Tiles and tribulations
Montrealer wins big in Scrabble tournament
Heading into the Scrabble Players Championship, North America’s largest Scrabble tournament, Montrealer Michael Fagen was seeded in the bottom half of his division: 28th of 42 players.
“No one expected me to win,” he said. “And I certainly didn’t expect to win.”
But Fagen, 27, surprised himself by defeating secondseeded Orry Swift, an accounting professor from Texas, in a best-of-five final for the 2022 championship last Wednesday. He came home from the tournament, held in Baltimore this year, with a trophy and US$10,000 in prize money.
“It was memorable — and thrilling,” he said.
“Michael was coming into the tournament definitely as an underdog,” said Josh Greenway, a competitive player and tournament organizer and media director for the Baltimore event. “What he pulled off here is really important in our community.”
Word knowledge is important in Scrabble, of course, but so is how a player views the board and controls it, he said. Finding places on the board where you can score is also important.
“I have exceptional spatial ability. If the word is one I know, there is a good chance I will find it,” said Fagen, a selfdescribed “word nerd.”
“A lot of people think of me as a bit nerdy, but I really enjoy the game,” he said.
He enjoys the challenge as well as the social aspect of gathering with people to do something they all love.
Fagen started to form words with fridge magnets when he was three and It occurred to his parents, casual Scrabble players, that “I had a talent.”
At 14, he joined the Montreal Scrabble Club, which meets Wednesday evenings in Côte-St-Luc.
“There were a lot of good players and when I first started at the club, it was fairly intimidating,” he recalled. But he learned Scrabble basics from them, then advanced strategy.
Playing against Fagen is “like playing against a computer,” said Bernard Gotlieb, the club’s founding president. “I can’t beat him. He’s a very strong player whose word power and strategy are awesome. Impeccable. When he plays, he’s very focused and immersed in his thinking and concentration.”
Since his first tournament in 2011, Fagen has played 800 games in more than 50 tournaments.
“I got to meet some really good players,” he said. “You can learn from other people who play well.”
In Scrabble, each player draws tiles with letters from a bag to form words on a 15-by15-inch crossword-style grid. Each Scrabble game has 100 tiles — there are nine As, two Bs, 12 Es and so forth — and each letter is marked with a specific point value, ranging from one to 10 points (Q and Z). Each player’s rack — the shelf holding the tiles — must hold seven tiles. The goal is to get more points than your opponent.
“You need a good balance of consonants and vowels. Too many vowels can make prospects quite slim, so there is an element of luck,” Fagen said.
And which tiles a player holds back is almost as important as the tiles he plays. “You want to hold back for the next turn.”
Standard time allotment in club and tournament games is 25 minutes for each player. “Sometimes you know your best play and sometimes it’s not so obvious and you can spend five to 10 minutes making a play.”
Competitive players use tracking sheets to monitor what tiles have been played, especially important “when the bag is low on tiles and you can figure out what tiles your opponent most likely has,” Fagen said.
There is also a lot of math in competitive Scrabble, “lots of computations — I have always known I am amazing at mathematical calculations.”
Fagen was a strong student in pure and applied science at Dawson College and started an accounting degree at Concordia University, although he did not complete it. He enjoys data entry and data analysis; when the COVID-19 pandemic took hold in March 2020, he left a job in data entry.