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 7th 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.
