“Do you think I can become an expert-level player by the time I turn 40?”

Josh and I are sitting at a picnic table in the park, where we're about to play a consultation game. I'm paying him for Scrabble lessons; maybe there are cooler or wiser ways to spend whatever meager dosh is left over from paying rent and student loans, but it's my money, so there. I ask because I'm already 37, and because I have convinced myself that I can be really good at this game, this game that I find not only fun, but challenging and beautiful in its strange little way. There are a ton of things I could be good at, but I already have all these god damn words rattling around in my head.

“Yeah. Why not?”

Scrabble isn't like chess. It's not the kind of thing where mastery is contingent upon an early start (though it obviously doesn't hurt, see people like Mack Meller or Joey Mallick or Jackson Smylie, or hell, even Josh). I've opted to take the 1999-2001 Stefan Fatsis road to experthood, though I don't have the benefit of PTO, a packed tournament schedule, or being single. I haven't even been able to attend the Montréal Scrabble Club since I've started my new job, on account of my late evening schedule. No, if I'm going to make the arduous trek from an ELO rating of ~900 to one of 1700 by the distant, far-flung year 2028, I'm going to have to grind, but not so much that I'll get sick of this game. So I've taken steps, which include the lessons in the park.

My “regimen,” as it were, is to study sevens and eights and fours and fives not until I'm blue in the face, but while commuting and zoning out in front of the YouTube video essay du jour. I'm also trying to play upwards of four 15-minute games against either BetterBot or STEEBot on Woogles.io. I try to play the right thing in the right spot, and mostly succeed; if I play in the right place but play the wrong word, I'll take it. If I don't know the bingo, it's okay. I'm not an expert (yet), so I'm not berating myself like one.

I. BEILKU?

Ah, the “-like” words. “Like” is one of those versatile suffixes that could conceivably get tacked on any noun in existence and make sense. “Ladderlike slats of light” is a nice little image that would be at home in a poem or essay, but LADDERLIKE* would get challenged off every tournament Scrabble board on the face of the planet. It's one of the perils of logophilic creativity in Scrabble: just because you see and use a word every days doesn't mean you get to play it, at least not yet.[1] The only thing more aggravating that words are the rules that govern them. The Scrabble dictionary is less a dictionary and more a rulebook, and the rules say there are only 88 words ending in “-like” that are playable in NWL, with an additional 24 fanciful “-like” word in the international Collins lexicon; my ORBLIKE# silhouette is not appreciated at home, you see.

I should note that the games I play against the Woogles bots are all void challenge, which is to say illegal words, or phonies, can't hit the board. If I try to play a word that isn't in the dictionary, I get an error message instead of a lost turn. This helps me be a little more creative with my plays.

Man, those back hooks on AD are pretty appetizing, that's where I'd score the most, especially if that K can hit that double-letter square. There's the obvious S hook, but I'm not finding anything. Like, like... BUsLIKE? “The lineman's frame was buslike.” Can't hurt to try, especially in void challenge.

No dice. BUSLIKE* is a phony.

I switch the S to a D. BUdLIKE? There are tons of offbeat botany words in the wild. Survey says?

Number one answer! 87 points. Thank you, Richard Dawson.

I'm ahead by 77 with 19 tiles in the bag when the clock runs out. I don't feel too bad about it going down in the books as a loss.

II. AAEISZ??

Ask any Scrabble player and they will tell you that there can indeed be too much of a good thing when it comes to the beloved blanks. Players of all skill levels speak of “blank blindness,” where your cup runneth over so much you risk drowning. A rack with two blanks is where perception and time go to die.

The instant the second blank appears on my rack, I thing “man, I must have something.” The I in ANERGIAS (which I played earlier, thank you very much) looks like a good spot. I lay down ZES after it, hoping to find something that ends in “-izes.” I shuffle and shuffle and piss away nearly two minutes of clock. I chuck a Hail Mary: AgAt(I)ZES for 80 points.

It stays on the board. I am thrilled with myself. I end up losing this game on time too. The engine says it's only the seventh-best play in the position (it likes Zo(O)S at H12 for 66 points, keeping the juicy AAE? leave). I don't care about what the engine has to say. I am still thrilled with myself. I am getting better at this, and the feeling is intoxicating.

Though I could stand to get a little faster.

[1] To wit, in one of my first club games back in 2023, I played, with the confidence of a man who knew what he was doing, the online-brainrot pronoun WHOMST*.

#scrabble

Thrust awake in the dead of morning, as one is when nursing a cold, I was struck by the kind of question that frequently afflicts the Scrabble-addled: is X word valid in Scrabble?

Because I'm me, I've had the Live in Chicago version of Ween's “The Blarney Stone” on the brain for most of the year (I've spent a lot of time with Ween this year, as a future post will attest to). During the final verse of this particular recording of “The Blarney Stone,” as is the case with the umpteen bootlegs I've inhaled this year, guitarist Dean Ween (aka Mickey Melchiondo) ad-libs various ailments befalling our salty-dog narrator, punctuated with mock disgust by the rest of the band. To wit: “I got zits on my back/I got cancer in my crack/I got tumours on my nutsack!”

And because my brain is broken in the specific way it is, on this congested morning after five-ish hours of fitful sleep, I ask myself: is NUTSACK good?

UNSTACK and UNTACKS are the only NWL words in that mess of letters, but NUTSACK# is good in CSW, and I can already hear select people I know chime in with “and that's why Collins is better.”

#scrabble