Spellbound: For Stefan Fatsis, the Lure of Scrabble and the ‘Freaks’ Who Play It Is an 11-point Word: Obsession
Boston Globe
August 16, 2001
By Fred Kaplan
NEW YORK – Stefan Fatsis doesn’t quite know how to account for his Scrabble addiction.
A sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal, Fatsis thought he was merely pursuing a quirky story four years ago when he started hanging around the weekend Scrabble matches in Washington Square Park and the Thursday night games at the Manhattan Scrabble Club in midtown.
One year and 1,000 games later, he found himself playing at a Scrabble tournament in Danbury, Conn. Joel Sherman, the then-World Scrabble Champion, turned to him and asked, “Are you here because you’re a journalist or because of the game?”
“I looked at him like he was crazy,” Fatsis recalls. “Of course, it was the game. I was hooked.”
Fatsis took a year off, devoted himself to Scrabble full time, and wrote a book about the experience, called “Word Freak.” But the book was more excuse than motivation.
“This was not just a journalistic venture,” Fatsis says, sitting in a diner in his Brooklyn neighborhood. “This came from a real desire, a real fascination. I really was obsessed.”
Or, as he puts it, a bit eerily, in his book, “I’m having trouble typing these words, but right now Scrabble is the most important thing in my life.”
Fatsis, 38, insists he’s since snapped out of it. He’s back at his job. He has a girlfriend. On Monday nights, he plays soccer. Then again, he still goes to the Scrabble Club on Thursdays. He plays four tournaments a year (he just returned from a four-day, 27-game competition in Reno). He’s even good, officially ranked by the National Scrabble Association as roughly the 150th best player out of 9,000 rated members nationwide.
When he goes to work in the morning (here’s the telltale sign), he spends the half-hour subway ride studying word lists – row after row of seven-letter words stacked in the left column, all the anagrams they form in the right column. For instance, to the left, the word ACELORS—to the right, all the anagrams you can make from it: CLAROES, COALERS, ESCOLAR, ORACLES, RECOALS, SOLACER.
Scrabble mavens have dozens of these lists: all the eight-letter words that contain five vowels; all the five-, six-, and seven- letter words that begin with RE or end with ING; all 96 two-letter words, from AA (volcanic lava) to YO (as in, “Yo, Adrian!”); all 975 three-letter words, from AAH to ZOO; all 10 words that have a Q but no U (QAT, QAID, QOPH, FAQIR, QANAT, TRANQ, QINDAR, QINTAR, QWERTY, SHEQEL); and a few hundred short words that contain J, Q, X, or Z, the letters that earn you the most points.
Go to the Thursday-night games and you’ll see words on the boards that the typical “kitchen table” Scrabble player never dreamed existed: ADIPOSE, ETA, TOGAE, HAFIZ, FOLIAR, HWAN, PULA, MARCEL, JUSSIVE, OXO, ORGIAC.
“Get over it,” Sherman, the former champion, says brusquely when a first-time visitor cocks an eyebrow. “They’re words. You can look them up.”
Fatsis gets a dreamy look when asked about his own favorite Scrabble words. “A couple of months ago,” he says, “I played OQUASSA. It’s a kind of trout. I’d studied all the seven-letter words with a Q in them. And there it was, on my rack. It was magical.
“Another one was JICAMA,” he goes on. “I played the C on top of OX, to form COX, and played it through an I that was already on the board. It was clever, creative. I once played a nine-letter triple- triple, TOURNEDOS, through DO. That was nice.”
(Translation: He had the letters ENORSTU on his rack. DO was a word on the board. He realized that by placing his letters around it, he could form TOURNEDOS, meaning a beef fillet. “Triple-triple” means he placed one of the letters on a triple-letter space and another on a triple-word space. He also earned 50 bonus points for using all seven of his letters on his rack—a Bingo, in Scrabblese. Serious players often play several Bingos per game, and almost always score well over 300 points altogether. The most Fatsis has ever scored in one game was 601.)
Asked if he has other oddball interests, Fatsis replies, “You mean my 2 million copies of Marvel comics?” He’s joking. “No,” he says, “my outer life is pretty standard—career, friends, exercise. I do what any quasi yuppie does in New York.”
Nor is there much unusual in his background: born and raised in suburban Pelham, N.Y. Two older brothers. His father in the shipping industry, his mother a housewife. Majored in American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. On to journalism with the Associated Press, then the Journal.
So what happened here? What possesses a fairly normal guy to devote huge chunks of time to a board game?
“Well,” he begins, “I guess it was this need to test myself, this drive to master something outside my professional world. And it was the depth of the obscurity. It’s a world apart from the one I’m used to. I like having a different world to escape into, where I share something with other like-minded people.
“It’s a great feeling to walk into a Scrabble tournament room,” he goes on. “The blood gets pumping. You know you’re going to be playing this game you love. It’s challenging. It’s physically and emotionally draining. It’s utterly exhausting. I swallow bananas and energy bars between games. I drink liters of water. I get pretty wired. But you also have to maintain this Zen inner cool.”
`Freak’ show
The Manhattan Scrabble Club is located on the sixth floor of a building in midtown, as the annex to the Honors Bridge Club. About 40 people show up on an average Thursday night. Some bring their own customized racks, tiles, score sheets, and boards.
There is an air-sucking intensity to this place. Robert Felt, former US champion and a club regular, says, “If you want to be a great Scrabble player, you have to be prepared to work very, very hard.” The club is where you test the fruits of that labor on your peers.
The average English-speaking adult knows about 20,000 words, but there are 100,000 words in the official Scrabble word list. “The average player here at the club knows about 30,000 words,’ says Sherman. “An experienced tournament player knows 40,000 to 50,000. I know about 80,000.”
The trick is not only knowing the words, but recognizing them when they show up as a random jumble of letters on your rack, and then seeing how to play them on the board in a way that maximizes your score.
Most of the players at the club are women, many professionally accomplished—Debbie Stegman is a vice president at Warner Bros., Diane Firstman a director in the mayor’s criminal justice office, Heidi Kujac a real-estate broker and fashion photographer. But the top-rated players, not just here but worldwide, are nearly all men.
“Most women aren’t willing to put in what it takes to be an expert- class player because we’re well-rounded,” says Stegman.
“Women tend not to be so single-minded about anything,” adds Firstman.
Sherman, who is also director of the Manhattan club, may be the only player alive who calls himself a “professional Scrabble player,” though he adds, “I can’t say I make a living at it.” Scrawny and semidilapidated, he generally sleeps from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m. and spends his waking hours playing games either on the Internet or against a CD-ROM program. His accomplishment at Scrabble, he once told Fatsis, “validates existence.”
Scrabble tournaments pay cash prizes, but nothing like the big bucks that chess masters, or even top backgammon players, pull down. In 1997, when he won the world championship, Sherman made $27,000, the most he’s ever earned in a year.
A few of the players have problems with the way Fatsis describes some of their physical eccentricities in “Word Freak.” (“What can I say?” the author shrugs. “It’s a funny-looking subculture.”) But on the whole, they all like the book immensely. As one club member, David Ross, puts it, “I never read a book where I know most of the characters in it.”
They also agree that Fatsis is a very good player, though some quibble. “I see gaping holes, but that’s me,” says Felt. “The last time I played against Stefan, he played a phony three-letter word.” He shakes his head. “Experts know all the three-letter words. I mean, that’s basic.”
Fatsis doesn’t dispute the charge. “There’s always more to learn, and there’s a sense of satisfaction when you do learn,” he says. “I’d love to quit and study words for another couple of years. Study words and play Scrabble all day? Sounds good to me. But I need balance, professionally and personally, which is hard to manage at the upper level of the game.
“I do want to be serious at this, though,” he adds. “People do this because they’re intrigued. There’s this mountain of words to conquer and this ever-changing geometric riddle. Once all this stuff about the book goes away, I’ll still put in five or six hours a week on this game. Wherever I go, I’ll play.”
