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

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Table of Contents

  Dedication

  Copyright

  Preface

  Author’s Note

  Epigraph

  1. The Park

  2. The Best

  3. Unrated

  4. 1005

  5. Edley

  6. 1191

  7. Alfred

  8. G.I. Joel

  9. 1291

  10. The Words

  11. Matt

  12. The Owners

  13. 1461

  14. Lester

  15. The Club

  16. The World

  17. The Worlds

  18. 1416

  19. 1501

  20. 1574

  21. 1601

  22. 1697

  Epilogue

  Afterword

  Appendix

  Sources

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Footnotes

  For Lampros, Cindy, and Michael

  Copyright © 2001 by Stefan Fatsis

  All rights reserved

  For information about permission to reproduce selections from this book, write to Permissions, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company, 215 Park Avenue South, New York, New York 10003.

  www.hmhbooks.com

  The Library of Congress has cataloged the print edition as follows:

  Fatsis, Stefan.

  Word freak : heartbreak, triumph, genius, and obsession in the world of competitive Scrabble players / Stefan Fatsis.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 0-618-01584-1

  1. Scrabble (Game)—Tournaments. I. Title.

  GV1507.S3 F38 2001

  793.734—dc21 2001016912

  eISBN 978-0-547-52431-3

  v1.0313

  Excerpt from “pulled down shade” copyright © 1992 by Charles Bukowski. Reprinted from The Last Night of the Earth Poems with the permission of Black Sparrow Press.

  SCRABBLE® & © 2001 Hasbro, Inc., in the United States and Canada only.

  For information on Scrabble® clubs, tournaments, and other activities contact:

  North American Scrabble Players Association, P.O. Box 12115, Dallas, Texas, 75225-0115, www.scrabbleplayers.org

  Preface

  WHEN WORD FREAK WAS first published in 2001, Scrabble had been an American institution for decades. In the ensuing years, to my delight and amazement, the game has become even more popular. But time changes even classics.

  Word Freak is about the intersection of a game, the culture, and the language. As you’ll discover in a new afterword, some fundamental aspects of those relationships have changed. The Internet has revolutionized how people play Scrabble. The daily evolution of the English language has altered the basic tools of the game, the words. Corporate exigencies have transformed the power structure that governs this little world. And the characters you are about to meet—myself included—have taken new steps on their Scrabble journeys.

  But the essence of the game invented by an unassuming New York City architect in the 1930s remains timeless, and the devotion of the people who fall under its spell remains the same as when I researched and wrote this book: all-consumingly, terrifyingly, mesmerizingly, happily complete.

  —Stefan Fatsis

  February 2013

  Author’s Note

  THE WORLD OF GAMES and the world of words are governed by their own sets of elaborate rules. This book is about one game, Scrabble, and the words used in playing that game. So it’s only natural that it has a few rules of its own, too.

  First, a little background: Organized, competitive, tournament Scrabble differs from the game played at home. A twenty-three-page rule book governs everything from how to select tiles properly (the bag containing them must be held at eye level or higher) to what to do when a player needs to go to the bathroom during a game (a situation that just happens to fall under Rule II P). I’ve tried to make clear the rules and conventions of tournament play as they arise in the course of the narrative. One, however, bears mentioning up front: Competitive Scrabble is a one-on-one game. Casual games sometimes are played two-on-two or two-on-one, but there are never more than two “sides.”

  The basic rules, however, are the same regardless of whether one is playing in a tournament or at the beach. The purpose is to make words. Players take turns making them. Points are totaled according to designations on the letters and on “premium” squares on the Scrabble board which double or triple the value of a letter or word. The back of the cover of the box from the first version manufactured in 1948 offers as good an explanation as any of the rules of the game. (If you already know how to play, feel free to skip ahead.)

  Each player draws seven tiles and places them on his rack.

  The first player combines two or more of his letters to form a word and places it on the board to read either across or down with one letter on the center square. Diagonal words are not permitted.

  A player completes a turn by counting and announcing the score for the turn. He then draws as many new letters as he has played, thus always keeping seven letters on his rack.

  The second player, and then each in turn, adds one or more letters to those already played so as to form new words. All letters played in any one turn must be placed in one row across or down the board. They must form one complete word and if, at the same time, they touch other letters in adjacent rows, they must form complete words, crossword fashion, with all such letters. The player gets credit for all words formed or modified by his play.

  New words may be formed by:

  a. Adding one or more letters to a word or letters already on the board.

  b. Placing a word at right angles to a word already on the board. The new word must use one of the letters already on the board or must add a letter to it.

  c. Placing a complete word parallel to a word already played so that adjoining letters also form complete words.

  The score for each turn is the sum of the score values of all the letters in each word formed or modified in the play plus the premium values resulting from placing letters on premium squares.

  When two or more words are formed in the same play, each is scored. The common letter is counted (with full premium values, if any) in the score for each word.

  Any player who plays all seven of his tiles in a single turn scores a premium of 50 points in addition to his regular score for the play.

  Play continues until all tiles have been drawn and one of the players has used all of the letters in his rack or until all possible plays have been made.

  The Scrabble board is a fifteen-by-fifteen grid. There are one hundred tiles in a set, ninety-eight letters and two blanks. For reference, the following tables denote the frequency of each tile in the set and their point values.

  A-9

  B-2

  C-2

  D-4

  E-12

  F-2

  G-3

  H-2

  I-9

  J-1

  K-1

  L-4

  M-2

  N-6

  O-8

  P-2

  Q-1

  R-6

  S-4

  T-6

  U-4

  V-2

  W-2

  X-1

  Y-2

  Z-1

  Blanks-2

  0 points: Blanks

  1 point: A, E, I, L, N, O, R, S, T, Ur />
  2 points: D, G

  3 points: B, C, M, P

  4 points: F, H, V, W, Y

  5 points: K

  8 points: J, X

  10 points: Q, Z

  While it isn’t necessary to memorize the tile frequencies and point values in order to read this book—or to know anything at all about Scrabble, for that matter—there are a few important notes about the text itself:

  Letters, groups of letters, and words referred to in the context of the game are written in capital letters.

  Blanks are denoted by a question mark.

  Groups of letters are listed in alphabetical order, and the blank or blanks always go last. For instance, a rack containing the letters E, A, M, O, N, D, and a blank would be written as ADEMNO?.

  When a word includes a blank, the letter represented by the blank is written in lowercase. The tiles in the above example can be used to form eight seven-letter words, which would be written as AbDOMEN, ADENOMa (or aDENOMA, depending on whether the blank is designated as the first or last letter), AMiDONE, DAEMONs, MADrONE, MAsONED, MONADEs, and wOMANED.

  I occasionally use diagrams to illustrate board positions. The four abbreviations on a diagram represent the premium squares. The abbreviations are DLS (double-letter score), DWS (double-word score), TLS (triple-letter score), and TWS (triple-word score). The center square, a star on the board, is a DWS. Here’s an example:

  As in chess, Scrabble has a system for indicating the square on which a play starts, and sometimes I’ll refer to plays made according to that system. Here’s how it works. The position of a play is designated by the location of the first letter of the word. If the word is played horizontally, the designation starts with the number of the square on which the first letter falls. If the word is played vertically, the designation starts with the letter of the square. The notation for the two words in the diagram above are MADrONE 8D and MAYBE D8.

  Finally, three symbols often mark words in the text: *, $, and #. The asterisk appears the most frequently. It indicates that a word is a ‘‘phony,’’ or unacceptable in Scrabble, like EMAIL* or LONGSHOT*. The other two symbols are used to differentiate between the separate word sources that govern Scrabble in North America and Great Britain. The dollar sign denotes a word acceptable only under North American rules, like MM$ or DREAMLIKE$, while the pound sign refers to a word acceptable only under British rules, like ZO# or DREAMBOAT#.

  However, I use the pound and dollar signs only when writing about international play, which combines the North American and British word sources. Otherwise, I follow the rules of North American play. For instance, the word QI is acceptable in Britain but not in North America. If that word were to appear in a discussion of a game played under North American rules, it would be written as QI*. But in sections of the book about international competition, it would be QI#.

  Accordingly, I wrote Word Freak using the two North American word sources as my official references. The main book is the Official Tournament and Club Word List, which contains in list form without definitions or parts of speech all acceptable two- through nine-letter words plus their inflected forms. For base words longer than nine letters, the source is Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Tenth Edition. (The British word list is Official Scrabble Words, which is based on The Chambers Dictionary.)

  Except for words that are capitalized, hyphenated, contracted, foreign, or part of a multiple-word phrase—the standards for the game—the words in this book between two and fifteen letters long are acceptable in Scrabble. A few, however, are not found in either reference source. For fun, I’ve listed them in an appendix at the end of the book.

  “Virtually everyone suffers from the deeply ingrained habit of considering language as a medium of communication.”

  —DMITRI BORGMANN, Language on Vacation

  “Without effort, he had learned English, French, Portuguese, Latin. I suspect, nevertheless, that he was not very capable of thought. To think is to forget a difference, to generalize, to abstract. In the overly replete world of Funes there were nothing but details, almost contiguous details.”

  —JORGE LUIS BORGES, “Funes, the Memorious”

  “Words, words, words. I’m so sick of words.”

  —ELIZA DOOLITTLE, My Fair Lady

  1. The Park

  THE COPS ARRIVE, as they always do, their Aegean blue NYPD cruiser bumping onto the sidewalk and into the northwest corner of Washington Square Park. There are no sirens or flashing lights, but the late-model Buick does emit a staccato bwip-bwip to signal to the public that business is at hand. The drug dealers usually shuffle away, perpetuating the cat-and-mouse game that occurs hourly in this six-acre plot of concrete, grass, dirt, and action in Greenwich Village. The druggies whisper, “Sense, smoke, sense, smoke,” as they have for twenty or thirty years, seemingly in tacit agreement with the cops to ply their trade as long as they do it quietly. But now, instead of allowing the dealers to scatter as they normally do, officers in short-sleeved summer uniforms, chests bulging from flak jackets, actually step out of the cruiser, grab a man, and slap on cuffs.

  “What’s going on?” someone asks.

  “They’re arresting a drug dealer.”

  I don’t look up.

  It is a hot, humid, windless Sunday afternoon in August 1997 in New York City, an asphalt-and-concrete circle of hell. The blacktop is thick with urban detritus—broken glass, bits of yellowed newspaper pages, stained paper coffee cups, dozens upon dozens of cigarette butts. In the southwest corner of the park, hustlers occupying the dozen or so stone tables attempt to lure the unsuspecting. “You need to play chess,” one of them announces. Tens and twenties are exchanged and surreptitiously pocketed with a glance over the shoulder. Not that the hustlers need worry; on the scale of petty crimes, board-game gambling ranks even below selling $10 bags of marijuana to New York University students. Around the fountain in the center of the park, hundreds gather to watch the street performer of the moment—the juggler, the magician, the guy with the trained monkey that jumps on the arm of a rube. On the south side, the dog people take refuge in their fenced-in, gravel-covered enclosure, where humans and animals eye one another cautiously before succumbing to the bond of their shared interests, dogs and other dogs, respectively. There is hair of all colors and styles, piercings and tattoos that would make Dennis Rodman blush, bikers and skaters and readers and sleepers and sunbathers, homeless and Hare Krishna, the constant murmur of crowd noise floating in the thick air.

  None of it matters.

  I’ve already squandered points with consecutive low-scoring plays intended to ditch a few tiles in hopes of picking up better companions for the Q that fortunately, I think, has appeared on my rack. And I got them: a U, two E’s, an R, and an S. But the chess clock to my right taunts me like a grade school bully as it winds down from twenty-five minutes toward zero. I have these great letters, but no place to score a lot of points with them. It’s only the second time that I’ve played in Washington Square Park and, frankly, I’m intimidated.

  My opponent is Diane Firstman, a fact I know only because she has handwritten and taped her name to the back of each of the standard-issue wooden racks that hold the game’s tiles. She is a six-foot-plus, physically awkward woman with short hair and glasses. She carries a clipboard with her personal scorecard—“Diane’s Score,” it is titled—which contains boxed areas to record her point totals and those of her opponent, each of the words they create, and all one hundred tiles. She marks off the letters as they are laid out in word combinations so she can keep track of what’s left in the plaid sack sitting next to the board.

  Diane is an up-and-coming player at the Manhattan Scrabble Club, which meets Thursday nights at an old residence hotel in midtown. On her right wrist she wears a watch featuring the trademarked Scrabble logo. On her head is a crumpled San Diego Padres baseball cap, circa 1985. Without knowing, I imagine that excelling at Scrabble is a way for this thirty-something woman to shed whatever insecurit
ies she might have. During a game, shed them she does. I have watched her play another novice, Chris, who chats during play. Among the Scrabble elite this habit might be a highly scorned mind-game tactic known as “coffeehousing,” but in this case it’s just friendly banter. Worse, Chris thinks out loud, and when her brain momentarily short-circuits and she questions Diane’s play of the word LEAFS, the retort comes quickly: “Duh! As in leafs through a book!” When Diane makes a particularly satisfying or high-scoring play, she struggles to stifle a smile, rocks her head from side to side, proudly (and loudly) announces her score, and smacks the chess clock with too much élan.

  I have made sure that Diane and the others who gather daily at the three picnic tables in this corner of the park know that I’m a newbie. When asked, I say that I’m just learning to play the game. Which in the strictest sense isn’t true. Everyone knows how to play Scrabble. Along with Monopoly, Candy Land, and a few other chestnuts, Scrabble is among the best-selling and most enduring games in the two-hundred-year history of the American toy industry. Hasbro Inc., which owns the rights to Scrabble in North America, sells well over a million sets a year. Around a hundred million sets have been sold worldwide since the game was first mass-produced in 1948. In some households, Scrabble is extricated from closets around the holidays as a way for families to kill time; in others, it’s a kitchen-table mainstay. Regardless, say the word “Scrabble” and everyone knows what you’re talking about: the game in which you make words.