Writer's Block, Feature, The Sum of its Letters, Scrabble Isn’t Just a Game about Words

The world’s most popular word game isn’t just for people with a flair for words and a great vocabulary—at the tournament level, some Scrabble players don’t even speak English.

Last year’s 7^th World Scrabble Championship, the foremost international tournament for competitive Scrabble players, saw Panupol Sujjaykorn from Thailand emerge as the winner in a best-of-five final series that pitted him against fellow Thai teammate, Pakorn Nemitrmansuk. It marked the first time the title of world’s best Scrabble player was won by someone from a country where English is not the first language.

The two Thai countrymen were not the only competitors to come from a non-English speaking country. The biennial tournament, which was held in Kuala Lumpur, drew 98 of the top Scrabble players from 38 countries that, in addition to Australia, Canada, Britain, and the United States, included Kuwait, India, Japan, Thailand, and host country Malaysia, among others. Speaking to the Bangkok Post, Amnuay Ploysangngam, a tireless promoter of the game of Scrabble and president of the Thailand Crossword Club,¹ says that Scrabble isn’t entirely a language game and that the language barrier can be overcome through the game’s strategic possibilities.

In a recent National Post article, John Chew, director of the Toronto Scrabble Club, the birthplace of organized Scrabble activity in North America, agreed, saying that “it’s a common misconception that people who are well-read or hyper-articulate are the best at Scrabble.”

The Meaninglessness of Scrabble

A 2003 study conducted by Dr. Diane Halpern of Claremont McKenna College in California and her colleague Jonathan Wai confirms what competitive Scrabble players believe to be true. In Scrabble, it’s the letters of the word that count, not the meaning of the word. Although top Scrabble players may know more words than most of us—as many as 14,000, which is about seven times the number of words that make up the average vocabulary—they don’t necessarily know their meaning.

Dr. Halpern told Reuters Health that the higher-ranked players performed only marginally better than the lower-ranked players on the vocabulary tests. However, the better players did stand out in visual-spatial skills. Higher-ranked players completed tests of visual-spatial skills much faster than lower-ranked players, suggesting that these skills are an important component of Scrabble.

“Professional games are timed,” Dr. Halpern explained, “and during an opponent’s turn, players need to excel at rapidly manipulating objects in their minds, such as when they imagine different letter combinations from the letters they hold, or inspect the board from upside down.”

Scrabble players call it “anagramming,” the ability to unscramble a jumble of letters into meaningful words. Experience tells them that it is the Scrabble player’s core skill. They also believe that those with a math background have an innate advantage over others since they juggle numbers in their head all the time.

It’s in the Numbers

With 100 tiles made up of 98 letters and two blanks, and each letter assigned a point value based on its relative scarcity in the tiles and its commonality in words, the Scrabble word game is actually all about math. The winner of the game is the player with the most points, not the one who has created the best or most flashy words. At the competitive level, this is often the person with some kind of math background.

Adam Logan is a case in point. A University of Liverpool math lecturer from Ottawa, Logan defeated former World Champion and English literature specialist Peter Morris in a best-of-five series to win the first Canadian National Scrabble Championship in 1996 when he was just a 21-year-old math student. In accounting for his win to the Houston Chronicle, Logan pointed to his math skills. “Scrabble uses the same analytical skills as in math. You have to think about what sort of tiles you are likely to be dealt.”

Scrabble contains two basic mathematical elements: the element of probability—the ability of players to keep track of what letters have been played in the game and anticipate which ones their opponent likely has; and what Stefan Fatsis, the author of Word Freak, an exploration of tournament Scrabble, calls the geometry of the board.

In an interview with The Pennsylvania Gazette in 2001, Fatsis explained what he meant. “Board games are about strategies; strategies are about patterns; patterns are about math. Look at any game—chess, backgammon, checkers, Scrabble—these are games about space and understanding geometry. Being able to sort of instantly process and digest the geometry of board position is a very mathematical practice.”

Hooked on Mnemonics

Mathphobes needn’t despair about ever mastering the game, however. Good competitive Scrabble players are largely made, not born.

Since the game of Scrabble combines elements of luck, skill, and preparation, all serious Scrabble players train like students cramming for a final exam. In fact, studying is a major part of competitive Scrabble. This “training” separates a die-hard competitor like Joel Wapnick from the recreational player.

A music professor at McGill University, Wapnick is the only person to have won all three major North American tournaments, and he spends countless hours memorizing words he will never use in a sentence.

“I spend an hour a day walking. I take a walk, and I have this list of 16,000 words that I’ve memorized in a particular sequence. They’re all seven- or eight-letter words, and I just rehearse them as I’m walking. And for about three months before a tournament, I’ll spend an extra maybe two hours practicing anagrams. Just going over them over and over, maybe 500 a day.”

Word knowledge is so basic to Scrabble that to help themselves learn words competitive players create hundreds of flash cards; use the Lexpert software program with its more than 3,500 word lists; and carry around Franklins, calculator-like machines that give every possible word combination to any seven letters.

Lou Cornelis, a retired actuary living in Ottawa, considers himself to be a pretty good player, but certainly not one of the best players. “There is a gulf between the elite players and ordinary competitors like myself. Their ability to anagram—to see the possible words out of their jumble of letters—sets them apart.”

Even with that caveat, Cornelis is willing to put a lot of time and effort into becoming a better player. Since he already knows all the two- and three-letter words that he can legally use in a game, Cornelis has turned his attention to memorizing five thousand of the more common (based on their letter use) seven- and eight-letter words. “Each player has to figure out why he’s not winning as many games as he ought to. In my case, I wasn’t playing enough bingos; I wasn’t playing enough seven- and eight-letter words.”

Kitchen table Scrabble players may find all of this effort too much. As Joel Wapnick acknowledges, “If you try to figure out the number of hours that people spend trying to become good and compare it with the payoff, it certainly, from an economic point of view, makes no sense whatsoever.”

But like any game or sport, Scrabble can be played two ways—for fun or to win. Those who play to win tournaments take the game very seriously.

It’s All about Winning

Tournaments are played one-on-one in a race against the clock, often for cash prizes, with the biggest prizes being handed out at the more prestigious tournaments—the US National Championship, an open event attracting several hundred players; the Canadian National Championship, an invitational to the top fifty players; and the World Championship, a competition that brings together the top players from around the world. The winner of last year’s World Championship, Panupol Sujjaykorn, won US$ 17,500.

When the stakes are that high, the intensity of the game changes. No longer the perfect summer holiday pastime or homework aid, kitchen table Scrabble morphs into a nail-biting battle between razor sharp opponents. With this in mind, sports broadcaster ESPN plans to televise the best-of-five match between the two top finalists at this year’s National Championship in New Orleans.

But achieving victory at these tournaments requires more than just knowing lists of obscure words most of us do not use on a daily basis. It also takes mental preparation and psychological strength.

Joel Wapnick in Canada and John Holgate in Australia both agree that playing with composure is critical to becoming a good Scrabble player. In the game of Scrabble, it’s easy to get frustrated when pressure and mistakes happen. John Chew of the Toronto Club told the National Post the story of Ron Hoekstra, a former Canadian National Champion, who threw his dictionary across the room in a fit of frustration during a minor tournament.

Holgate, a five-time winner of the Australian Championships who has also represented Australia at six World Championships, offers a coaching clinic on the Australian Scrabble Players Association web site that includes ten tips for keeping cool under pressure. He emphasizes the importance of getting into a winning state of mind and learning to distinguish between bad luck and a bad play.

Players who dwell on their mistakes tend to make more of them. But great players try never to let their opponent or outside conditions control their game. They are tough, mentally conditioned. That’s why Lou Cornelis believes he must harness the power of sports psychology to help him think like a winner and develop mental toughness.

“I know that I can play with the elite players, but I still make too many mistakes that cost me the game. I don’t think I’m tough enough mentally. If I start losing, I seem to sort of give up at some level. So I’m thinking of seeing a hypnotist or a sports psychologist.”

The Word According to Scrabble

Mastering the basic skills needed to play well is essential in any game or sport, but winning or losing can also depend on who officiates the game.

Hockey has its referees and baseball has its umpires. The sole authority for judging the validity of words played at all North American tournament and club play since 1978 is the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD). Compiled to correspond with the rules of Scrabble, it allows all non-capitalized words without apostrophes or hyphens that are not designated as foreign, includes only words of eight or fewer letters, and provides only the most rudimentary definition for every base word.

In 1997, the National Scrabble Association (NSA), the official organization of North America’s 10,000 tournament Scrabble players, published the Official Tournament and Club Word List (OWL) to provide a more efficient and complete reference for judging challenges at tournaments.

The OWL seems to recognize that learning word meanings can be a distraction from what it takes to win in competitions. Based on previous editions of the OSPD and the 10th edition of Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, it contains all words up to nine letters and doesn’t even bother to provide definitions.

Under pressure from its members to keep up with the new words that enter the English language every year, the NSA dictionary committee is working hard to update the OSPD and the OWL in time for the National Scrabble Championship in August. If that doesn’t work, their fallback deadline is January 2005.

The committee is referencing four dictionaries—Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary, Eleventh Edition; The American Heritage College Dictionary, Fourth Edition; Random House Webster’s College Dictionary; and Webster’s New World College Dictionary, Fourth Edition. If a word appears in one of the four dictionaries then it will be added to the Scrabble player’s official lexicon.

According to the Seattle Times, “duh” is already one of about 8,500 words that will be added to the dictionary and tournament word list. Other words to make the list for the first time include computer and technical terms, but also “upsadaisy,” “qi,” and “za.”

All of these additional words should make serious Scrabble players happy, even if it means revising their word lists and memorizing new words, because more words can only increase the probability of creating words, scoring points, and winning games.

Cynthia Rurak is a writer and editor living in Vanier, Ontario, who plays Scrabble for fun, at the kitchen table.

If you’re serious about Scrabble, you need to understand the terminology. Here are just a few of the terms you’ll hear at any Canadian Scrabble club or tournament.

Anagram: A word that is spelled with the exact same letters as another word.
Example: KITCHEN is an anagram of THICKEN, and vice versa. GAPE is an anagram of PAGE.

Bingo: Any word played that uses all seven letters of the rack, earning a bonus of 50 points. British players use the term “bonus” instead of bingo.

Bingo-Prone Tiles: A group of tiles that are likely to produce a bingo. Often used to describe a player's set of two to six tiles just before drawing his or her replacement tiles. Example: ERS, AL, or AERST.

Coffeehousing: To make small talk, crack knuckles, or do any of a number of things meant to distract or mislead your opponent. This is unethical and strictly forbidden in clubs and tournaments. It is generally considered impolite to talk during a tournament game unless it is pertinent to the score or the play.

Fishing: To play for only a few points or exchange only one or two tiles, keeping five or six really good tiles, with the hope of making a high-scoring play next turn.

Hook Letter (or Hook): A letter that will spell a new word when it is played either at the front or end of a word already on the board. Example: With HARD on the board, the Y is a hook letter, since HARDY is acceptable. “Hook” is also used as a verb. Example: The letter C can "hook" on to HARD, since CHARD is acceptable. Also called Front Hook or Back Hook.

Nongo: A bingo that won't play on the board.

Power Tiles: There are 10 power tiles. They are the two blanks, the four Ss, and the J, Q, X, and Z.

Rating: For each sanctioned National Scrabble Association tournament, a new rating is computed for each of the contestants. The rating represents how well a player is doing in relation to other rated players. The higher the rating, the more skillful the player. Ratings currently range from 200 to 2,100.

Tracking (or Tile Tracking): The process of keeping track of the letters played on the board. This can give the astute player an advantage as the game progresses. Careful trackers can deduce an opponent's rack after there are no letters left to draw. By knowing the opponent's rack, the player can often make moves to block the opponent's best plays or set up high-scoring plays that the opponent can’t block. Players are allowed to play with their own Preprinted Tracking Sheet alongside their score sheet.

Price, Betsy. “From ‘Duh’ to ‘Za,’ Small Words Slip into Updated Scrabble Dictionary.” The Seattle Times. 10 February 2004.

“Scrabble Champ Counted on His Math Skills.” Houston Chronicle. 26 July 1996.
http://www.chron.com/

McCook, Alison. “Scrabble Experts Know Many Words, Not Meaning.” Reuters Health. 5 May 2003. http://berger.claremontmckenna.edu/Publications/scrabbleexperts.pdf - link no longer available

¹Thailand’s version of the international game of Scrabble is known as Crossword. In fact, the North American version of the game owned by Hasbro’s Milton Bradley is actually the SCRABBLE Brand Crossword Game, but most North Americans — including Milton Bradley’s own publication — use the term Scrabble to refer to the game.

The Sum of its Letters Scrabble Isn’t Just a Game about Words

The Meaninglessness of Scrabble

It’s in the Numbers

Hooked on Mnemonics

It’s All about Winning

The Word According to Scrabble

The Sum of its Letters
Scrabble Isn’t Just a Game about Words