Scrabbling For A Game In Old Greenwich, Conn.

When players picked their tiles, they averted their eyes and held the bag above their heads in order to discount any accusations of cheating. And they jingled. The only sound in the entire room—besides the whisper of conversation—was the constant jingling of the tiles. I later learned that players jingle partly in order to avoid overdrawing; taking one too many tiles is a severe Scrabble penalty. Don’t ask how severe; one of the players tried to explain it to me, but I lost him after a few words. Tournament Scrabble can be like that: the outsider can only follow so far…

Scrabble letters; via kidsurf.net

I walked around the room glancing at the games in progress. Many of the words were familiar to me, but some were pretty darn obscure: “manumit” (one of those words I look at and know that I’ve seen before, but can’t quite call to mind: it means to release from slavery) or “waul” (to give a loud cry similar to a cat). Other words, however, were terrifyingly beyond me. Lez? Vext? Dace? Kex? Are we sure these are words? The players seem to be.

(Indeed…they are words: lez—variant spelling of ‘les’, a shortened, disparaging term for lesbian; vext—variant spelling of ‘vexed’; dace—a small freshwater fish; kex—cow parsley or similar plant)

Some of the participants gave me cold glares as I looked over their boards. I was prepared for this.

“The one thing about spectating is that it’s a privilege,” the tournament organizer told me in a phone interview beforehand when I asked about watching the games.  

“Sometimes the players will shoo you away,” she said. “It bothers them.”

~

When I arrived at the Old Greenwich Tournament on Saturday morning, she was manning the Newcomers tournament. She waved me inside the room and pulled me into a corner. Facing the corner, she whispered to me.

“There are 10 people here,” she said. “We had a few drop out.”

We looked around the room—there were 5 Scrabble games going on, nothing like the games I’ve played all my life. At one table, a young Asian-American boy played a thirty-something blonde woman. It didn’t look like a friendly match. The woman’s expression was not fit for a board game; she looked as if she were going over her checkbook—and maybe finding figures that didn’t add up. She soon called the organizer over for a technical question.

She listened patiently to the woman's whispers before turning to the boy.

“Sorry,” she said to him. “You can’t do that.”

Glumly, the boy looked back to the game and the woman, assured, proceeded with her next play.

~

But the Newcomers tournament barely held a candle to the severity of the aforementioned Main Event. Added to the aura of silence and concentration of the Newcomers tournament was a curious gravitas. There were things at stake in this room: tournament money, player rankings, possibly other things that I could not understand or hope to uncover in my short three hour visit—possibly friendships, possibly even love.

Love, silly as it might sound, was not out of the question.

“I met my husband at a tournament 25 years ago,” said Verna Richards Berg, arm in arm with her husband, whose name I did not catch. It might seem an odd sort of story to have to tell in most circles (“Well…we met…believe it or not…at a Scrabble tournament! How crazy is that?!”), I could not help but think that this is the sort of circle they travel in. The Scrabble world, however, is just that. It’s a world unto itself.

People travel for Scrabble tournaments. And I’m not talking from just a few hours away. I expected Old Greenwich tournament to perhaps have the luck to draw people in from the city (New York City is an hour away by Metro-North), but I didn’t expect to draw people from any further than that. I imagined a triangle between New Haven, New York City, and White Plains. After that? Well…that just seemed too far to me.

But I was wrong. People traveled. People came from Michigan, Pennsylvania, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, upstate New York, and one player even journeyed from Texas. These people are serious about Scrabble.

I asked a high-school age player who ended up winning in the Division C of the tournament on Sunday, how far he travels for tournaments.

“For multi-day tournaments, I’ve been as far as Ohio,” he said. But he has also been to Dallas, TX for the NSC—the pinnacle of achievement for players in the United States—the National Scrabble Championship. Last year, he finished first in Division 5.

Word-frequency chart created by Alfred Butts, inventor of Scrabble; via tumblr.com

But he doesn’t travel simply to play; he travels with friends. When I spoke with him, he was paling around with two other young players also in the tournament. Two of them are from the Philadelphia area and have known each other through Scrabble for years. The pair met the third player from New Haven, Conn., only the day before, but they act like a trio of old friends. It seemed like as long as you were good enough or dedicated enough, you had yourself a guaranteed Scrabble family.

~

But not everyone there was part of that family. While many of the tournament’s players were regulars, not everyone in the Main Event was a hardcore Scrabble player.

Like me, Elena Abrahams, of Old Greenwich, is a newcomer to competitive tournaments. She explained to me that she has been playing for many years with a group of friends, so she didn’t feel entirely out of her league.

But while this tournament was her first venture into competitive Scrabble, she has already participated in crossword tournaments. Two days into her Scrabble experiment, she admits her experience with crosswords as “a lot more interesting” than that of Scrabble.

Abrahams enjoys a good game of Scrabble just as much as the next person, but she has no desire to become an expert. At this point, she knows she’s had enough practice with the game; it’s now a matter of study.

“I don’t want to spend the rest of my life in my basement memorizing words,” said Abrahams.

Being perhaps not the best of reporters, I quickly engaged her in a conversation about the fascinating linguistic problems that arise when language becomes fertile ground for memorization rather than meaning. After all, we discussed, a facet of the expert Scrabble game is the knowledge of words, meaning be damned.

“I like to know the meaning of the word,” she said, of unknown words she encounters in her Scrabble matches. When she plays with friends, they keep a dictionary at hand for reference.

“We like to look things up.”

But Scrabble players, on the other hand, could not care less about meaning.

“More than half the words I play I don’t know,” said one player.

“The only advantage to knowing what a word means is what endings it can take,” said another. She related a game in which her opponent played “puliks,” ostensibly the plural of “pulik.” She, however, recognized “puli” as the actual singular and “pulik” as the plural form; she challenged the play and gained an extra turn. (A “puli,” by the way, is a Hungarian herding dog—not that Scrabble players would much care.) So once you go far enough in Scrabble, only its grammatical function matters, whether it’s a noun, verb, or adjective.

~

Joe Edley, like most players, doesn’t care about the meanings. As the only three-time National Scrabble champion, I don’t take his advice lightly (at least in terms of Scrabble).

When I asked him if he has ever really bothered with the meanings of words, he was careful to answer.

Joe Edley runs a tournament; via tumblr.com

 “In general, they’re relevant,” he stated. “You need to know how they’re declined. But,” he continued, “it really is irrelevant.”

“And I don’t want to clutter my brain,” he added.