So I study. I anagram and review and anagram some more. After club sessions and tournaments, I scour every rack of every game and check for missed words, which I record in a new slate blue spiral-bound notebook. And it all pays off. In two club games, for instance, I play HETAIRAS (ancient Greek concubines), INPHASE (having matching electrical phases), VENALITY (openness to bribery), and CONGAING (dancing the conga).
My study doesn’t yield just words from the prepared lists but trickier combinations that are difficult to find in a mishmash of unlikely letters. Against my friend Dominic Grillo, I play FIrEBUG (an educated guess that turns out to be acceptable) and follow it up with EQUINOX to an open X—tough because it’s unnatural to view the X as the last letter in a word. The words get weirder. I play LOGI-NESS and ZINCOID and SHEKELS; JALOP, MUFTI, MAQUI, XENIA, and MEZES; APOGEAN and LIAISES. One night at the club, through the word DO already on the board, I play TOURNEDOs as a nine-letter triple-triple for 140 points, drawing a challenge. When G.I. Joel rules it good, he issues an approving smile.
After another club game, my opponent, Jean Lithgow, says, “You played that beautifully.”
I fill my words notebook with plays I’ve missed, not to punish but to learn. Page by page, it slowly becomes a tapestry of linguistic randomness. ACAROID (105 lost points), COAGULA, OXIDASE, the chance to turn BLACK into BLACKOUT. I write down SODOMITE, which would have worked when MOODIEST didn’t. EXODOI? A plural of EXODOS (a concluding dramatic scene). Most of the words or racks I botched may never materialize again. But so what? It’s all part of the deliberate practice about which Neil Charness schooled me. WOOPS means to vomit. A RIVIERE is a necklace of precious stones. MONGO is a low-quality wool. There are three bingos in EGIMNPR: IMPREGN, PERMING, and GRIPMEN. The rack EFIPRST contains only one seven, PRESIFT—not PREFITS*, as I’d tried. I write down every unfamiliar word starting with Q, and every word starting with AIR, SEA, and ROSE.
Word Freak : Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players (9780547524313) Page 36