Alumni Gazette
More Than Mere Words
An alumna discovers new possibilities in each rack of Scrabble tiles. By Cecilia Le ’02
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| (Photo by Richard Baker) |
I had just laid down EOSINES, and my higher-rated opponent had challenged and lost his turn. I was staring at AEGINR and a blank tile. There are four dozen words in that rack—BEARING, TANGIER, ENGRAIN—but none fit. Suddenly, synapses clicked. My fingers moved tiles to the board. The play was ANERGIA for a triple-word score, overlapping EOSINES to simultaneously make the words RE, GO, IS, and AI.
I went on to lose six of seven games that day, falling just short of reaching an expert Scrabble rating, but at that moment, it didn’t matter. All that mattered were the possibilities in those seven tiles, that board situation, the probabilities of what my opponent held, and what he could do to vaporize my 100-point lead. I was in the zone. I couldn’t hear the clicking of tiles from the 400 other games in the room.
It was early August in the blanket of heat that is New Orleans, and we hadn’t come to drink, hear jazz, eat Creole, or shag. We had come to play a board game. Thirty rounds in four days, and more for fun at night. Every cabdriver in the city knew about the “weirdos convention.” It was the National Scrabble Championship, where the afflicted dream strategy positions and learn every eight-letter word with five vowels.
It was my pleasure to share a week with our nation’s most brilliant minds and neurotic personalities. They included a black power warrior, a professional poker player, and a guy who became a night watchman to memorize the dictionary. Of 850 players, I was the only woman in my 20s. This status conferred several perks, such as people asking if I was playing in the tournament or merely a Scrabble Girlfriend.
It’s a man’s game, at least at the elite level. More women than men belong to the National Scrabble Association, but of the top 100 players in North America, only six are female. Theories on this gap abound: Men are more competitive, obsessive, mathematically inclined. Believe what you will.
Everyone knows how to play Scrabble, the wholesome pastime invented by an unemployed, Depression-era architect. Competitive Scrabble is a totally different animal.
I wandered to the local club the winter after graduating from Rochester. I had just moved to a new city, needed a hobby and thought myself verbally inclined. The director handed me a list of 96 two-letter words and 972 three-letter words, including MM, as in “mm mm good,” and XU, a Vietnamese currency.
You have to be kidding, I thought. But almost two years later, coming up on an expert rating, I’m learning 3,903 four-letter words cold. An English major and journalist, I’ve basically stopped reading novels in order to study words. My apartment is filled with flashcards of thousands of probable seven- and eight-letter words, which earn a 50-point bonus (ANGERED, DERANGE, and ENRAGED are anagrams!).
I’ve also learned it’s not word minds but math minds that excel in this game of probabilities. Definitions don—t matter, and top players view the letters as nothing more than crude scoring tools. That’s why players became enraged (angered) 10 years ago when Hasbro, the game’s corporate owner, purged about 150 offensive words from the players dictionary. Words have no context in the game, players argued, and we may not like the sentiments behind them, but theyre part of our lexicon nonetheless.
A compromise was reached. Two dictionaries were published, one you can buy in bookstores, the other for tournament play. To this day, competitive Scrabble allows the N word, the C word, and others so barely offensive they can be printed in this magazine, such as “fatso and fart. But the 2004 Nationals was the first in which a best-of-five series between the two finalists would be televised by ESPN. For those five games, the network nixed the 150 no-no’s.
It was the third and possibly deciding game of the finals, played between David Gibson, a 53-year-old math professor from South Carolina, and Trey Wright, a 30-year-old pianist and Tom Cruise look-alike from Los Angeles. Trey, who had played LAKIEST and CALUTRON, held a narrow lead. He slapped down LEZ, scoring 32 and blocking the bingo MONOCLE that David held on his rack. It was clearly the right move, except that LEZ—drumroll, please—is an offensive word for lesbian.
It was the biggest drama since Jim Jeffords switched parties. ESPN’s worst fears had come true. The advisory committee called an emergency meeting. Verdict: The word came off the board and a do-over was engineered. Trey won the game anyway, along with the title and $25,000. He cried like a baby. David won $10,000.
I won zero.
But I played ENQUIRES for 122 points. Based on what tiles were unseen, I gambled on drawing the right letters for TUTORIAL—and got it.
It’s easy to fall in love with a game of possibilities, one that walks the line between luck and skill, and self-determination and fate. Reaching into a full bag is like Christmas morning. You never know what might come out, or what you can do with it.
Cecilia Le ’02 is a reporter for the News-Journal in Wilmington, Delaware.
