Cheap Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePlayers (Book) (Stefan Fatsis) Price

Related Products

Customer Reviews of Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePlayers

A window on obsession - what you see through that window tells a lot about one's self
______________________________________________ <
>Fluff or not? Not <
>_____________________________________________ <
> <
>---- Comments ---- <
>Annoying and weird, funny, loveable, eccentric, talented, and driven - the multitude of players Fastis helps us get do know display all of these characteristics and many more. There's gobs of interesting scrabble history, trivia, strategy, and tournament play-by-play but what this book was really about for me was obsession: it was about how obsession grows, how it manifests differently in different people but, more importantly, how it can happen to anyone. Obsession is something with which I can identify. Whether you're a Scrabble player or not doesn't matter for there's so much in here about being human, about mechanisms for survival, for determining self worth, and for simply having fun that you won't be able to put it down - prone to obsession or not. <
> <
>---- What I liked ---- <
>The nuts and bolts shared about the game and strategy, the idiosyncrasies of the main players, and the personal details the author shared about his scrabble journey and the relationships he developed with some of the other main characters. <
> <
>---- What I didn't ---- <
>Well, now I'm hooked on Scrabble <
>

---

A "Paper Lion" of the logophiles
A friend loaned me this book about the time we were attempting to create an intraoffice Scrabble tournament (and she was in the process of proving how very much better she is than I am at this game). The most obvious thing Stefan Fatsis' skilled reporting demonstrates is the vast gulf that exists between casual players like us and the handful of top players for whom the game can be a time-consuming, even life-consuming, obsession. <
> <
>It's a world that's hard for me to understand, in part because my competitive gene is relatively underdeveloped. What makes "Word Freak" particularly interesting, however, is watching the author himself slowly transforming from outsider into one of the inner, obsessive corps of championship-level players. Unlike, say, "Wild and Outside," in which Fatsis was able to retain reportorial objectivity, here he becomes part of his story -- "new journalism," of a sort, and Fatsis makes several references to George Plimpton and his sojourn in the NFL. <
> <
>On the whole, "Word Freak" is a fairly remarkable piece of writing -- part memoir, part history, part nature journal. The author paints memorable pictures of his central characters, one that made me want to look them up and see how they're doing (or even if some of them are still alive) five years after the fact. Equally memorable is his portrayal of himself, and his ability to retain a certain distance from the change he's undergoing while, at the same time, experiencing it fully. For the reader, the ride can be simultaneously entertaining and disturbing as we see Scrabble as both a game and a mania. It's a combination that makes for a book most readers, I'd expect, won't soon forget ... particularly since so many of us probably have a Scrabble set of our own gathering dust in a bookshelf or closet.

---

Like looking under a rotten log
Word Freak is an impressive job, maybe even amazing. How in the world could someone crank out a 372-page book on Scrabble that more or less lives up to the reproduced blurbs: can't-put-it-down narrative; marvelously absorbing; impassioned; thoughtful, winning; etc. Bob Costas summed it up: "Scrabble. Who knew?" <
> <
>But they forgot to mention: no fun; disgusting; revolting; no missed opportunity to rub an obscenity in the reader's face; America's most beloved board game befouled by uncivilized worms; like sitting down to Mark Twain and getting the Godfather. I doubt I'll ever feel clean again. As an English player said about the Americans: "I can't imagine being any of them." <
> <
>Sordidness aside, it's hard to imagine anyone not already brainwashed into the cult of tournament Scrabble not coming away from the book with a feeling of serious Scrabble being a perfectly ridiculous activity. Scrabble was invented as a word game, but you'd have to look mighty hard at a tournament Scrabble board to find anything to do with one's spoken, written, or reading vocabulary - no matter how intelligent or educated, or how much of a word lover, you are. <
> <
>Early on, Fatsis tells about watching a game between two experts that seems to be in a "foreign language." He reports that there are devoted Scrabble players, even, who think more people would join up if the dictionary "didn't include so many strange or obsolete words." How could they not? <
> <
>A top player says, "It's very frustrating to me that we have not yet managed to develop an audience for the game." Gee, I wonder why that is. This player's own brother points out (112 pages later) that a tournament Scrabble board "would look like Greek to its prospective audience." <
> <
>The list of valid Scrabble words for international play is called SOWPODS. Players opposed to SOWPODS say that its supporters are "a handful of elitist snob experts who play in the world championships and are trying to ram 40,000 ridiculous words down the throats of the masses." I second that. Or, I would if it mattered. All my Scrabbling is with a collegiate dictionary, and I don't see any signs of an apostasy on the horizon. <
> <
>Fatsis states, "It's just about impossible to play high-level (or even low-level) competitive Scrabble if you're hung up on the game's use of odd words." His saving grace there is the hedge, "just about". I offer myself as living proof that there is no problem whatsoever playing competitive Scrabble with a collegiate dictionary. None. <
> <
>American tournament rules allow bluffing, and so a bluffing game Scrabble has become. Whoopee. Fatsis reports on some of the highest scoring Scrabble games. A Chicago player scored 792 - "but he used four phony bingos." A Cincinnati student scored 724 - "but his opponent was an 83-year-old newcomer... who let him get away with five phonies." <
> <
>How can anyone write that or read that without turning all shades of red with embarrassment? Where else in all of our competitive sports and games is there anything like it? Did Babe Ruth get credit for home runs by striking out? Did he rack up his home runs in sanctioned games with kiddies and grannies and a 150-foot fence? <
> <
>Here's one of the author's own anecdotes from a tournament: "I open with a deliberate phony, MEAOW. On her next turn, she takes the bait, pluralizing the fake word, and I challenge that off the board and gain a turn... At the next table, one of the old-timers watches the sequence. 'You've become one of us,' she says." Sounds like too much fun to me; guess I'll never be "one of them." <
> <
>In another passage, a former top-rated player explains why he quit Scrabble. He objected to having to play inferior players, from whom he had almost nothing to gain, rating-wise, and everything to lose. "Given this environment, one must play phonies... to steal games that are seemingly out of reach." In other words, if he were constrained to playing real words, he would lose now and then. Excuse me while a grapefruit-sized tear rolls down my cheek. <
> <
>You know from my Scrabble pages what I think of phonies. If that asinine component of Scrabble were eliminated, Fatsis' book could have been half as thick. And maybe a reader or two might have come away thinking, "Hey, this Scrabble, it could be a pretty neat game!" <
> <
>Actually, world competition uses the "free challenge" rule, what I call "no-risk challenge" (or simply "double-checking"). In one game a player challenges ZAMIAS, a baby word for the pros. He's accused of "buying some time to think." Fatsis declares, "It's one of the perils of the free challenge rule." Somehow, in the other 371 pages of the book, he forgets to list all the other perils of such a lame-brain rule, which, by the way, was the box-top rule until the mid-1970s. Hmmm, mid-1970s . . . tournament Scrabble emerging . . . Who tricked or strong-armed Selchow & Righter into changing the box-top, and thereby turning Scrabble into a barroom bluff game after 25 years of class? <
> <
>If Fatsis recognizes the two-letter words as anything more significant in Scrabble play than teensy words, he doesn't let on. He writes near the beginning, "Armed with the two- and (most of the) three-letter words, I can now beat casual players handily." Right. And armed with an AK-47 you can beat a guy with a water pistol at 20 paces. Handily. The two-letter words are the game's basic equipment, the tools. Any game in which a player is "unequipped" with the acceptable two-letter words is a meaningless exercise, a total waste of everybody's time. <
> <
>Fatsis counts the K among the power tiles. I remember people in the Bowie Scrabble Club (Maryland) who did the same. I don't get it. It's nowhere near the category of the J, X, Q, and Z. Any one of those tiles played on a triple-letter score, all by itself, nothing else, would score 24 or 30 points. That's far greater than the average points per turn of an excellent player (using a conventional dictionary). The K would score a piddly 15 points. That's about equal to the average points per turn of the weakest novice in a Scrabble club. The K - you can have it. <
> <
>Fatsis made use of a funny little word, "pesty", in his text. Twice, even. This was not a word in the original OSPD, a concoction of five major dictionaries. Back then, if anyone accidentally said "pesty", he was really trying to say "pestiferous". But it sounds so right that PESTY was always popping up on Scrabble boards. I wonder if it became a real word somewhere along the line largely because Scrabblers willed it. <
> <
>Worth the price of admission was the chapter on the inventor of Scrabble, Alfred Butts, and the man who put the finishing touches on it (including the name), James Brunot. Now there's a classy story! The chapter stands out like an enchanted isle inthe middle of an ocean of sewage. <
> <
>It disappoints me greatly that Scrabble players are ranked according a "rating" with an obscure and complicated calculation. I trust it shows where the players stand relative to each other, but what sort of absolute meaning does it have? If there's some reason not to simply calculate average points per turn (PPT), it eludes me. What makes PPT perfectly valid is that you always play the same number of turns as your opponent, on the average. It's insensitive to opponent, except maybe in the far-fetched case of collusion. And how long can you hope to go around playing the same chum who blithely spends his life setting you up? To be the best player, you have to be able to extract a fraction of a point more per play than anyone else. Period. <
> <
>So if somebody calculated these guys' average points per turn, I would have an idea how I compare. But since their scores are so affected by the arbitrary 50-point scrabola (bingo) bonus, I'd also be interested in an average points per turn without the bonuses added in, and a separate scrabola statistic, such as average number of turns between scrabolas. If you say, "But they throw away a lot of points in order to make scrabolas!" I say, so do I. <
> <
>I wish I had enough money to run a major tournament using my club rules: a collegiate dictionary; no-risk challenge; 3-letter minimum; and tiles dispensed to the players from a drum with a mixture of a hundred sets. Now that would be fun to watch and play along with. Just think, all those guys who spent years memorizing tens upon tens of thousands of official Scrabble letter combinations having to downshift to a real dictionary to go for the biggest Scrabble pot ever offered! Heeheehee. The winner might even be a reasonably smart, regular person. <
> <
>Fatsis observed: "Recruiting new players is Scrabble's toughest task." No mystery there; just read the book. He gives 372 pages of reasons. <
>