My Scrabble Career

Originally, I was a normie playing at the local Scrabble club in Sacramento. Like everyone does, I improved over time. I knew all the 3-letter words and averaged close to 2 bingos per game. Bingos are where you use all 7 tiles (letters) at once, earning 50 bonus points—they're the key to the game.

Then at some point, I decided to try a tournament.

Scrabble club and tournament play is different than playing at home. All the games are head-to-head like chess. There is a timer giving each player 25 minutes to use for the game. If you go over this, you have 10 points deducted for each minute over. There's a challenge process if you suspect your opponent played a phoney (not in the official word list). You'll likely track all the letters used so far, so that you know which remain in the bag. Words such as AALII, QUIPU, ANEROID and INOSITE would never be challenged by a minimally competent player. One good thing—you don't have to know what the words mean. 

My first Scrabble tournament was in 2006. Since I was unrated, I was relegated to the plebeian recreational division, the lowest one. I did win the division, with a critical victory coming against the guy whose novel Shoeless Joe was adapted into the Field of Dreams movie. That brings up a key point—competitive Scrabble is not about having read a lot of books and knowing a lot of words. It's about knowing the right words, the most probable ones given the letters in the Scrabble bag and on your rack. It's also about maximizing your bad letters, playing those off in a way that gets you the most points.

I continued playing some tournaments, mostly local ones in Berkeley, CA, and some larger ones in Reno, NV. In one extremely lucky game, I opened with 3 bingos in my first 4 plays. I rarely scored over 500 points in a game, but commonly scored over 400.

Have I played great players? Yes. And it wasn't impossible that I could have won, because luck is part of the game. I once played an expert named Winter ZXQKJ. (Yes, he changed his last name to be the highest scoring letters in the Scrabble bag.) Winter destroyed me with ease. Another time I played superstar player Kenji Matsumoto. The Scrabble gods had gifted me both blanks, by far the most valuable tiles in the bag. I was ahead and there were 4 letters left in the bag, one of which I knew was the Q. He played 3 tiles, meaning after he drew up to 7, there was only 1 tile left in the bag. I had no way of playing the Q, but the odds were with me that he had pulled the Q. I mean, what are the chances that it's the last tile in the bag?  1 in 100 to be exact.

Too bad for me, of course the Q ended up being the last tile in the bag. I had to pull it after my turn, and it netted him 20 points, giving him a narrow win, 396 to 388. (The player that uses all their tiles first at the end gets double the value of their opponents unplayed tiles, and the Q is worth 10.)  

I've hung up my Scrabble rack for the time being. Why didn't I continue? Our local Scrabble club lost members and interest, and my board gaming moved to euro strategy games. The official word list started changing too frequently, making it hard to know which words were valid. I won't even get into the great North American Scrabble schism, wherein a splinter group rebelled from the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) and formed a separate league with its own rating system, the Word Game Players Organization (WGPO).

The main thing is I realized that to be a top player you need to be dedicated enough to change your last name to ZXQKJ. I wasn't willing to go that far. Apparently, neither was Winter, who in rock star fashion now goes by only first name in the tournament listings.

If you want to read more about the many characters this world has attracted, you can always check out Stefan Fatsis’ Word Freak. As one reviewer of the book noted, this world is best viewed from an armchair. That is solid advice.

~ Terry Vrchota