Hard Scrabble existence? Not for ‘full-contact’ spellers
By Bill Gallo 
| August 27, 2009 | 9:31 AM
Denver-Boulder Scrabble Club members, including Dave Goldberg, left, and Keith Pries, far right, play the word game during a club gathering. (RMI photo by Marilyn Marsh)
When Paul McCarthy can’t sleep, he gets up and plays a couple of games of Scrabble on his computer. In the morning, he’s likely to play two or three more before breakfast. The retired science writer is also a regular at the Denver-Boulder Scrabble Club, where he does bloody word-battle a couple times a week with other human beings who are just as hooked on the game as he is. The rest of the time he’s studying word lists, anagrams, strategies, high-probables — anything that will help.
“It’s what they call a positive addiction,” McCarthy says. “Once you get to a certain place, it’s pretty hard to get out. You’re in up to your neck.”
In other words (arenite and flokati, for instance), real Scrabble is nothing like the casual board game millions of American families have been playing in their living rooms since the early 1950s. It isn’t the game Barack Obama, Queen Elizabeth and Rosie O’Donnell dabble in.
In fact, real Scrabble is not recreational at all. It is, as hard-core players like to say, “a full-contact mind sport.”
At last Sunday’s meeting of the club, held in a sunny, ground-floor corner of a Barnes and Noble bookstore in Boulder, eight of the faithful gathered, boards and letter tiles and word-stuffed brains at the ready. Stefan Fatsis, the Wall Street Journal reporter who revealed the world of competitive Scrabble (and gave the game a huge boost) with a 2001 best-seller called Word Freak, would surely bestow that title on each of them.
Lesesne Kunz, a 54-year-old composer and musician who got serious about the game two years ago, now plays 30 to 40 hours a week. She has given up chess and puzzles and most everything else to concentrate on her dream — table one, division one, at the national championships.
“I don’t know if I can get there, but I’m going to give it my best shot,” she vows. “It takes a fantastic memory and plenty of drive, the willingness to put in the hours and hours of study it takes to learn the word lists.”
Ah, the lists. The Official Tournament and Club Word List (the “OWL”) is the competitive Scrabbler’s bible. Pantofle and oquassa are in the book, which contains almost 125,000 Scrabble-legitimate words. But windowless and neurolinguistic are not in the book. And if, like McCarthy or Kunz or Keith Pries, you aspire to greatness in the game, you’d better know the difference.
Pries, 61, who runs a Denver tree-care service and has been an avid player since 2005, is probably as Scrabble-centric as anyone. He’s been known to put in 10 or 14 hours a day at the board and has developed a fundamentalist’s view of language itself: “If a word is not in our rulebook,” he says, “I don’t want to know that word at all.”
Fact is, most of today’s top-notch Scrabblers — they sport “tournament ratings” ranging from 1600 (very good) to 2000 (virtually word-perfect) — are not particularly “literary,” or even very well-read, McCarthy points out. Most of them don’t know, or care about, the definitions of the more obscure words they put into play. They only know the spellings and the point values. The game, he says, has evolved since the 1970s: Mere literacy now counts less than math skill and memory.
Example: At the world championships, which are contested in English, there are always a few Thai and Filipino players who don’t even speak the game’s mother tongue. But they’ve memorized the lists.
For Dave Goldberg, a Loveland real estate investor who used to teach high school math, Scrabble brings a certain calm to the world.
“I do not like chaos,” he says. “It’s very difficult for me, so I like to make order out of chaos. When you get Scrabble tiles in front of you, it’s chaotic, as with any puzzle. but if you can turn that into something else — preferably by playing all seven letters in your rack at once, then you have order. That’s my nature.”
A relative newcomer to club and tournament play, Goldberg has a modest tournament rating of 900 and says he was so inspired by Fatsis’ Word Freak that he quit reading it halfway through: He thought he could better spend his time studying the OWL and game strategy. Kunz is a 1306 after playing in just five tournaments around the country, and McCarthy, who’s been in the game since 1995, is about 1600.
Dominick Mancine’s rating is 1837.
A 35-year-old Boulder engineer now designing software that could revolutionize slot machine programming in casinos, Mancine will this weekend direct the most important Scrabble tournament Denver has ever hosted. The seventh annual Can-Am Scrabble Challenge will pit seven top U.S. players (average rating: 1900) against seven elite Canadians at the Crystal Inn Hotel near Denver International Airport. Pries says it’s the equivalent of a poetry roundtable starring Keats and Shelley.
Mancine will not be competing himself, but he probably could.
“The ultimate goal of every serious Scrabble player is to play full time,” he explains. “It may be silly, but it’s compelling. An obsession? That’s not completely inaccurate. Because you don’t always choose your passions: sometimes they choose you.”
Just ask McCarthy. At age 66, he is one of the older Word Freaks in the Denver-Boulder Scrabble Club. He’s even written a book of his own about the game, called Letterati, and for him it’s pretty all-consuming. Some of his fellow players claim he once declared: “Scrabble sings the siren song for those who wish to hear it.” For his part, McCarthy doesn’t remember saying anything quite like that, but the competitive fire still burns inside him.
“The best player in our club right now is 16 years old,” he says. “And I can tell you. It hurts like hell to lose to him.”
After all, Scrabble is a full-contact mind sport.
board game, paul mccarthy, scrabble
