My friend Julie asked me to be sure and say what I thought of Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. This is a combination of memoir and reportage, in which the author, a fair-to-middling living room Scrabble player, enters into the world of competitive Scrabble playing to see what it's like. In the process, he becomes a near-expert ranked player himself, and experiences the obsession that many competitive players do: studying word lists on the subway, for instance, and reading dictionaries.
It's a fun read, and if you had friends (or say, a sister and brother-in-law, as Julie does) who play a lot, the book might make a good Christmas present. I found myself sucked into Fatsis's obsession just a tiny bit. Not a very good Sctabble player myself, I found myself considering the possibility of getting hold of just, say, the list of acceptable three-letter words and studying the few hundred I don't know, and then maybe memorizing the seven or so "Q" words that don't also require a "U," and becoming the Terror of the Living Room. But, if Fatsis' experience is anything to go by, that's just the first dangerous step on the slippery slope that will have me, first, deciding to memorize the four-letter words, and then the fives, and then embarking on burning all their various anagrams into my mind, and then eventually abandonding my family to play 41 games of Scrabble in fort-eight hours in the basement of a cheap hotel in Atlantic City, come the next National tournament. So perhaps I will not start making flashcards just yet.
It may be interesting to you to know that advanced players create study methods so intricate that I had trouble following their descriptions on the page (like memorizing all the anagrams that can be formed with the seven letters in SERVIOT plus any one additional letter, so that they can potentially make eight-word "bingos." A "bingo" is a word that uses all seven tiles). They have long intense conversations about "rack management" and tile turnover, and whether a "closed" or an "open" board is better. They keep track of what letters have been played, and will say things like, "I knew I had a 1 in 68 chance of pulling a S at that point." They run computer simulations about what is the best opening play from any given seven-letter rack (not "tray," mind you. It's a "rack"), and argue the results on-lie and in their newsletters. They tell each other over and over again the truly legendary moves, like playing a ten-letter bingo through three disconnected letters on the board, or laying a seven-letter word parallel to another seven-letter word, forming seven two-letter words in the process.
It may scare you to know that there are people who have devoted their whole lives to Scrabble, who do not hold down jobs because having a job cuts into Scrabble time, who feel that achieving a certain ranking or winning a certain tournament validates their whole existence. Fatsis acknowledges that these people are a minority among elite players, but he spends most of his time and most of the book on them, because they have the best stories. Like anyone who becomes the very best at anything, they are people who have unbalanced their lives and made themselves monstrous in order to achieve. The only thing that makes them sad compared to, say, an Olympic gymnastics champion is that they labor in a field so small that there is little recognition and less money for them, no matter how great.
Posted by Su Penn at December 7, 2003 05:34 PM | TrackBack