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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  “Yeah, he should have played MISRATE,” Jimmy says, as if I don’t exist.

  “MAESTRI was the right play,” Felt says. “He just played it in the wrong place.”

  I believe this is known as character building.

  Later, I play FIXER for 34 points. I look up and Alan is shaking his head.

  “REFIX?” I say. I’ve just recognized the word, and the spot. It would have been worth 51 points along a triple.

  He nods.

  Whenever I reach a new numeric milestone in the game—1200, 1300, 1400, 1500—the significance of the achievement immediately diminishes as I begin looking another 100 points ahead. But the next one is 1600, and the designation of expertise. When I get there—not if, because I know I’m going to get there—I vow to be satisfied. I will have reached my goal. So when the cross-table from Waltham arrives in my mailbox and informs me that I am now rated 1598, I’m surprisingly content. It’s only a matter of time now.

  The Holiday Inn in Atlantic City beckons again, the big eighteen-game spring tournament (the one featuring the talent show is just twelve games long). With my new rating, I’m seeded near the top of the second division, which includes players with ratings as low as 1200; I’ll need to win a lot of games in order to gain any points at all.

  And I do. Seven of the first nine. Six of the last nine. I play newly learned, high-probability words like SOURDINE, TEGULAR, and INSETTER. My 13–5 record is good for second place and a hundred bucks. I’m perfectly satisfied.

  Until I call Edley. He’s initially complimentary. But then I tell him that the tournament director didn’t seed the players using up-to-date ratings, so rather than fifth in the division, I ranked first. Thirteen wins, he says, might be worth a couple of rating points. “Probably not much more,” he says.

  At the club recently, I hung in there in a game against G.I. Joel. But I missed a bingo (KNEELER) and wound up losing.

  “One mistake per game,” I said to Joel.

  “Mistakes kill,” he said.

  And then, in my notebook, I wrote, “I want to play until I don’t make mistakes anymore.”

  This, of course, is folly. Mistakes are inevitable in a game in which humans are required to make decisions. But now, analyzing my Atlantic City games, it becomes clear: I have learned how to beat players rated below me but haven’t yet eliminated the sort of conscious foolhardiness that kills. Four of the five defeats, I decide, were selfinflicted—phony bingos in two games; a missed “back hook” in another (turning LUTE into LUTEA, a word I’d just studied as I begin the fives); a Marlon-like decision to pass up a blank bingo for a 30-point play; getting unnerved by two bickering novice ladies sitting at the next table.

  But the sting of my candid assessment wears off quickly, as it always does. There’s the tingly anticipation of the next trip to the club, park, or tournament, another batch of words spilling out of my printer to be learned. A week after Atlantic City, I receive an e-mail from the ratings czar Joe Edley:

  It’s official! You’re now an EXPERT! Not much over the limit, but there it is. 1601.

  21. 1601

  JIM GEARY believes that games aren’t worth playing unless they can be played to their theoretical maximum. In Scrabble, he says, playing the “total game” occurs only when you effectively control the game’s three elements—your tiles, the unseen tiles, and the board. You synthesize information from the unseen tile pool. You see all of the strategic possibilities in the board geometry for both players. And your word knowledge allows you to exploit a rack to its fullest. It’s being in the zone, a place Geary was when he extended EXISTENT along the bottom row to EXISTENTIALIsTs or made his legendary WATERZOOI play.

  Take away any one of three elements, though, and, Geary argues, the game collapses. Without mastery of the vocabulary—the most widespread deficit among players—“trying to keep track of ‘what’s going on’ is kind of a joke,” he says. The point of making certain plays in Scrabble is to maximize scoring potential and to prevent your opponent from making certain plays. But if you don’t know the words, you can’t know which words you’re missing and can’t definitively know that you’re stopping your opponent.

  So who plays the total game? Not many players. When talk on CGP turns to the merits of winning the lower divisions at the National Scrabble Championship, Geary writes, “To be honest, the NSC is only Division 1. Every other division is just stamp collecting.” The stamp collectors take up arms. Arrogant superexpert! they cry. The lower-rated players try hard! They’re not “window decorations for the exalted few,” one says. “There [is] a LOT of great Scrabble going on, by people who DO see it as a hobby, AND as serious study,” another screams.

  Blah, blah, blah. Geary’s right. I’ve played more than a thousand games of Scrabble since embarking on this journey. I’m technically an expert now. But I’ve never felt like a pro—as if I had played the total game, or at least a game in which I could say I had considered all of the possibilities scaled down to my vocabulary. I know how good the greatest are. The rest of us are just hobbyists, because we’re not playing the game to its mathematical fullest, the only place where it possesses analytical value.

  But the only way to reach that place is to keep playing. I’m proud of what I have achieved. Eight months ago, my chances of qualifying for Division 2 at the Nationals seemed remote; I’d need a 1500 rating to play up, and I stunk. But then I won Bird-in-Hand, surged at Waltham, finished second in Atlantic City, and suddenly I was an expert. I run some numbers: Since my comeback, I have a 56–33 record in tournaments, a .629 winning percentage. After a one-day Long Island event, my rating improves to 1613. My contentment with achieving technical expertise lasted about a minute. I’m already looking ahead to the next century mark, which carries with it a tantalizing prize.

  I do believe I can win Division 2 in Providence. But if I can reach 1700 I will qualify to play in Division 1 alongside the past and future champions, my mentors and backers, the people with the ability to play the total game. So that’s my new goal. I have four weeks to gain 87 rating points. I’m going to have to collect a lot of stamps to do it.

  First stop, Albuquerque, New Mexico. Every other year, Mike Baron hosts the Southwest Invitational L-Note Special—L-Note because the entry fee is $50—at his well-appointed adobe home in the sagebrush scrub outside the city. Baron invites a cross-section of players, but the concentration is on the stars. Brian Cappelletto is going for his sixth title in a row here, and arrives with a 2095 rating, by far the best in the land. Jim Geary, rated 1987, is there, as is 1996-rated Trey Wright. Baron himself is rated over 1900, and Chris Cree, who flies in from Dallas, is at 1871. The opportunity for me to play such a lineup of Scrabble all-stars is incredible. And if I can beat one or two of them, 1700 is mine in one quick trip out west.

  Baron and his wife, Pamina Deutsch, are terrific hosts. Mike lets me read his voluminous Scrabble archives. Over enchiladas at a famous cheap Mexican restaurant, Mike energetically rehashes his feud with Joe Edley. We pick up bagels and spreads for the next morning. At the photocopy store, we gather the personalized scorecards and score sheets Mike has made, and the giant scoreboard that will be taped to a living-room wall. There are snacks aplenty and shaded, backyard seating in the warm, dry New Mexico air with a breathtaking view of the Sandia Mountains. And there’s collegiality unlike at any tournament; when you handpick the players, it’s much easier to put together a reasonably well-adjusted group. Players fly in from Portland, Oregon; Boston; New York; Dallas; Chicago; Los Angeles; and Phoenix. A group of us stays at a bed and breakfast a mile away, and we enjoy alfresco breakfasts together. Scrabble for grownups.

  With all the niceties, though, it’s hard to work up a testosterone high. I have to be social and flip off the competitive switch when the game is done. I can’t very well punch a bathroom wall or hurl obscenities into the air.

  Ten or eleven wins in the seventeen games—my goal—would require at least two major upsets and beating all seven p
layers rated near or below me. In Game 1, against an 1880-rated player, I bingo to empty the bag (CLARINEt, sticking the blank T between a U and an A, making UtA, a genus of large lizards). But then I draw the Q and lose. Two unchallenged phonies by my opponent are the difference in Game 2. I lose the third game by 18 points. Chris Cree takes me to school in Game 4. Then I finally win one. And then it’s Murderers’ Row: Cappelletto, Geary, Wright, and Baron.

  Brian teaches me a lesson: Don’t play scared. He opens with an easy bingo and proceeds to control a tight board, while I play off a few tiles at a time for too few points. I’m afraid to open up the board because I’m afraid he’ll bingo. But since Brian has a 30-point lead, I can’t win unless I open up the board. So it’s death by a thousand cuts. I draw poorly, he builds a bingo rack, and then boom: ENHAnCER for 89, and a tight game becomes a 425–234 blowout. “I hate playing intermediates,” he says, not meanly. “I feel like I have to play that way,” he continues, referring to the closed board. The total game it isn’t. I want to apologize for not being better.

  Against substantially higher-rated opponents, there are two ways to compensate for the yawning gap in word knowledge. The most foolproof is to be very, very lucky: Draw natural bingos and be graced with obvious spots for the Q, X, and Z that you also pull, while the superexpert extracts unplayable dross from the bag. The second-best way to compensate for your shortcomings is to be a little bit lucky, but open up the board enough so that you’ll have the opportunity to put down a bingo when fortune strikes. Against Brian, I stared at VIGOURS on my rack with no place to play it.

  The worst way is for your superior opponent to have all of the luck. After Trey Wright beats me like a dusty carpet, I face Geary. We sit in the backyard, where I tap my leg nervously, steal wide-eyed glances at the clock, and shuffle frantically. I draw clunky tiles on virtually every turn, but I do well by them, playing awkward words like UNSEWN (30 points), DYKE (28), and MOULDS (31). Then I pick up both blanks at the same time and wring 122 points from them (PATZeR followed by GIRLIEs). While I’m playing Scrabble like a drowning man gasping for air, Geary is laying down a succession of mindless, high-scoring plays. QAT for 32, TOENAIL for 73, MIX for 38, RECLOSE* for 69 (which I neglect to challenge), HUH for 36, REF for 35. I’m trying to move a mountain; he’s lying in a hammock sipping iced tea. Geary consumes less than ten minutes of clock time the entire game. Ho hum.

  At this point I’m 1–7. I blow a 50-point lead and a sure win against Baron with the daily double of endgame sins: overlooking a winning “out play” and exceeding my time by a few seconds, incurring the 10-point penalty that in this instance turns a tie game into a loss. Polite guest that I am, I also lose to Mike’s wife. My worst day of tournament Scrabble ends with a 1–9 record.

  So much for 1700. I wrap up a depressing weekend with a 5–12 mark (the second day is losers versus losers, so I cadge a few wins). Brian takes first place again. In the fastest awards ceremony on record, he grabs his $385 in winnings and, like most of the players, rushes to the airport. Over the weekend, they’d seen nothing beyond Mike and Pamina’s house, a hotel, and the road in between.

  Baron e-mails me afterward: “Your quest for improving your skills (and getting that higher rating) is a noble one. Your rise in this past year has been almost meteoric! But do continue to enjoy each and every game, regardless of your or your opponent’s ratings, and regardless of the game’s outcome.”

  I wonder whether I’m becoming like Marlon, possessed of a gambler’s addiction, so blinded by the need to inflate the number associated with my name that I risk having the opposite happen, losing rating points, let alone emotional stability. Post-Albuquerque, my immediate thought isn’t the lofty “How can I become a better player?” or “How can I achieve oneness with the board?” It’s “How can I still make it to 1700 before the cutoff for the Nationals?”

  Now there are three weeks to the deadline—and two more possible tournaments. The first is a fifteen-gamer at a Howard Johnson’s off Interstate 95 in Milford, Connecticut, the following weekend. The second is a one-day event the week after that at Columbia University, where G.I. Joel will direct a tournament for the first time. But after Albuquerque, I’m exhausted and demoralized, and as I drive into the New Mexico mountains for a few days of R and R, I tell myself to give up. Play at Joel’s tournament, of course, but forget Milford. It’s not worth the sacrifice: just one day at home, three hours of traffic, a weekend at a HoJo’s. I see the writing in the sky: Surrender, Dorothy.

  Then I find myself on a sidewalk pay phone in Taos dialing the woman who is organizing Milford.

  Sure, she can squeeze me in. Yes, I’ll play in the top division.

  I cut short my trip and return home to study. HoJo’s, here I come.

  I’m burning to make up for my New Mexico humiliation, to replace all of the losses with wins, to reach my new goal. I’m also mentally numb and physically battered from playing so much Scrabble. For the first time, it feels like a job. Or like a bad relationship.

  Intellectually, I understand that 1700 is arbitrary. But my construct is so clever! Embarrassed by my at-all-costs fanaticism, I start telling friends that I want to get to 1700 for journalistic reasons. Baron said it would be a much better story if I could conclude my Scrabble journey playing against the best. Jim Geary wrote me, “Readers won’t give a shit if you go 70 percent in Division 2. They wanna read how you got your ass kicked in Division 1.” I post the note above my desk for inspiration.

  And then I drive to Milford. The escape from New York involves four and a half hours of relentless traffic on charmless, truck-heavy I-95. I go alone—no can-you-believe-the-injustice tales from Matt, no black-is-beautiful sermons from Marlon. No roommate at HoJo’s at all. I’m there to work, not to have fun, which must be obvious. As I set up my board for the first game, I’m yammering to Larry Sherman about Albuquerque and my rating and this boneheaded play and that gross misfortune.

  “You were such a sweet, young guy when you started,” Larry deadpans. “Now it’s like being with Felt. Sometimes it’s like being with Marlon when you leave the room. I hope you’re proud of yourself.”

  I laugh nervously. Larry’s joking, but he’s not joking. I’m becoming a Scrabble bore, but so what? I have a dream. I’ve already calculated that, with my rating down to 1564 after Albuquerque, eleven wins at HoJo’s will get me to 1700; ten will get me close enough to plant the flag the next weekend in New York.

  I didn’t calculate what would happen if I win seven games and lose eight. Against 1900-rated Joey Mallick, I fail to block an obvious desperation setup, which Joey (who has played the words LEPROTIC and SUZERAIN) pounces on for 77 points and a 478–440 victory. This match earns me a prize for the high losing score of the tournament, a new sack for my tiles. Whoopee. Another inexcusable loss is to Gordon Shapiro, the retired truck driver from Baltimore who hauls Marlon around to tournaments. His legs weakened by hardened arteries, Gordon rides a motorized cart, muttering “Redrum!” like that kid in The Shining, and he drapes a white, monogrammed towel around his neck. I take an early lead on Gordon when I lay down a triple-triple, TADPOLEs, for 140 points.

  “I gave you the fucking spot,” Gordon says. “I must be fucking brain-dead. Tad-fucking-poles. Can you fucking believe that? Goddamn luckiest bastard I have ever seen.”

  I laugh, and think it’s game, set, match, then neglect to block a hot spot, and post another high-scoring loss, 453–423.

  The weekend isn’t without its moments. A few recently learned fives (PAREO, a Polynesian garment, to lock up a game; HAMZA, an Arabic diacritical mark, to steal another). A thoroughly well played victory over Bob Ellickson. The bumbling Mark Berg challenging the word ALLY. “Alley? Alley?” he says. “Allie Sherman? We have a challenge over here!”

  I breakfast alone, at a nearby gourmet coffee shop. I lunch alone at the same place. Driving to and from meals, I crank at high volume some inspirational music (Steve Earle’s “Transcendental Blues”). I dine alone at
a burger place by Long Island Sound, studying lists and reviewing the day’s games. I drive home alone, the weekend’s work done, the dream deferred. Only thanks to my depressed rating will I recover most of the points lost in Albuquerque.

  I’m a Scrabbling Sisyphus, sentenced to scratch and claw my way up the tournament ranks only to be knocked down again. But there must be a reason, a redeeming value to my toil. Camus argued that while the rock-rolling might have sucked, it was liberating. Sisyphus had been king of Corinth, but he served at Zeus’s will. By defying Zeus—Sisyphus complained when Zeus made off with the maiden Aegina—Sisyphus unbound himself from his earthly servitude. Every time he walked down the mountain to roll the rock back up, he was free—free to think and free to be himself, opportunities denied in his temporal life.

  My freedom is even more complete. I have chosen to push the rock up Mount Scrabble. Only my own shortcomings send it tumbling back down.

  In rational moments, I recognize that I am improved. Anagramming, so mystifying at the start of this odyssey, is second nature now. Other tasks are even more routine. When I pull tiles from the bag, I record them in alphabetical order on my score sheet as automatically as if they were arranged by a computer. Out come the tiles—RLAOEMQ, say—and down they go onto paper—AELMOQR. (The longest word in there? I see it quickly: MORALE.)

  I sense that the very physiology of my brain has changed. To find out why and how, I call Larry Squire, a professor of psychiatry, neurosciences, and psychology at the University of California School of Medicine in San Diego. In addition to being one of the country’s leading experts on memory and the brain, Squire was a competitive Scrabble player in the 1970s. He explains that there are two important kinds of memory: declarative and nondeclarative. Both play a role in Scrabble. Declarative memory is memory for facts or events—in Scrabble, memory for the words. Nondeclarative memory is the unconscious recall of skills—for example, processing the spatial configuration of the Scrabble board. Declarative memory is the key to understanding how players absorb and recall the words and why top experts do it better than others.