Stefan Fatsis

Finished Word Freak: Heatbreak, Triumph, Genius and Obsession in the World of Competitve Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis the other day. Excellent, for the most part. Fatsis explores a world most of us are not even aware exists – professional Scrabble. And what a world it is.

Fatsis, who is ordinarily a reporter for the Wall Street Journal, had always been a decent Scrabble player, but had no idea it could be played competitively, until he happened upon some players in Washington Square Park in Manhattan. He started playing more frequently and meeting more and more advanced players, observing them, interviewing them, and researching the history of the game. What made the book possible, however, was that Fatsis got completely obsessed with the game and became one of “them.” He took a leave of absence from his WSJ job and started studying and practicing in earnest and playing tournaments, eventually winning two and reaching a rating of 1733 (out of a possible 2000).

Along the way, Fatsis introduces us to the most colorful characters in competitive Srabble, some of whom he gets to know pretty intimately, and colorful they are. Their extreme eccentricity is not surprising. Any game, especially one that requires the mental pyrotechnics, memory and pattern recognition skills of Scrabble, attracts the extremely dedicated, the obsessed, and the just plain weird at its highest level. Fatsis portrays them well – charitably but fairly. He also expounds on the origins of the game, its inventor Alfred Butts, and the issues raised by Scrabble’s unique position as the only commercial, trademarked game that has a thriving international competitive scene surrounding it.

A large part of the book, however, is dedicated simply to words. Words in their infinite variety, their acceptability (or not) in the game, the various dictionaries and lists that have been used to play the game over the decades, and the differences between US and non-US Scrabble dictionaries (and the fact that the World Championship uses a combination of both). Fatsis spends many pages (too many, some might say), describing the overwhelming numbers of words and letter combinations one must memorize and be able to recognize in a mess of Scrabble tiles to play well, the methods top players use to study them, and their superhuman skills at anagramming. For me, one of the more interesting, and somewhat sad, conclusions that emerges is that being good at Scrabble has little to do with being good at English. If you have any ambition at all to become competitive, you will never have time to learn the definitions of the words you’re studying. You memorize strings of letters and learn to recognize patterns. Hundreds of thousands of them. The official dictionary used in US tournaments – the Official Word List (OWL) – contains no definitions. Many of the world’s top players have minimal command of spoken English.

If I have any complaints about the book at all, it is the fact that Fatsis recounts too many individual games in too much detail. He is obviously really into Scrabble, and is clearly fascinated by every single game. He also brings his experience as a sports writer to bear and does a convincing job of depicting a game of Scrabble the way someone might do with an exciting basketball match or a close car race. But after a while, it got a bit too much for my taste. I do play Scrabble recreationally (and very poorly – I enjoy learning the meanings, etymology and use of new words way too much to learn very many actual words), but after a while all the game descriptions started to sound the same. On balance, however, the book is thoroughly enjoyable, and with just a bit more editing, could have become a non-fiction classic.