Scrabble is a five-lettered SPORT

 
Spiro Zavos Columnist

By , 29 Jan 2010 Spiro Zavos is a Roar Expert

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Joyce Slaughter of Louisville, Ky., arranges her tiles. AP Photo/Bill Janscha

Joyce Slaughter of Louisville, Ky., arranges her tiles. AP Photo/Bill Janscha

While my wife was in labour at Hammersmith Hospital in London for the birth of son number one, we passed the long hours of waiting by playing Scrabble. Such is the word-power and determination of Judy that she only succumbed to a defeat, after many victories, just before she was wheeled away to give birth.

My attitude to Scrabble was that it was a sort of one-on-one word game played by couples to fill in some time when there was nothing on television that night. Or there was no television set handy.

But an article in The New Yorker (19 January 2009) by a staff writer Judith Thurman has forced me to look at Scrabble in a new light. I now see it as a tough-minded game, intellectual and intuitive like chess, and with the same competitive edge to it.

Thurman has written an essay about her obsession with Scrabble which places this obsession in the history of the sport. There is, too, within this personal memoir, a fascinating history of how Scrabble emerged as a word game played by couples on sofas around the world to a sport that has its apex in three major tournaments.

Before reading this essay, I’d heard of Derryn Hinch’s book of useful words for Scrabble players, a compendium that contained several thousand words. According to Thurman, the USA and British Scrabble Associations have an agreed list of 267,751 words that Scrabblers can use in tournament play.

Some of these words include over 100 two-letter words like ‘aa’ and ‘zat’ (which competitors in international tournaments learn by heart like chess players rote-learning the main openings of a chess game). Apparently, too, there are 11 admissible ‘q’ words like ‘qat’ that do not start with a ‘qu’. I wonder if Qantas is one of those words.

Competitors apparently swot up on all these words, and hook words starting with ‘re’ and so on, rather like the kids swotting up for a Spelling Bee competition. They use flash cards and other memory aids to train up for the tournaments.

What they are trying to do is maximise the letters they have and not fail like Homer Simpson in a celebrated episode when he put down DO when he was holding the letters OXODIZE  (American spelling).

According to Thurman there is a system of ranking for tournament players that takes into account victories and losses over higher-ranked and lower-ranked players.

There are three major Scrabble tournaments: The USA Scrabble Championship (with the winner earning $25,000), The World Championship (which was held in Mumbai in 2008) and The Thai International Tournament (which is the largest of the regional tournaments with 8,000 competitors in 2008).

The runner-up at the most recent World and USA Championships (and a winner in previous years) is a 42 year-old New Zealander, Nigel Richards, who should be rated – but isn’t yet – as one of that country’s greatest sportsmen.

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