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 More on travel & pursuits from The Atlantic Monthly. |
Masters of the Tiles - Page 2 1 | 2 One strategy that has been the subject of recent debate is the hoarding of certain letter combinations. For instance, if your rack held E, R, and S, you would play the other four tiles and pick again, since many four-letter words can take aners suffix or anre at the beginning and an sat the end. (The idea is eventually to draw letters that in conjunction with ERS will produce a bingo.) The ERS combination is usually still hoarded. But what if you pick ING (or NG and see an open I on the board)? Do you play your other letters and hope that the next draw will provide a verb to which you can add the ING? There is serious controversy in the Scrabble world over ING. Many of the best players say, "Break up the combination if it means better points and position. I know so many words that I can keep digging for new letters instead of wasting my time hoping for a verb." Some very good players demur, arguing that so many bingos, end ining that it's a mistake to break the combination up. To be in favor of breaking it up shows that you have great confidence in your vocabulary. In the view of some players, it also shows that you have a lack of common sense. Other questions, too, have yet to be answered definitively—for example, the proper use of the Q in midgame. Without a U, the Q is almost useless. Only a few words acceptq without its natural mate. (They are qaid, qoph, qindar, qintar, and faqir.) Because the Q is commonly exchanged—at the cost of a turn—it often appears in the end game. Any player unable to rid himself of it is not only prevented from making a bingo but also loses twenty points if the letter is still in his rack when his opponent runs out of letters. The Q has been considered more thoroughly than any other consonant except the S. Its frequency of appearance at every position in a seven-letter word has been tallied. Still the arguments rage. When is it wise to dump the Q? When is it wise to hold onto it? How can I stick my opponent with it and avoid having it boomerang into my rack again? There are aspects of Scrabble that are still dominated by luck. For instance, if two players of good but equal ability pair off, the one who picks the lowest letter and starts first has a substantially better chance of eventually winning. And there is no explaining the existence of streaks and slumps, which most players have experienced. Furthermore, there have been many average players who have surged beyond expectations and played like champions, only to regain typical form and never do so again. Yet ultimately, the best players have reduced the element of luck considerably. When not making lists, they are inventing new challenges and puzzles to keep their minds flexible and their word knowledge growing. One theoretician, Joseph Leonard, who lives in Philadelphia, has tried to find every bingo in the OSPD that is valid both forward and back. Some of the pairs he has found are stinker-reknits, deliver-reviled, desserts-stressed, and sallets-stellas. Other players have tried to find the highest-scoring plays possible. Here we enter the Scrabble player's flourishing fantasy world. 
n theory one can score well over a thousand points in a Scrabble game, with the help of one or two brilliant moves. In practice it is very hard to score above 600. The highest score yet recorded in club competition is 724, achieved by Bill Blevin against eighty-three-year-old Daisy Webb, who compiled a score not much higher than her age. Despite Blevin's undeniable skill against Webb, the score that is considered the highest ever achieved against reasonable competition is 719, which Christopher Reslock racked up in actual tournament play.It is easy to imagine getting almost half as many points on a single move as Reslock got in his entire record-setting game. What if someone has made the word lappers down to the middle triple-word square on the left side of the board? You can put a C on it, making clappers, and already you have one triple-word play. Then you make claqueurs across the top two triple-word squares, utilizing two letters already on the board. Now you have a triple-triple word, the value of which is multiplied by nine, your Q has landed on a double word score, and you have the triple off clappers plus the bonus bingo points. Your total for one turn is 353 points, a not uncreditable total for a whole game. 
The Scrabble Players News in 1982 asked its readers to find the highest possible score for one turn using words that appear in the OSPD. All across America players worked on the problem. One of the best solutions was submitted by Kyle Corbin, of Raleigh, North Carolina, who shared first place in the cornpetition with Alan Frank and Stephen Root, a computer programmer who lives in Westboro, Massachusetts. Corbin imagined a game in which the first twelve turns resulted in the configuration shown below, with the C in chapeau on the center square of the board and the M in mahjong as a blank. On the thirteenth turn a player with the letters M, X, M, I, Z, N, and G in his rack can make the word maximizing down the right-hand side, score a bingo, and in the process make the new words buckram, chapeaux, prewarm, quartz, bunn, and mahjongg. The total score: 613 points.The next step, of course, was to figure out the highest possible score in a complete Scrabble game (using only words from the OSPD). Once again Scrabble's finest minds went to work. The highest score to date was found by Stephen Root. Root devised a game in which 2,354 points were scored, 1,177 by each player. 
If you want to follow the course of this hypothetical game on your own board, you need to know that the final N infunction is the center square, and that the words were played in the following order: unction, arrowing, ideation, whizbang, sortably, whizbangs, deaerate, eidolon, nineteen, pyruvates, pe, in, vanquish, coterie, vanquishes, ye, do, if, flummoxing, flapjack. The final S in vanquishes and the T in ideation are blanks, and the second player gets two points for the T left in the first player's rack when the game ends.
crabble, like chess, is a vast game. The odds of two forty-move chess games ever being exactly the same are all but infinitely remote. The same holds for Scrabble games. There are just too many possibilities for the play to become repetitive. New problems, solutions, analyses, and arguments keep cropping up.All theorizing stops at a major tournament, however. The mood among the players beforehand is one of great anxiety and expectation. Sometimes the tension brings out legendary performances. Jerry Lerman, a very good player, was once matched with the former North American champion, Joseph Edley. Edley had forsaken career advancement for Scrabble, working as a night watchman so that he could learn and memorize and practice. He does not often lose. But Lerman played brilliantly, emerging with a 499-499 tie, the highest-scoring tie in Scrabble history Just as often the tension causes errors, the most ridiculous being the result of an affliction called Scrabble blindness. Its major symptom is an inability to see the obvious. I once heard the word apply challenged at a tournament. ("Apply? I've heard of limey and orangey. But apply?") I myself have challenged the wordwho. I had just finished memorizing the four-letter list, and whoa was a new word of mine. I stared at the who, mumbled "whoa" to myself several times, and finally declared that who takes an a. My opponent called the tournament judge over to look up the word in the OSPD. He stared at who, turned a few pages of the dictionary, and walked away saying, "I'm not going to look that up. " I yelled that he had to by the rules of the tournament. He still refused. I finally looked it up myself and was shocked to see that who didn't need an a. It wasn't until the game ended that I realized I had actually challenged who. During a tournament the most serious players do not socialize between games. They stay in their rooms and study. They hate it when people say, "But it's only a game." To them it is at the very least a profound intellectual and artistic experience. Is it too much to suppose that there may be a religious element to this experience as well? The cabala, in its way, is an ancient Judaic form of Scrabble. Each Hebrew letter was assigned a value, and once a word was formed the combined total of the letters revealed a deeper message from God. When one sees two serious Scrabble players at their game, it is not hard to imagine them as cabalist sages in meditation; or to wonder if this will be the time when the word zyzzyva—that rarest of all bingos (and one that requires blanks to be used for two of the zs)—makes manifest the presence of the divine.
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What do you think? Discuss this article in Post & Riposte.
Copyright © 1987 by Barry Chamish. All rights reserved. The Atlantic Monthly; June 1987; Masters of the Tiles - 87.06; Volume 259, No. 6; page 54-58. |
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