Memoirs of a Tile Head: Inside the weird, obsessive world of competitive Scrabble; do you know the 10 words with ‘q’ but no ‘u’?
Chicago Tribune
August 7, 2001
By Marja Mills
Surely Alfred Butts, the unemployed architect who invented the game that became Scrabble, could not have imagined what he set in motion.
During the Great Depression, Butts envisioned his brainstorm ‘ first called “Lexiko” ‘ as pleasant diversion during hard times. With time and refinements, the game found a home in millions of American living rooms, its beige tiles and wooden racks instantly recognizable to most of us, even now.
Perhaps even harder for Butts to fathom would be the obsessive, quirky subculture of competitive Scrabble players chronicled in journalist Stefan Fatsis’ new book.
Fatsis, 38, turned his talent for Scrabble into an entree into this little-known world. A sports reporter for the Wall Street Journal and regular on National Public Radio, Fatsis took a leave from his day job to earn a ranking in the top 10 percent of North American Scrabble competitors.
The book “Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players” is what Fatsis calls his “valentine” to the colorful, often oddball, characters who are among the world’s best.
For them, Scrabble is not pleasant pastime but consuming passion. The bag of tiles holds their chance at the kind of excellence that emerges only when rare talent meets obsessive dedication.
Fatsis spoke to the Tribune during a recent visit to Chicago, and subsequently by telephone.
Q. You profile all these quirky characters and say that was part of the appeal for you of this subculture. Does competitive Scrabble attract quirkier characters than most pursuits?
A. The world of games does. Chess champions are notoriously dysfunctional people. The history of chess is littered with neurotics and crazies at the top ranks.
Scrabble players probably actually are slightly more functional than chess players . . . because the game has a much broader cultural overlay, you get a higher percentage of normal people.
But, no doubt, the games-playing mind is an obsessive mind and in order to be successful at Scrabble you have to have a slavish devotion to memorizing and studying and spending a good chunk of your waking hours thinking about this board
Q. What’s the main difference between living room Scrabble and competitive Scrabble?
A. The main difference is that competitive Scrabble isn’t a test of vocabulary, which is what it is at home. The words are tools. The goal is to use the tiles, the letters and the blanks, in the most effective way possible to try to win the game.
Q. What is the appeal of Scrabble for casual players versus the appeal for the obsessed?
A. The appeal for casual players is that it’s something to do to pass time. And it’s a game of the mind, which people love. Even for the most casual player at home, you’re still struggling to create something. . . .
The difference is that for the competitive players there’s a strategic element that’s so highly refined that plays no role in the home game. At home, you’re not thinking about probability. You’re not thinking two or three turns ahead. You’re not examining the proportion of vowels to consonants at any point in the game.
Q. You’ve said that “Scrabble’s little secret is that it’s not really about words. It’s about math.” Explain that.
A. What competitive players have done is determined, based on these 100 tiles, the 98 letters and two blanks, which words are most likely to appear from a full bag. So Scrabble players have determined the probabilities of drawing particular letter combinations at the beginning of the game.
They’ve determined the likelihood of playing a seven-letter word at the beginning of a game, which is 12.6 percent.
Q. Now that you are a Scrabble expert, do you find yourself thinking in terms of probabilities more in life in general?
A. Yeah, I think it does give you a sense of proportion. You know, we go through our lives weighing risks versus consequences. And we’re making judgments all our waking hours. What the game has done for me is to be more accepting of the odds in life, I guess.
Q. How do you look at a dictionary now compared with how you did before your immersion in Scrabble?
A. I linger longer over dictionaries now. I’m more prone to wanting to pore through a dictionary or just spend a couple of minutes turning the pages and looking for cool words than I was before.
Q. Speaking of cool or unusual words, I’ll put you on the spot. What are the 10 words that use `q’ but not `u’; do you recall?
A. (Laughs). Sure. Qat, qaid, qintar, qindar, qwerty, qoph, sheqel, tranq. How many is that? What am I missing? Qindarka.
Q. That means? Any idea?
A. No. It probably means the same as qindar and qintar, which I think are Arabic units of either currency or measurement of some sort. (Fatsis is partially right. It’s currency, but from Albania.) Maybe qindarka is a plural with qindar, actually, because there are plurals.
(He consults software designed for Scrabble players and comes up with a tenth world.) Qanat. (His book lists not the plural `qindarka’ but the word `faqir’ among the 10 U-less Q words.)
Q. Do you find yourself looking for anagrams these days or, in spite of yourself, finding anagrams in billboards and signs?
A. Oh, yeah. All the time. That’s a little gift from Scrabble, because I think it’s fun. You look at a word and you see another word in there.
Q. Where do you find yourself making anagrams?
A. Wherever. I was having a non-alcoholic beer one day, called a Kaliber. I looked at it and I was with some friends and they were asking me about Scrabble and the book. They were talking about anagrams. And I said, “Look at that beer bottle. I just looked at it 10 seconds ago and saw balkier, b-a-l-k-i-e-r. An anagram.”
So that happens from time to time. It’s actually one of the little rewards. Your brain is always firing to look for words in unusual places.
Q. That could be a reward or it could be a curse, I think.
A. (Laughs). It could be a curse too. It’s true. Your mind does tend to wander when you’re lost in the haze of words.
Q. A conversation by Scrabble die-hards might not be intelligible to lay people. What are some of the terms that Scrabble aficionados use among themselves?
A. There’s plenty of lingo. “Coffeehousing” is when your opponent talks to try to distract you during a game. “Bingo” is, of course, when you make a word using all seven of your tiles. “Q stick” when you stick your opponent with a “q” at the end of the game so that he or she can’t play it.
Q. We usually think of American pop culture exports in terms of movies and music. But this game, invented by an American, is something we’ve exported as well.
A. It absolutely is. I do think Scrabble tiles are among the most familiar cultural icons out there. This is a game that was invented by a New Yorker during the Depression and when it finally took off in the 1950s, a small British company acquired the overseas rights to it. The game quickly became popular overseas as well. Something like well over 100 million sets of Scrabble have been sold around the world in its lifetime.
Q. What are the countries where it’s most popular?
A. Well, it’s predominantly, obviously, in the English-speaking countries.
But the most interesting phenomenon of the last 15 years is that the game has taken hold in completely unexpected places, like Thailand, which had no connections to the British empire or to America in its formative years. And there are these players now who can barely speak English but are brilliant Scrabble players. They’ve committed the words to memory.
So at the world championships next December in Las Vegas there’ll be about 100 players from 30 different countries, a lot of them speaking English as a second language.
Q. Has anyone tried to create Scrabble in Spanish or any other languages?
A. Yeah, Scrabble is produced in 22 foreign languages. . . . You’ve got Scrabble in Hebrew and Russian and Greek and Romanian and lots of other languages.
But the world championships are in English. There is now a Spanish world championship (as well).
Q. Does anyone make a living at Scrabble?
A. Not from playing alone. Most top players have jobs and have families and lives. A lot of them don’t, though. A few have chosen to make Scrabble their life to the exclusion of other pursuits.
So you’ve got a guy like Joel Sherman, whom I profile, who lives at home, has a small inheritance, is in his late 30s, doesn’t feel he can work for health reasons, so he’s been a Scrabble player. He calls himself a Scrabble player. $27,000 was his biggest take in a single year. . . . So you’re not going to become a Rockefeller playing Scrabble.
Q. Scrabble has this nerdy image compared to, say, basketball. Is that hard on the social life?
A. We don’t care what people think, whether it’s nerdy or not. You’re drawn to it because your brain is drawn to it and it’s an unstoppable attraction.
No, there are no groupies hanging outside the tournament room trying to pick up Scrabble players when the day’s games are done. But that’s not why they’re there. They’re not there for the glamor.
They’re there for the challenge. They’re there because, as with most obsessions, they have no choice but to be there.
Q. How many words do you figure you’ve memorized for Scrabble?
A. I’ve never added them up. But my guess is that of the 120,000 words or so in the Scrabble word list, I probably have looked at 70,000 of them or so that I might recognize. How many are buried in the recesses of my brain is another question. Words flow in and out like water over a dam. I certainly studied upwards of 30,000 words that were outside of my working vocabulary.
Probably the best players have committed 80 to 90 percent of the dictionary to memory. If I’ve got 50 or 60 percent in there, and I’m considered an expert, I’d be amazed.
Q. Do you feel like you then lose other things stored between your ears when you’re amassing that amount of extra stuff?
A. I think you don’t. What I learned in talking to people who study the chemistry of the brain and the makeup of the brain was that when you do what Scrabble players do, which is we try to learn a vast amount of new data, you’re basically changing the chemical makeup of your brain.
You’re creating more neurons. Your ability to retain words and to anagram words improves. . . .
You just get better at it the more you repeat it. I learned that’s how experts in almost every field become experts. 10,000 hours of practice, 10 years of study are the believed parameters for achieving expertise in something, whether it’s playing the violin or becoming an expert chess player.
