From the Wall Street Journal, a fascinating report on Scrabble and the national championship.
RENO, Nev. — The best play of the 2005 National Scrabble Championship didn’t occur during yesterday’s beautiful five-game final match between a Thai student and an American mortgage underwriter.
Nope, for my money it happened on Tuesday, during the 25th round of the 28-game affair, in the second division in the six-division, 700-person field, in a game that had no effect on who’d be crowned king of the Scrabble world.
Rita Norr of Danbury Conn., the only woman ever to win a national championship, in 1987, played the word MATERIAL. In one go, Andrew Golding, an IT professional from Verdun, Quebec, placed RE in front of it and IZE at the end to make REMATERIALIZE. The R landed on a triple-word-score square, and the word totaled 93 points. Rita later tacked on a D: REMATERIALIZED. A 14-letter word. There are 15 rows on a Scrabble board.
After the game, world filtered around the giant playing room. A crowd gathered around the table; 14-letter words don’t happen very often. Photos were taken — of the board, not the players …
Some additional remarks:
… To the people in this tournament, though, Scrabble is a strategy game in which the playing pieces happen to be letters. The purpose of the game is similar to that of other games, physical or mental: to use all of the pieces to their fullest potential to exploit the intricacies of the playing field.
… Scrabble’s secret is that it’s a math game: board geometry, strategic decision making, probability and chance. But nearly every player loves the language part, too, the aesthetics of the letters and letter combinations, the quirky definitions, the sheer breadth and beauty of English.