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

by Fatsis, Stefan

  Words have been common tools in memory studies for more than a century. In the 1880s, the German psychologist Hermann Ebbinghaus created lists of nonsense syllables in which he placed a vowel sound between two consonants, like NEK, LAZ, JEK, and ZUP. (Phonies all in North American Scrabble, though NEK is good in the British book.) Ebbinghaus memorized the lists and then tested his recall. He concluded that there is a distinction between short- and long-term memory, and that repetition helps the information stick around longer. Later studies showed that short-term memory can last only a few seconds, while long-term memory can last a lifetime.

  In Scrabble, the goal is to transfer words from short-term to longterm memory through a process of encoding that occurs in various regions of the brain. This phenomenon happens through repetition or by applying cues such as word meanings, sequential lists, or anamonics. Lately, at Joe Edley’s suggestion, I’ve been setting up the tiles on my rack in alphabetical order, because that’s how I study racks on paper—the familiar letter sequence can help trigger recognition of a bingo.

  As I study and play, Squire says, my brain is undergoing a longterm and complex architectural overhaul. Some of its ten trillion to one hundred trillion synaptic connections are getting stronger, improving my ability to recall words and make plays.

  “The deeper the words are processed, the better they are remembered, the more cues are available for retrieving them later,” Squire tells me. “Declarative memory sails along easily for people who are experts because they have such a deep encoding experience. A Scrabble player will look at the letters and he will be anagramming already—which letters they combine with, whether they have any uncommon letters. All of that is done without a thought.”

  This explanation accounts for why it’s easier for me now than it was a year ago to see quickly all of the possible words in a rack of common tiles, to recall effortlessly words I’ve just studied, or to scan a board and see the potential hooks and hot spots. The part of my cerebral cortex that performs that last task, for instance, may have grown by a millimeter or so, Squire says. I probably have created thousands of new cells and hundreds of thousands of new neurons devoted to the activity of finding words and making decisions about how to play them. “You’re making new connections, new associations,” Squire says.

  But I can’t keep up with Matt or G.I. Joel or Edley. I haven’t studied and played for years the way they have, so my brain hasn’t changed to the point at which expertise is fully developed. It’s not that they have “better” memories; it’s that I don’t hold in long-term memory as many chunks of relevant knowledge needed to solve particular Scrabble problems as they do. Their brains have become highly specialized for the perception and information processing specific to Scrabble.

  A study by the Carnegie-Mellon professors William Chase and Herbert Simon showed that expert chess players could re-create perfectly a board setup from an actual game, while novice players could not. But when the same pieces were placed randomly on the board, the experts had no better recall of their placement than the novice players. Positions need to have meaning related to the expertise. So when Bob Felt dredges up some position from a decade-old tournament or Matt Graham says to me, “For some reason I remember plays from years and years ago,” it’s not just raw memory. It’s their expertise talking.

  But Squire notes that there’s a genetic component to expertise, too, even if scientists and researchers haven’t yet figured out how to define or measure it. “Mozart was Mozart. No amount of basketball practice is going to turn you or me into Michael Jordan,” he says. “The brain we are born with is adept at being good at being a musician or a lawyer or a scientist or an accountant or a Scrabble player.”

  The New York City subway system is like a favorite library carrel. I get my best studying done there. When I board a train in my Brooklyn neighborhood, I have twenty to forty-five minutes, depending on destination, of total alone time, a perfect concentration increment. I like the fetal rocking motion. I like the periodic announcements. I like the strangers looking over my shoulder and wondering why I’m highlighting funny-looking letter combinations on a page of jumbled uppercase letters. Being engaged in a practice apart from the usual subway behaviors—newspaper reading, catnapping, CD listening, baby tending, battery peddling, panhandling—somehow makes me proud of my (a)vocation, proud of being different, and, therefore, able to focus better. No one said it has to make sense.

  G.I. Joel’s tournament is held on a hot summer Saturday in an unair-conditioned basement cafeteria at Columbia University Teachers College in upper Manhattan. That’s a longish subway ride, just what I need to prepare. I already have calculated that six wins in the seven games will definitely stretch my rating from 1606, where I wound up after Milford, to 1700, and five will get me pretty close. On the Number 2 train, I review some fives. On my notepad I write “NO MISTAKES. Focus. Look deeply. Save time for endgame. Concentrate on minimizing errors.

  “TRUST YOURSELF”

  And then I repeat the mantra as I walk from the 116th Street subway station to the Columbia building four blocks away. Trust yourself. You can do it. Trust yourself. You can do it.

  The dark-paneled cafeteria is crowded with thick, sturdy, old oak tables and imposing wooden chairs, like some gothic rathskeller. One giant fan labors futilely to cool the room. But the crowd is buzzing. For a one-day tournament—the first in Manhattan in two and a half years, since my virgin event at the Beverly Bridge Club—the turnout is huge, ninety-eight players, from Matt Graham and Joe Edley to Scrabblers as far afield as Boston and Philadelphia. Even a couple of parkies.

  I’m seeded twenty-sixth of thirty-four players in the expert division, just where I need to be to make a big leap. An hour late, G.I. Joel takes a microphone and announces the pairings.

  “Bob Felt versus Stefan Fatsis!”

  An ooooh!, and a few laughs, circulate among the players, and I receive sympathetic claps on the back. “You’ve got to be kidding,” I jokingly say to Joel, as I grab the scorecards from his hand. Felt, the onetime former national champion. Felt, the talkative word machine. Felt, who has a 1953 rating. Felt, the number-one seed in the tournament. (Felt, who has cleaned up his act since moving to New York recently and taking a new computer programming job; he has a smart wardrobe, tucks in his shirts, shaves regularly, and generally is more pleasant to be around.) But I don’t shrug or whine. Hell, I’ve beaten Felt before (once in the ten or so times we’ve played). And what better time to do it again, when my rating can spike as a result.

  I take a deep breath and open with a bingo. After a 36-point PFFT—an interjection expressing a sudden ending, but more important a delicious all-consonant word, like BRRR and CRWTH—I bingo again on turn six for a 110-point lead. Felt answers with a 69-point play. On turn eight, I miss the only bingo on my rack. Felt bingos to go ahead, 314–279. But I bingo back: 345–314. I can taste the win. Then, on turn eleven, I make a conservative blocking play instead of an offensive, higher-scoring one. It’s a game-losing move caused by fear and nervousness—and a lack of confidence in my ability to close him out. Trust yourself. Felt has the tiles and outscores me the rest of the way. I’m 0–1.

  I play Game 2 against eighteen-year-old Daniel Goldman. Danny started playing in tournaments at age ten, cracked 1600 at age fourteen, 1700 at fifteen, and 1800 at sixteen. He was touted as the next Brian Cappelletto and sent by the NSA to play Scrabble on TV with Regis and Kathie Lee. Danny is a smart, energetic, well-rounded kid who dresses in T-shirts, basketball shorts, and high-tops, and who has just been accepted at Columbia. To his credit, he has studied for school more than for Scrabble, so he’s yet to become an elite player.

  Danny also is an Orthodox Jew, and it’s the Sabbath, so he has to modify the normal Scrabble conventions to play. There has been debate among Orthodox Jews over whether playing Scrabble is permissible at all on Shabbat, when, according to the Torah, work is forbidden, as are writing, measuring, and touch that may result in forbidden labor. Wh
en he studied at an ultra-Orthodox yeshiva, Sam Orbaum, a newspaper columnist who runs the Jerusalem Scrabble club, asked different rabbis for their interpretations of playing on the Sabbath. “The responses I got were incredibly hairsplitting, because they were basically theoretical, but that’s the nature of Talmudic interpretation,” he says.

  Generally, playing Scrabble is considered an intellectual pursuit, and therefore Sabbath-acceptable. How you play is the issue. One school of thought holds that using a deluxe board is permissible because the tiles are separated by ridges. That separation means the practice of forming words is not like writing, and it also means the letters aren’t contiguous, so the game can be disassembled without breaking anything (breaking and separating are prohibited on the Sabbath). But an opposite interpretation holds that the letters on a deluxe board are fixed in place, so it is like writing; a flat board, on the other hand, offers no permanence to what is being set down, and is therefore permissible. Orbaum, who is nonreligious now and plays with a clean conscience on the Sabbath, was told that mixing the tiles isn’t allowed, but that one could play if they were laid upside down on the table rather than placed in the bag. I once saw an Orthodox player use an assistant to draw tiles and hit the clock for him.

  Danny plays with a deluxe board and without an assistant. But he uses a wind-up chess clock—electronic devices can’t be used on the Sabbath—and even that, Danny says, is questionable because a clock is considered by some to involve measuring. After the game, Danny asks his opponent to pick up the tiles, so he doesn’t do any breaking up, and to fill out the score sheets. Also to avoid writing, Danny keeps score and tracks tiles by using washers and nuts. On a sheet listing the numbers 1 to 600 and the tile frequency, Danny places nuts on the number indicating his score and washers on his opponent’s score and on the tiles played.

  Nuts, washers, whatever. I play ITEMIzER for 60 points late in the game. Danny challenges, it stays on the board, and I eke out a 380346 come-from-behind victory. I take Game 3 when my opponent, Audrey Tumbarello, eats the Q. But when I drop Game 4, to 1900rated Lynn Cushman, falling to 2–2, I figure the dream is dead.

  I bingo late to win Game 5. I play a solid Game 6 against another strong player: PASHA yields 45 points thanks to three parallel hooks, SOILURe builds a lead, and a tactically sound ICE for 36 locks it up. When I drop down BLOVIATE (to talk or write verbosely or windily) on the second turn of Game 7, and then cruise to victory, despite not seeing a blank, I realize I’ve gone 5–2 against a strong field. Maybe I do still have a shot at 1700.

  I finish in eighth place overall—ahead of a 4–3 Edley and a 3–4 Graham—and take home $125 for having the second-best record of players in the bottom half of the expert division. Joel shakes my hand heartily. I think he’s proud of me. Edley, meanwhile, is grumpy, especially after an uncharacteristic error that cost him the last game. When I tell him my record, wait for his usual sincere congratulations, and suggest to him that I may reach 1700, he snaps, “You’re not going to make it. No, you’re not going to make it.”

  Danny isn’t so sure, and eagerly volunteers to calculate an estimate. He still can’t write because the sun hasn’t set yet, so I record the numbers he tells me to while he performs a mental calculus, an amazing feat on its own. Danny mumbles, I scribble, and he totals the figures in his head.

  “Oh, God,” Danny says. “It’s like 1696 or 1697. You’re just going to miss. Let’s hope I’m off by a few points in the right direction. But I don’t think I am. That sucks. I can’t believe it. That really sucks.”

  Any one game in the last month could have gone my way had I not overlooked some (in hindsight) obvious move, or had my fingers, pawing the bottom of a tile bag, clutched a blank instead of a W, an S rather than a U, or had my opponent done the opposite. The few points don’t make me a better or worse player, don’t mean I could be expected to perform better or worse in the top division of the Nationals.

  So maybe, I muse, I’ll ask for an author’s exemption. I had begun this Plimptonian journey as a bottom-dwelling novice, playing (and losing) to the blue-hairs and other assorted stamp collectors. I would end it playing the greatest who had ever shuffled a rack, Edley and G.I. Joel and Cappelletto and Graham and Tiekert and Felt. I would prove that I belong. And I would end the tale on the biggest stage yet: the 2000 Nationals, the largest Scrabble tournament ever in North America.

  Edley confirms the worst: 1697. Three measly points. “I’m sorry,” he says.

  Edley is a stickler for procedure, so I turn for my exemption to John Williams. I make a proposal: The annual twenty-game Fourth of July tournament in Albany—one of the best events on the circuit because of its length, strong field, and equitable pairing system—is the following weekend. Extend the July 1 deadline, I suggest. If I crack 1700 there, let me play Division 1.

  John says he’ll discuss it with Edley. But he reminds me how far I’ve come from the day we first played in a Manhattan hotel room and I pulled everything and won. John hasn’t entered a tournament in two years, but he still considers himself a decent player. I’ve kidded him as I passed his current rating of 1350 and then his peak rating of 1550. And I’ve beaten him consistently of late, even racking up my first 600-point game.

  “It’s astonishing what you’ve achieved,” Williams tells me. “You’ve come far so fast. And you’re probably better than your rating, though it pains me to say that.”

  Go over 1700 at Albany, he tells me, and we’ll talk.

  Albany will be my fourth tournament in as many weeks, my sixth in nine weeks in four states and two time zones. I feel as if I’m running for president. My Scrabble dreams are becoming more frequent and intense: the floating words, the unsolvable games, the opponent phonies that stay on the board. I try to exercise daily between events, to clear my head of the most recent games and get stronger for the next, but lack the energy. I read more word lists instead.

  Like any addict, I take pains to hide my addiction. I complain about the exhaustion, but privately can’t wait for the next tournament. The flimsiest excuse is all I needed to register for Albany, and, happily, I have one. I tell a non-Scrabble pal that, after two months of nonstop tournaments, I’m completely Scrabbled out. But I have to play Albany, have to get to 1700, have to make it to Division 1. “For the book,” I say.

  “Yeah,” he replies, honey-thick with sarcasm. “For the book.”

  Fine. I’ll say it: for me. After almost a year as a full-time Scrabble player, I’m close to achieving something. It isn’t just the number and the recognition that goes with it. When I mention to Ron Tiekert that I want to play Division 1 in Providence, he says, “I hope we don’t meet up there given how you’ve played against me.” Ron Tiekert! A former national champ! I’d been fortunate the last couple of times we’ve played—once he couldn’t stop me from bingoing out with SANGRIA to win, 496–455—and while I was nowhere near his caliber, and never would be, I finally was accepted, as a player.

  Outside Albany, at the Marriott in suburban Colonie, along a highway lined with strip malls and corporate parks, in a top division of thirty-two, I split my first two games and face Ron in Game 3. He wins by 198 points.

  In Game 5, I lose to Matt, 470–430, on a blunder; so accustomed am I to his playing phonies when he’s down, I challenge SPAViET, which turns out to be the adjectival form of SPAVIN, a disease of horses. Had I not challenged, we determine, I could have won. I lose to another 1900-rated player, Randy Greenspan, when I thoughtlessly forfeit a turn on a word that I almost surely know to be, and is, phony. But I win the games I should. The opposition is all strong, and I’m intense, in the zone. After one game, I look down to see blood on one of my tiles; I cut my finger and didn’t notice.

  In Game 10, I meet up with Danny Goldman again. After playing ACIDURIa (a condition of having excessive acid in the urine) and then blocking the most fruitful bingo line, Danny has a 318–267 lead. The board looks like this:

  Focus, I tell myself. Play like the expert you allege
dly are. The letters on my rack are AABORST. The words ABATORS (which I see) and RABATOS (which I do not) don’t fit anywhere on the board. On to Plan B. There are five tiles left in the bag, plus the seven on Danny’s rack. Together, the unseen letters from my perspective are ADDEFLNORVW?. I write them down on my score sheet. Next, I conclude that I almost certainly must bingo to win. As it stands, there is but one place to bingo: down from the M at position O8. I examine my rack and determine that if I had a D instead of a B, I could play MATADORS.

  My heart beats faster because this isn’t too long a shot: There are two D’s plus a blank unseen to me. So, if I were to play off the B, I would have a 3 in 12 chance of drawing what I need.

  The problem is that in order to have a shot at MATADORS, I have to use the B to create a second place to play a bingo. Otherwise, Danny will simply kill the triple-word column below the M, effectively ending the game. I realize that if I place the B at position M2, making the word BO, I can hook it to form ABO (an Australian shorthand, usually disparaging, for “aborigine”) as part of a triple-word-score bingo.

  I place my bet on the 4-to-1 pony. Down goes the B. Into the bag goes my hand. Out comes a D.

  Olé!

  Danny blocks the Row 1 bingo line by playing VAT vertically to the T in OOT, taking a 338–271 lead. Both of our clocks have ticked below a minute.

  My eyes as big as poker chips, I hurriedly deposit MATADORS onto the board. “Ninety-one!” I shriek. “Oh, shit!” Danny mutters. Danny is energetic and enthusiastic to begin with; whenever he draws tiles, he roots around the bag violently, as if there’s a snake in there that needs strangling. Now, he’s shaking with worry and excitement. I’ve surged ahead, 362–338.