Wow, you got a lot of subscribers for your first week... Congratulations. I'm about halfway through Unabridged now, which I just checked out a couple weeks ago.
I was unaware how much the Scrabble scene had changed since I quit. I started very early in the Mensa Scrabble-by-Mail SIG in 1994 when I was eight. Back in the '70s, my mom was one of the top three players in the group along with Ken Clark and Tom O'Bannon. She rejoined Mensa and the Scrabble SIG in the late '80s and at one point had the second-highest game score (718 behind only Bob Lipton's 784). When the SIG started (which was before OSPD existed) all players used W-3, so there were lots of useful words like QT before QAT and QI existed. When OSPD was introduced, players had a choice between OSPD and W-3. Usually the original players went with W-3 while the newer players (often from the tournament scene) preferred OSPD. There was also an option to play either OSPD only, W-3 only, or either with "all 2s and 3s" from both dictionaries. Because it was a mail Scrabble group, there were never any prohibitions on looking up words because how could you possibly enforce that? As a result, OSPD won out once word lookup/anagramming guides like the Blank Book, Wordbook, and eventually the Franklin OSPD were all introduced in the late '80s/early '90s. Mom had all of these but we were poorer than almost all the other players so we didn't get them until years later.
Both my parents were Mensa members. I was never interested in trying to join Mensa but I was interested in joining the Scrabble group; at some point in the '80s the group ruled that non-Mensans could join so I was in. The top two players in the group in the '90s were tournament experts Bob Lipton and Luise Shafritz. Lipton was the group's first ratings compiler and Shafritz . They were both Mensans, but allowing non-Mensans to join led to the entries of a bunch of other tournament players in subsequent years. (Chuck Armstrong and Peter Morris were even members! Very, very briefly; hilariously, Armstrong played only a single game, set the then all-time high score record, and never played again.)
I would always open my mom's games and read the group's newsletters before she got to them and try to find plays. One time when I found a better play than she did, she got all pissed and asked if I wanted to play my own games and I said yes. At the age of 14 in 1999 I became the group's statistician and turned what was then a 5-page statistics column into a regular 20-page column every month. I invented lots of statistical categories no one had ever thought about before and wrote blow-by-blow sports report-esque commentaries of games. Under me, the statistics column, which was kind of a minor part of the newsletters in the '90s, suddenly became a centerpiece. I quit the statistics role in 2003 to focus on college and then the group co-ordinator Bob Heasley had a heart attack a few months later and the group never really recovered. It lingered on until the late 2010s or so and I had returned as statistician while doubling up as the group's third ratings compiler after Lipton and Dick Lazaro, but it was never the same. There were some hilarious moments. After I joined, a bunch of the other yuppie players in the group (who were usually not very good players) pretty much forced their similarly-aged kids into the group to compete with me, and they were all matched in games with me and only me. I was blowing the crap out of all of them so badly they all quit before the games were half-over. One of their parents accused my mom of making my plays for me. She did not. I made my own plays. Of course, I searched for words using the Franklin OSPD, but all the adult players were doing that to, so... I didn't even WANT to play the kids! I wanted to play the adult players but some of them didn't want to play me because they "didn't want to be beaten by a kid", but I was pretty much universally accepted by the end of the millennium.
Scrabble-by-Mail play was different than regular play because every four months, a game would be released that had a particular "letter sequence". Players got to see all 100 letters in order in advance, knowing exactly what was coming. So the strategy was very different as the objective was simply to force the bad tile combinations on your opponent, keep the good tile combinations by yourself, and set up unblockable bingos with complete certainty. This really showed up in my adult playing in tournaments also. My strategy was always better than my word knowledge. I know everybody likes to say that, but Scrabble-by-Mail gave me a lot of experience in strategy and setups and shit like that, but I never quite got around to diligent word study like I was supposed to. There's even mathematical proof for what I'm saying. According to Josh Castellano's Random Racer site (https://randomracer.com/legacy/leaderboard.html#Bingo%20Probabilities), I had the lowest probability of bingos played among every player ever. That HAS to mean my strategy was carrying me well over my word knowledge, right? Which ties right back to my background where I expended a lot of energy on strategy but not enough on word acquisition. Even though I had both the OSPD1/OSPD2 and Wordbook in the house at an auspicious age and I was already well aware that tournaments existed from mentions in the Scrabble-by-Mail newsletters, I just never bothered memorizing everything even though I had all the tools, mainly because I was in Syracuse, I was poor, and neither of my parents ever went anywhere so I had no access to tournaments or clubs. Boy, I WISH school Scrabble had existed then to motivate me or something. I kind of feel like based on my background and how young I was, I eventually should've become some championship-caliber player or something and I set way too high expectations for myself while refusing to put in the work for diligent word study, so it was perhaps inevitable that I was miserable once I finally entered tournaments as an adult. I am the aftergifted poster boy. (Of course I later became this niche celebrity gamer, the supposed fastest typist of the 2010s, and finally found my niche as an author, enjoying that more than I ever enjoyed Scrabble tournaments or actually competing at typing really...) (1/2)
Did I really write "doing that to" and "three mnutes a site"? lol
Also embarrassed by the typos, but I didn't realize there wasn't an edit function on here. I do feel so much dumber than I was 10-20 years ago, so that tracks...
I never could afford to get to many tournaments so I almost entirely played online for years and I think that gave me a skewed perspective as well. Almost all the expert players wanted to play ISC games at three minutes a site where if you go more than one minute over, you forfeit even when you're leading. That really, REALLY stressed me out and was not fun for me. Now I realize why. Games like that are too shorrt for anybody to properly strategize. Games of that length are 100% "Do you know the words? Do you see the best plays INSTANTLY?" I remember Matt Canik once thought I was a serious up-and-comer and then changed his mind after I lost to him 19 games in a row in a blitz marathon, but now I get it. My word knowledge was so poor relative to everyone I was playing against that they all saw great plays instantly and I did not, while I was always at my best at slow-burn strategies (the gap between my skill in 25 minute games and my skill in 3 minute games was WAY starker than most of the other players as a result, I think). But the fact that none of the good players wanted to play anything but blitz made me think I was worse than I was because fast play accentuated my weaknesses, but seemingly nobody good other than Ben Schoenbrun wanted to play slower games...
I know almost all the elder millennials will tell you they got into Scrabble because of Word Freak, but it was the opposite for me. I got into Word Freak because Judy Yavner, one of the top Scrabble-by-Mail players for many years (but I don't think she ever played a tournament), told me about your book when we were playing. In our game, I set up the nine-letter word iguanodon (using a wordfinder admittedly, but I already knew it), but one of the Scrabble-by-Mail oddities is that we used W-3 for words longer than eight letters while tournaments used Merriam-Webster's Tenth Collegiate at the time (I think). Iguanodon was capitalized in W-3 but lowercase in MW10. That technically made the play unacceptable and she told me that, but Judy was so impressed she didn't challenge. Anyway, she told me about your book so from then on I really wanted to go to tournaments. One of the reasons I was so excited to go to Cornell in 2003 was because I thought there was a regular Scrabble club in Ithaca, but Rich Baker (who ran it) had apparently just moved and it no longer existed. My first course at Cornell was a freshman writing seminar called "The Anthropology of Imaginary Subcultures". We studied the SCA, Trekkies, and comic book fandoms; I guess this was several years ahead of its time. I convinced him to write my final paper on tournament Scrabble and I used Word Freak as the source for most of it. Eventually, I quoted you in my own typing history/memoir/guide Nerds per Minute. (Basically, I was trying to write the typing book equivalent of what Word Freak was for Scrabble, Ken Jennings's Brainiac was for trivia, and Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein was for memory competitions, and I think I succeeded.) While I don't think I regret quitting Scrabble and I think both that book and the current book I am writing were better uses of my time and more fun, I guess your post and your book triggered a lot of memories for me.
I had an OSPD1 and OSPD2 in the house as I said, but I never bought the other ones once they were ironically no longer official either for Scrabble-by-Mail or for tournaments (I think I got a later edition in my swag bag at the 2014 Nationals). I had admittedly noticed there were more differences between OSPD and TWL than just the swear words and the slurs over time. Apparently, at some point TWL started adding lots of brand names like JELLO that OSPD was rejecting (correctly, I think; I'm not convinced anyone used jello generically the way they used xerox) and there were other words that you almost never saw uncapitalized like JURASSIC that dubiously made it in, so I guess that was the start of it? I remember Carl Johnson making fun of a lot of the words added in that update on his LiveJournal. I didn't bother looking at any of the post-OSPD2 OSPDs so I was unaware of how much they had diverged. I don't think I even knew JAKER! But then, lazy studier and all. I had also never heard of the Scrabble Word Guide despite all the books I had at home.
I think ultimately, you've convinced me that the North American word list (all of them) should just go back to OSPD. I really did think the swear words, the slurs, and certain brand names were the only differences and I was unaware how far NASPA had spread its wings in the years since. But I guess now that there are apps based on all these individual word lists, that will never happen. I remember that quote from Word Freak about Joel Sherman wanting to see Scrabble become the hot new sport. That was never going to hhappen in the first place, but it's CERTAINLY not going to happen with six different lexicons or whatever.
I know this was much more than you either needed or desired to read... (2/2)
Wow, you got a lot of subscribers for your first week... Congratulations. I'm about halfway through Unabridged now, which I just checked out a couple weeks ago.
I was unaware how much the Scrabble scene had changed since I quit. I started very early in the Mensa Scrabble-by-Mail SIG in 1994 when I was eight. Back in the '70s, my mom was one of the top three players in the group along with Ken Clark and Tom O'Bannon. She rejoined Mensa and the Scrabble SIG in the late '80s and at one point had the second-highest game score (718 behind only Bob Lipton's 784). When the SIG started (which was before OSPD existed) all players used W-3, so there were lots of useful words like QT before QAT and QI existed. When OSPD was introduced, players had a choice between OSPD and W-3. Usually the original players went with W-3 while the newer players (often from the tournament scene) preferred OSPD. There was also an option to play either OSPD only, W-3 only, or either with "all 2s and 3s" from both dictionaries. Because it was a mail Scrabble group, there were never any prohibitions on looking up words because how could you possibly enforce that? As a result, OSPD won out once word lookup/anagramming guides like the Blank Book, Wordbook, and eventually the Franklin OSPD were all introduced in the late '80s/early '90s. Mom had all of these but we were poorer than almost all the other players so we didn't get them until years later.
Both my parents were Mensa members. I was never interested in trying to join Mensa but I was interested in joining the Scrabble group; at some point in the '80s the group ruled that non-Mensans could join so I was in. The top two players in the group in the '90s were tournament experts Bob Lipton and Luise Shafritz. Lipton was the group's first ratings compiler and Shafritz . They were both Mensans, but allowing non-Mensans to join led to the entries of a bunch of other tournament players in subsequent years. (Chuck Armstrong and Peter Morris were even members! Very, very briefly; hilariously, Armstrong played only a single game, set the then all-time high score record, and never played again.)
I would always open my mom's games and read the group's newsletters before she got to them and try to find plays. One time when I found a better play than she did, she got all pissed and asked if I wanted to play my own games and I said yes. At the age of 14 in 1999 I became the group's statistician and turned what was then a 5-page statistics column into a regular 20-page column every month. I invented lots of statistical categories no one had ever thought about before and wrote blow-by-blow sports report-esque commentaries of games. Under me, the statistics column, which was kind of a minor part of the newsletters in the '90s, suddenly became a centerpiece. I quit the statistics role in 2003 to focus on college and then the group co-ordinator Bob Heasley had a heart attack a few months later and the group never really recovered. It lingered on until the late 2010s or so and I had returned as statistician while doubling up as the group's third ratings compiler after Lipton and Dick Lazaro, but it was never the same. There were some hilarious moments. After I joined, a bunch of the other yuppie players in the group (who were usually not very good players) pretty much forced their similarly-aged kids into the group to compete with me, and they were all matched in games with me and only me. I was blowing the crap out of all of them so badly they all quit before the games were half-over. One of their parents accused my mom of making my plays for me. She did not. I made my own plays. Of course, I searched for words using the Franklin OSPD, but all the adult players were doing that to, so... I didn't even WANT to play the kids! I wanted to play the adult players but some of them didn't want to play me because they "didn't want to be beaten by a kid", but I was pretty much universally accepted by the end of the millennium.
Scrabble-by-Mail play was different than regular play because every four months, a game would be released that had a particular "letter sequence". Players got to see all 100 letters in order in advance, knowing exactly what was coming. So the strategy was very different as the objective was simply to force the bad tile combinations on your opponent, keep the good tile combinations by yourself, and set up unblockable bingos with complete certainty. This really showed up in my adult playing in tournaments also. My strategy was always better than my word knowledge. I know everybody likes to say that, but Scrabble-by-Mail gave me a lot of experience in strategy and setups and shit like that, but I never quite got around to diligent word study like I was supposed to. There's even mathematical proof for what I'm saying. According to Josh Castellano's Random Racer site (https://randomracer.com/legacy/leaderboard.html#Bingo%20Probabilities), I had the lowest probability of bingos played among every player ever. That HAS to mean my strategy was carrying me well over my word knowledge, right? Which ties right back to my background where I expended a lot of energy on strategy but not enough on word acquisition. Even though I had both the OSPD1/OSPD2 and Wordbook in the house at an auspicious age and I was already well aware that tournaments existed from mentions in the Scrabble-by-Mail newsletters, I just never bothered memorizing everything even though I had all the tools, mainly because I was in Syracuse, I was poor, and neither of my parents ever went anywhere so I had no access to tournaments or clubs. Boy, I WISH school Scrabble had existed then to motivate me or something. I kind of feel like based on my background and how young I was, I eventually should've become some championship-caliber player or something and I set way too high expectations for myself while refusing to put in the work for diligent word study, so it was perhaps inevitable that I was miserable once I finally entered tournaments as an adult. I am the aftergifted poster boy. (Of course I later became this niche celebrity gamer, the supposed fastest typist of the 2010s, and finally found my niche as an author, enjoying that more than I ever enjoyed Scrabble tournaments or actually competing at typing really...) (1/2)
Did I really write "doing that to" and "three mnutes a site"? lol
Also embarrassed by the typos, but I didn't realize there wasn't an edit function on here. I do feel so much dumber than I was 10-20 years ago, so that tracks...
Shafritz was the statistician. Sorry, I forgot to finish that sentence.
I never could afford to get to many tournaments so I almost entirely played online for years and I think that gave me a skewed perspective as well. Almost all the expert players wanted to play ISC games at three minutes a site where if you go more than one minute over, you forfeit even when you're leading. That really, REALLY stressed me out and was not fun for me. Now I realize why. Games like that are too shorrt for anybody to properly strategize. Games of that length are 100% "Do you know the words? Do you see the best plays INSTANTLY?" I remember Matt Canik once thought I was a serious up-and-comer and then changed his mind after I lost to him 19 games in a row in a blitz marathon, but now I get it. My word knowledge was so poor relative to everyone I was playing against that they all saw great plays instantly and I did not, while I was always at my best at slow-burn strategies (the gap between my skill in 25 minute games and my skill in 3 minute games was WAY starker than most of the other players as a result, I think). But the fact that none of the good players wanted to play anything but blitz made me think I was worse than I was because fast play accentuated my weaknesses, but seemingly nobody good other than Ben Schoenbrun wanted to play slower games...
I know almost all the elder millennials will tell you they got into Scrabble because of Word Freak, but it was the opposite for me. I got into Word Freak because Judy Yavner, one of the top Scrabble-by-Mail players for many years (but I don't think she ever played a tournament), told me about your book when we were playing. In our game, I set up the nine-letter word iguanodon (using a wordfinder admittedly, but I already knew it), but one of the Scrabble-by-Mail oddities is that we used W-3 for words longer than eight letters while tournaments used Merriam-Webster's Tenth Collegiate at the time (I think). Iguanodon was capitalized in W-3 but lowercase in MW10. That technically made the play unacceptable and she told me that, but Judy was so impressed she didn't challenge. Anyway, she told me about your book so from then on I really wanted to go to tournaments. One of the reasons I was so excited to go to Cornell in 2003 was because I thought there was a regular Scrabble club in Ithaca, but Rich Baker (who ran it) had apparently just moved and it no longer existed. My first course at Cornell was a freshman writing seminar called "The Anthropology of Imaginary Subcultures". We studied the SCA, Trekkies, and comic book fandoms; I guess this was several years ahead of its time. I convinced him to write my final paper on tournament Scrabble and I used Word Freak as the source for most of it. Eventually, I quoted you in my own typing history/memoir/guide Nerds per Minute. (Basically, I was trying to write the typing book equivalent of what Word Freak was for Scrabble, Ken Jennings's Brainiac was for trivia, and Joshua Foer's Moonwalking with Einstein was for memory competitions, and I think I succeeded.) While I don't think I regret quitting Scrabble and I think both that book and the current book I am writing were better uses of my time and more fun, I guess your post and your book triggered a lot of memories for me.
I had an OSPD1 and OSPD2 in the house as I said, but I never bought the other ones once they were ironically no longer official either for Scrabble-by-Mail or for tournaments (I think I got a later edition in my swag bag at the 2014 Nationals). I had admittedly noticed there were more differences between OSPD and TWL than just the swear words and the slurs over time. Apparently, at some point TWL started adding lots of brand names like JELLO that OSPD was rejecting (correctly, I think; I'm not convinced anyone used jello generically the way they used xerox) and there were other words that you almost never saw uncapitalized like JURASSIC that dubiously made it in, so I guess that was the start of it? I remember Carl Johnson making fun of a lot of the words added in that update on his LiveJournal. I didn't bother looking at any of the post-OSPD2 OSPDs so I was unaware of how much they had diverged. I don't think I even knew JAKER! But then, lazy studier and all. I had also never heard of the Scrabble Word Guide despite all the books I had at home.
I think ultimately, you've convinced me that the North American word list (all of them) should just go back to OSPD. I really did think the swear words, the slurs, and certain brand names were the only differences and I was unaware how far NASPA had spread its wings in the years since. But I guess now that there are apps based on all these individual word lists, that will never happen. I remember that quote from Word Freak about Joel Sherman wanting to see Scrabble become the hot new sport. That was never going to hhappen in the first place, but it's CERTAINLY not going to happen with six different lexicons or whatever.
I know this was much more than you either needed or desired to read... (2/2)
Great article. Janet than the last!
Damn auto correct! Jaker
Excellent read!