Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis

Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis

Author:Stefan Fatsis [Fatsis, Stefan]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: word freak, stefan fatsis, scrabble
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
Published: 2001-07-06T16:00:00+00:00


Lester played in the first New York Scrabble tournament. It was staged in the late 1960s by the proprietor of a new games parlor on 72nd Street between Broadway and Amsterdam Avenue called the Chess House. A double round robin in which the ten entrants played each other twice, whenever they could over two weeks, the tournament awarded a top prize of $35. (It wasn’t, however, the first tournament anywhere; there was one in Sparks, Nevada, of all places, in 1961, and it’s possible that others were held even earlier.)

Lester’s Scrabble supremacy was being challenged by Mike Senkiewicz, a recent Iona College English grad who spent four or five hours a day at the Flea House hustling both chess and Scrabble. (He later would become a U.S. backgammon champion.) Senkiewicz had what Lester and other top players considered a limited working vocabulary. But he did what no one else was doing. He combed through Funk & Wagnalls and compiled lists. He trained himself to count the tiles in his head as they were played, another unheard-of practice. And he learned to play the endgame with precision. Senkiewicz had become a chess master not because he was a genius but because he studied and calculated and concentrated. He applied the same techniques to Scrabble.

Lester, on the other hand, was known as a clever strategist rather than a prodigious memorizer. (Though when his friend Al Tesoro spotted a Funk & Wagnalls on the bedroom floor of the apartment he shared with Ann near Grant’s Tomb, it got back to the Flea House crowd. “Tuches sleeps with the dictionary,” Tesoro reported.) But both he and Mike played the conventional style of the times, which would be discredited by the strategists and mathematicians who took over the game in the 1980s: lay down a lot of tiles early in the game to increase the chances of drawing the blanks and S’s. “Rack balancing” and “rack management”—keeping a healthy balance between vowels and consonants, and retaining bingo-prone letter combinations, like EST, ING, or AENR—were just evolving. One or two bingos a game was a lot.

“No one could touch us,” Lester says. He and Mike staged hours-long sessions at the Flea House. In the Chess House tournament, Lester and Mike waited until the end to play each other—at the Flea House, naturally, rather than the Chess House—by which time each had 15–1 records. Lester drew all the good tiles, and won both games and the $35.

But for Lester, something was changing. Times Square was deteriorating. Thugs seemed omnipresent at the Flea House. And many of the regulars who gave the place its unusual charm—and him decent Scrabble competition—were dying off or moving to other pursuits, like betting on horses. For good competition, it was just Lester and Mike. Lester began to feel uncomfortable spending so much time with Senkiewicz; they didn’t have much in common outside of Scrabble, and he missed the camaraderie of the Flea House crowd and the Gold Rail gang. The combination of



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