SECRET WORLD OF THE SCRAMBBLE
Described as wife-swapping without the sex, competitive Scrabble has been rocked by allegations of skulduggery...
IN the beginning, was the word. And the word was often maddeningly short like AA and ZA and occasionally impressively long like OXYPHENBUTAZONE, but was always intended to confound and befuddle opponents in one of the most devilishly simple board games ever devised.
To most of us, Scrabble is largely reminiscent of childhood squabbles over obscure spellings, where the loser settles the matter by slamming the board shut and launching the offending tiles across the living-room floor. All fun and games until someone loses an ‘I’.
Mostly, though, we get over ourselves and get on with our lives, burying the grudge much as we coped with Monopoly-style bankruptcy when landing on Park Lane stacked with hotels by some tycoonish uncle. It is just a game, after all. It doesn’t matter that much.
Except that, for hard-core devotees, Scrabble is quite different from other parlour games. For them, it is the ultimate test of skill, concentration, creativity and quick thinking. It is how they have come to define themselves. They are Scrabblers – the game’s ultra-competitive wing for whom winning is everything.
They train with almost fanatical daily devotion, committing a liturgy of words to memory, testing themselves on solving anagrams against the clock and studying strategies for success for hours on end. The very best can rattle off obscure terms such as AECIA and ATIGI, BANDURA and CONIINES, NY, LITU, QAT and SWARF without breaking sweat – hardly everyday conversational material but potential game-changers for a Scrabbler.
They will do anything in their mental power to boost their vocabulary above the 150,000 words needed to challenge at top level tournaments held around the country almost every week. They are professionals in all but name. And yet there is one shibboleth which remains sacred to the Scrabbler: thou shalt not cheat.
Which is why the Scrabble world was rocked this week after it emerged that a former UK Scrabble champion, who has written every edition of the game’s British bible, Chambers Official Scrabble Lists, has been banned from all competitions for three years for ‘actions that led to a suspicion of cheating’.
Allan Simmons, a leading player for 30 years, was accused of failing to hold the bag of tiles at shoulder height when selecting tiles during a match and of not always displaying an open palm before dipping into the bag. The charge sheet might sound like something from a Monty Python sketch, but it was serious enough to have a giant of the game disbarred for impropriety.
The rules on selecting tiles from cloth bags used in timed matches are notoriously strict. Before picking them, players must show opponents their palm with the fingers splayed to prove they are not secretly dropping unwanted letters into the bag. They are also required to hold the opening of the bag at shoulder height to ensure they cannot be accused of looking at the tiles during selection.
Mr Simmons, 60, who quit his job as an IT project manager to become a full-time Scrabble consultant, denied cheating and said detailed records of his games showed he had suffered the same ‘untimely bad luck from the bag as anyone else’.
His accuser, Lewis Mackay, 32, from Cambridge, raised the alarm after the British Masters in Yarnfield, Gloucestershire, in June. Mr Simmons was banned from competitive games initially for a year, but the punishment was increased to three years by the Association of British Scrabble Players (ABSP) following a second complaint by the director of last year’s Scottish Masters.
The director said he had not raised the alarm at the time because Mr Simmons, from Coldingham, Berwickshire, was such a powerful figure in the game. He had been the Scrabble correspondent for The Times since 2009 but was sacked following the controversy.
Mr Mackay insisted he had been left with no choice but to report Mr Simmons’ conduct. He said: ‘It sours the whole experience entirely when I discover that someone I had a great deal of respect for was not playing in the same manner as the rest of the community.’
He added: ‘The game is nothing without integrity. I hope that many lessons can be learned from this sorry affair by all concerned.’
The main lesson those of us at one remove from this affair might learn is that Scrabblers take their Scrabble incredibly seriously. And what they play has about as much in common with a homely game after the festive turkey as professional golf does with a weekend hack around the municipal course.
And despite presenter Janet Street-Porter once memorably describing competitive Scrabble as more addictive than cocaine, champagne and group sex, it has suffered from an image problem in Britain even before this week’s hoo-ha. ‘I know that people outside the game think it’s really nerdy,’ acknowledged Natalie Zolty, the ABSP’s head of promotions and one of the game’s few top female players.
When she tried to set up a taster session involving current world champion David Eldar at an Oxford café devoted to board games, all she got were funny looks. ‘As soon as I mentioned Scrabble, people’s faces fell. They said, “Oh, we don’t get much call for Scrabble here. That’s something you play at home with your granny”.
‘But the funny thing is it’s so different in other countries. Scrabble is massive in Thailand, especially among schoolkids where it’s part of the curriculum and used to teach English. It’s seen as cool there, and in Nigeria and Pakistan. It’s partly a cultural thing. Being geeky there is quite cool. Being geeky here is not cool at all.’
Now 52, Miss Zolty came to competitions relatively late, just five years ago. She started online, juggling up to 12 games at a time.
‘It is really addictive but there is a horrendous problem with cheating online. There’s not a lot you can do about it other than accept it or only play people in real life.’
Face-to-face tournaments, she says, are the real test. ‘The lack of cheating is one thing,’ she says, without any apparent irony.
‘It’s a big social thing. Most of us now have made friends all over the world, such a diverse community, all sorts of ages and interesting people. A lot of the British tournaments tend to be in hotels, which can make it an expensive hobby. I’m going to one this weekend at the Holiday Inn in Milton Keynes.’
Journalist, author and self-confessed Scrabble addict Jonathan Maitland once suggested the game’s competitive version was like ‘a wife-swapping party but without the sex’ where ‘everyone turns up at a cheap hotel and plays everyone else, non-stop, stopping only for sleep, lavatory breaks and meals’.
Scrabble, he adds, also has its dark side. Lurking beneath the benign camaraderie is a cut-throat determination to destroy one’s opponents.
‘Players have been suspected of swallowing problematic tiles or taking strategic loo breaks to flush them away,’ says Mr Maitland. ‘One competitor was accused of wearing a baseball cap to cheat: his opponent said it shielded his eyes, thus enabling him to peek in the bag for juicier letters.’
THEN there was the curious case of the missing ‘G’. ‘At the 2011 final of the World Scrabble Championships in Warsaw, a Thai and a British player were neck and neck at the end of a crucial game. The Thai competitor noticed the letter ‘G’ had gone missing and accused the Brit of disposing of it to gain an advantage.
The referee was called in, voices were raised and demands made that the opponent be strip-searched. The ‘G’ was eventually found in another player’s trouser pocket and lawsuits were threatened. The controversy simmers to this day.’
Scrabble champions will also spend several hours a week down the gym, believing that physical prowess will boost their mental faculties. Some, inevitably, take it to extremes. The use of so-called ‘smart drugs’ – or cognitive enhancers – to help memorise words has been suspected.
It’s all rather spicy stuff considering the cash rewards are negligible. Eldar pocketed a measly £7,000 with this year’s world title in August at the Nottingham Conference Centre, so why would anyone go to such lengths to lift the trophy? ‘People
play Scrabble competitively for the love of the game and their ratings,’ said Miss Zolty. ‘And there are titles like Grandmaster, as in chess, so they do it for the glory too. There are only about 15 or 20 Grandmasters. You have to achieve a certain ratings level over five years consistently. To reach that level, it takes over your life.
‘The top of the rankings board is very male-dominated. Fewer than ten of the top 100 British players will be women. I am one of them. Partly, I think, because men tend to be more competitive and they really don’t want to lose once they get to that top level. These men tend not to have children. All world champions to date have been men and only one had children when he won, I believe. A lot of older players retire when they start to drop down the ratings.’
So what makes a good Scrabble brain? ‘Most people think you need to be good at English to be good at Scrabble but it’s really a maths game,’ said Miss Zolty, who has a maths degree from Oxford.
‘Generally, the top players are mathematicians, computer programmers, science people and not linguists. We spend ages learning words – starting with two-, threeand four-letter words and working up – but we don’t learn the meanings. They’re just symbols and it’s all about understanding probabilities, the valid combinations and patterns of letters. David Eldar is also a really successful poker player so he has that maths and probability brain.
‘Some of the top players in Thailand don’t even speak very good English, they just learn the words. Former world champion Nigel Richards – reckoned to be the best Scrabble player ever thanks to his photographic memory – recently entered the French-speaking world championships despite not speaking a word of French. He just memorised the French dictionary. And he won. He has an amazing brain.’
Scrabble was invented in 1931 in the garage of an American architect, Alfred Mosher Butts, who wanted to create a word game that combined anagrams and crosswords with chance and skill.
What, one wonders, would he make of today’s top-level rivalries? There are special Scrabble ‘dictionaries’, really just lists of words that players learn by rote, and sophisticated software training programmes. Serious players will practise up to ten hours a day, some taking work sabbaticals to fit in the time. It is important to keep up with new words, such as chillax, hashtag, selfie, vlog and texter, appearing all the time.
Miss Zolty, who runs online firm The Tile Fairy, selling Scrabble equipment and paraphernalia from her Birmingham home, has an app on her smartphone which will cheerfully fire anagrams at her all day long: ‘Each day, I’ll do a few hundred. I can sit and watch TV and do a few.’
HER average score is about 430 – anything over 400 is pretty good – but admits her obsession causes arguments with her partner, Peter, while her teenage son won’t play with her any more. ‘Once you play competitively you can’t go back to playing with family,’ she said.
Miss Zolty finds it awkward to discuss the Simmons scandal as both culprit and accuser are friends of hers: ‘We are all finding this incredibly difficult because it’s quite a small community really.’
As for Mr Simmons, it is time to step away from the gaming table – for now, at least. It is not clear if he will return. He said this week: ‘I had actually been winding down the number of tournaments I play anyway with a view to retiring because I was spending far too much time keeping on top of word learning, coupled with long drives to events and stressful games.
‘I am now going to enjoy more of my world beyond Scrabble which has been somewhat neglected. I will rise above this issue and get on with more important things in life than playing Scrabble.’
Amen to that.