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Sharpie asked me to post (she's en route to New Orleans, as I will be tomorrow).
I felt honored at first, then remembered she'd go to almost any length to remain in lurk mode.
She and I join about 900 other Scrabble players from all over the continent (and a few from Britain, Thailand, etc.) for the biennial National Championships: 30 games played Sunday-Wednesday.
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I like Scrabble, but I'm never going anywhere near a tournament... I've heard that champion Scrabble players tend to be weird/insane -- not the kind of role model I wanna look up to, eep...
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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The thing I associate with scrabble players is all those arcane borrowings from East India. Reminds me of Colonel Pickering.
Posts: 11017 | Registered: Apr 2003
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The local Scrabble scene here is pretty amazing -- and insanely competitive. If you want to compete at that level, you basically need to resign yourself to memorizing endless lists of words without aspiring to know what they mean. (There was actually an article about this in our local 'zine just two weeks ago, in which they helpfully listed all the two-letter words in the English language and every word that begins with "q" but does not immediately progress to "u.")
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See, I know all the two-letter words and the q-without-u words, and I know part of the three-letter word lists.. but champion Scrabble players pretty much memorize the whole dictionary and know all the seven- and eight- and even NINE-letter words -- only without, like Tom said, even knowing what they mean, ack...
Posts: 2911 | Registered: Aug 2001
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(Posting, ack, using some weird webtv kind of thing in the hotel).
Thanks for putting this up, John.
Yeah, yeah, Scrabble players are weird creatures. Then again, I just spent six weeks with science fiction/fantasy/horror writers, and, well, the Scrabble players here seem kinda tame now!
Tom, you live near one of the top players in the world, Brian Cappelletto, so yeah, I bet it is a competitive scene around there.
As far as the lists vs. definitions debate, there are top players of all types. There are people who actually do know most of the definitions and there are people who don't even speak English but play absolutely topnotch top levelS Scrabble, because they memorize the words as pattern strings. Most of us fall in between those extremes.
It's like any other obsessive endeavor, I guess. We study, we dream, we strive -- for pennies, really, and the respect of our fellow players and occasionally a write-up in a local paper. Yeah, it's odd to outsiders -- but I can't figure out why people tend their lawns for hours a week or practice swinging a stick at a ball or paint their fingernails, for that matter.
But boy, I do have several of the geek corners covered! I play Scrabble AND I write science fiction; what's next, stamp collecting?
Okay, back to panicking and studying for tomorrow..
Posts: 628 | Registered: Nov 1999
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There was such a rousing response to this thread, i figured you might like to read our mutual friend's journal over at Slate. This is part one of ~4 installments.
It will probably confirm all your most demeaning characterizations of language-hating, obsessive nerds.
On the other hand......
Posts: 431 | Registered: Oct 2003
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What are the approximate end scores of tournament games?
Are all Scrabble tournaments two-player?
Does tournament Scrabble play differently than playing any other above-average player, or is it roughly the same, only more advanced and more competitive? Or is there a whole new bag of tricks that even people who are "good at Scrabble" never learn until they get to the pre-tournament level?
Posts: 1903 | Registered: Sep 2003
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Woohoo, Scrabble questions . Those are not dumb questions at all.
Average scores vary quite a bit player to player and division to division, but scores in the upper three hundreds are very normal and for the top division, players are likely to have average scores around 400. There are games that end up much higher (and much lower) than that, of course.
Tournament games are always one-on-one. There are occasionally informal afterhours "partner" tournaments that are two-on-two. (I enjoy those; you learn a lot when you team up with another person. Two people will see a given rack of letters or a given board position very differently.)
Does tournament play different from "ordinary" play? Yes and no. There are no bags of tricks really. We use the weapons we have (our words) and we try to take control of the board. Just like the rules in the box. But of course that's not the whole story. Tournament players do know an awful lot of "scrabble" words, for one. Words we wouldn't use in conversation but that are soooo useful on the board (aalii or crwth, for instance). We engage in long and pointless arguments about strategy. "Can you believe he played ____ when he could have played ____????" The longer I play, the more I realize there is to learn… but it still really is that same game I learned the first day I tried it. Pull letters from the bag. Make magic .
Club and tournament play is a blast. Seriously. You sit down across the table from anyone, businessman or bum or goofy teenager. And you engage in a battle of wits.
Transferring from online to club play is pretty painless. Most of the differences are in paperwork and clock management. You have to count the scores yourself, etc. But if you've played online for very long, you already know the basics. You already know your twos, how to make parallel plays, how to get rid of clunky letters so that hopefully you can play a seven-letter word, etc. Online players do very well at club (and in tournaments.)
Posts: 628 | Registered: Nov 1999
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I'll expand a teeny bit on Sharpie's reply about 'bag of tricks.' But first, this message from our sponsor:
If you love the game, and recognize in yourself (you know it, if you do) that particular jazzy feeling from combining your vocab with the pattern of premium squares on the board, to achieve higher scores than most of your compatriots -- try a club. It can be daunting at first, but a lot of that is due to external rubbish like playing on a clock, formal challenge rules, tracking tiles, and so forth. The game itself is what you're used to.
That said, there are a handful of basic, basic things that set even the lowliest club player above all but the most competitive 'kitchen-table' player. You can consider these a 'bag of tricks' if you like:
Playing for score (not just to 'use up tiles' or 'make cool words')
Rudiments of 'defense' -- such as not putting vowels next to premium squares (if possible)
Rudiments of 'rack-balancing' -- as one expert told me early on: "it's not the tiles you play, it's the tiles you keep"
Being a little more willing than you might be used to, to forfeit a turn in order to exchange some tiles. You can only stare in despair at IIIIUUW or KDNNJQY for so long.
learning the tricks of parallel play -- forming multiple words, even with 1-point tiles on non-premium squares, will multiply your scores. Of course in order to do this, you need to...
Know the two-letter words
Other lists that are memorized quite early on include: the three-letter words; the Q-not-followed-by-a-U words; the 5-letter-words with 4 vowels in them; and a handful of the highest-probability 7-letter words, to boost 50-point-bonus scoring power.
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