Chicago, 1998. After a 29 round playoff, Jerry Scheiten has made it to the finals of the Scrabble tournament he had entered. Scheiten, a substitute teacher from Buffalo, is 30 points behind his opponent, a 19 year old college student. But Scheiten sees the ideal opportunity to win. “I was sitting there, trying to be as nonchalant as I could,” Scheiten says.
“All he needed to do was block that spot, and he would have won the national championship,” Scheiten says. But the kid, who Scheiten remembers as being exceptionally nervous, played far away from the ideal opportunity. Scheiten then seals the child’s fate, dropping the 50 point bingo that won him the Division Three National Scrabble Championship. “He sat there for eternity,” Scheiten says of his opponent, who looked in awe at the word the teacher from Buffalo had created: IDEALIZED.
Seven years later, Scheiten is once again sitting in front of a Scrabble board, playing under the watchful eye of a chess clock and the finite list of words that the National Scrabble Association has deemed appropriate (japan, a type of black varnish, is ok. Gouda, the name of a cheese and nothing else, is no t). Like most other Thursday evenings, Scheiten is in the Kenmore Baptist church for a meeting of the Buffalo Scrabble Club (BSC). “It’s somewhat anti-climactic I suppose,” Scheiten says. “But the game of Scrabble is still the same, no matter where you play it. It’s just as much fun playing at the local club as it is playing at the national tournament.”
Scheiten is responsible for bringing organized Scrabble to Buffalo. After a childhood filled with spelling bees and crossword puzzles, he was first exposed to organized Scrabble while living in Boston in the late 1970s. “I just sort of said, ‘that’s kind of cool.’ It’s more fun than playing at the kitchen table, and it’s better than just playing with your mother,” he says.
Founded in 1978, the National Scrabble Association (NSA) provides a 45 page rule book for Hasbro’s classic table game. Joan Tondra, the current director of the BSC, says, “Scrabble is enjoyed at home, but club Scrabble has additional rules and policies, ranging from the proper way of taking letters out of the bag (hold the bag at eye level; show your open palm to your opponent; draw the number of tiles needed; place them on your rack or face down on the table), to instructions on recounting the score in the event of a tied game.”
Every week, there are at least three sanctioned tournaments somewhere in the United States or Canada. On this particular Thursday, five members of the Buffalo Scrabble Club share stories of a recent trip to Danbury, Connecticut. The NSA has sanctioned over 500 clubs, and both Tondra and Scheiten agree that the game gives them a great opportunity to see other parts of the country, and meet other Scrabble players.
The tournaments are played with an official word list. There are two lists, one for two to nine letter words, (going from AA to ZYZZYVAS) and another list for long words (ABACTERIAL to ZYGOMORPHY). “Before the dictionary came out, there was no real standard for judging.” Scheiten says.
On this Thursday night at the Kenmore, Randy Greenspan is staring at his board after a first round loss. “I should have challenged SLUTTING, and I should have played MULATTA,” he says, of his opponent’s decision to play the unlisted word. NSA rules allow players to challenge a word they think is not on the list. If it is a fake, the word is removed from the board, and the challenged player loses their turn. But if one challenges a legitimate word, then the challenger loses their turn.
But after 16 years of Scrabble, Greenspan is just happy to be competing. He attributes much of his Scrabble success to pure luck, but it was fate that brought him to meet his fiancé, author Ember Nelson.
Nelson was looking for a way to relax in-between the endless line of surgeries for her daughter Genivive, who was born with cerebral palsy. “I was looking for bingo,” Nelson says. When she came across a Scrabble club, she thought, “I love Scrabble, why not?”
“They did not tell me they were all experts,” Nelson says. “I would go to the club on Tuesday night and get my ass kicked.” Tondra says, “Most of the players who come to the club play competitively. They like winning.” It was only after a few years that Nelson discovered that many of her club mates were nationally ranked Scrabble players.
Fast forward to the Kenmore Baptist Church, and Randy Greenspan is still sulking over his loss, examining every tile on the board, all of which grew out of one center tile in the middle to form a twisting maze of arbitrary words. AORTA is connected to QAT, which is further connected to SLUTTING. “I’m Randy, and I play Scrabble,” says the only person in the room to have taken a trip to the Scrabble world championships.
In 1993, Greenspan, after only five years of playing competitive Scrabble, received an invitation to the world tournament in New York City. His invitation was partially based on the fact that he had won the national tournament in 1988, and had earned a spot in Division One (divisions are based on player’s winning percentages in past tournaments). He went to the World’s three weeks after having heart surgery, and he placed seventeenth. “Just out of the money,” he says.
Though expert Scrabble players can be deadly with the right mix of letters, getting those letters takes a certain amount of just plain luck. Tondra says, “You can be pulling out your hair with four Is and two Es.” The 14 people gathered at the church strive to memorize every two letter word, every word that does not have a vowel, and every Q word without a U after, but the words they can create are still dependent on the letters they draw at random from the bag of tiles. “Compared to chess, the luck factor allows a lower rated player to beat an expert,” Tondra says.
The players gathered at the church are just happy to be playing the game they love. Genivive went to college on a full scholarship while maintaining a 3.9 GPA and attending class in-between treatments for the brain tumor that eventually led to her death. Nelson built up the courage to leave her abusive husband and move to Buffalo with Randy, who she had met at a Scrabble tournament. “We’ve been living for three years in blissful Scrabble harmony,” Nelson says. The past 22 years of her life has been documented in her most recent book, Hardscrabble.
Back in the Kenmore Baptist Church, Scheiten goes two for three. He loses in the final round of the small tournament to Charmain Wolfe, who will spend the rest of the evening in a diner playing Anagrams, another word game, with her friends. Scheiten is annoyed at his loss, and he can recall every wrong move from that losing game, as well as the final game of Nationals. If he wanted to, he could take the correct tiles out of the bag and recreate that fateful day in 1998.
Instead, he snacks on a piece of supermarket lemon cake as Tondra reads out the evening’s high scores. Most days, the standard fare is cookies and lemonade. But last August their ordinary menu gave way to gourmet pizzas and champagne when the Buffalo Scrabble Club was celebrating a wedding anniversary. Greenspan and Nelson plan to marry in the near future, but it will be the second Buffalo Scrabble Club marriage. Scheiten met his wife at the club 15 years ago.
At the end of the evening, Wolfe collects her small cash prize. Tondra, who keeps detailed records of every match, also gives out small tokens for accomplishments such as the highest word score, and the highest bingo score. For one night a week, Buffalo Scrabble fanatics can sit in the same room with people who not only know what a VICUGNA is, but also know how to use it.
