against the computer with its gaudy eight-colour display. Before long it would come up with a prompt asking me if I was sure about that word I’d just played. Because it couldn’t hold all of the words in its puny memory, it politely enquired quite often. At five years old my vocabulary was a bit shaky but I used to give myself the benefit of the doubt. If it wasn’t a word it should be anyway, right?
That was back in 1986. According to my partner Karen I still spend too much time on the computer. The instruments may have evolved, but I still love my games. Having spent a lot of my youth with pith-helmeted sabremen, blue hedgehogs, and dark elves whizzing across the screen, I eventually graduated to more cerebral distractions. I got attached to the internet at college and university before wandering to my first Scrabble Club in 2003.
In truth I had been hooked by word games for a while, playing all sorts of them on the web. Scrabble was just the best one. I played my first tournament later that year and made it my goal to win a local one-day event, then a weekend tourney, and so on. Countdown (a words and numbers TV show in the UK) came along four years later. I took time out from Scrabble to concentrate on it and was fortunate enough to win the series.
Recently I’ve become increasingly involved with Scrabble associations, their websites, and running or organizing tournaments. I particularly enjoy being part of big events, even when I’m not playing. It also feels good contributing to such a wonderful community.
More personally I’m a mathematical, scientific sort of guy. I like my technology, but I also like to be outdoors and travel. I enjoy characterful villages and towns over big bustling cities. I grew up in Norton, near Stockton-on-Tees in the northeast of England, with a stint at university in Sheffield. In 2014 I moved to Guisborough, a lovely little town on the outskirts of the North York Moors with my partner Karen and three soppy little dogs, Molly, Benny, and Charlie.
The journey really began when I reached my late teens. I had played Scrabble™ once in a while during childhood, but it couldn’t compete with joystick-waggling on the ZX Sinclair Spectrum, button-bashing on the Sega Mega Drive, and later those countless hours juggling virtual memory in DOS, occasionally interrupted by playing the computer game I was trying to get working. By the late 90s, the internet was starting to take off, and that’s when I got into word games.
Dial-up modems were the order of the day. I can still remember the high-pitched tone it generated on attempting to connect to the web, then me holding my breath on whether the attempt was successful or not. I loved playing games online. It certainly wasn’t for the faint-hearted, but it never really bothered me. I spent many an hour chatting, playing, and arguing with Americans. I felt those across the Atlantic needed to be enlightened about cricket and rugby – much better than that baseball and gridiron malarkey. After racking up hundreds of pounds in phone bills, I went to university in Sheffield and discovered the joys of computer rooms with what was then super-fast internet. I moved from playing a range of games, particularly the card game Spades, to almost exclusively playing quick word games. I mostly played a clone of Scrabble, which had more tiles, a different board, and a love of dishing out Cs, Is, and Gs, which were all worth a measly one point. You also had to place each letter by hand. It was an adrenalin rush to beat people with seconds remaining at the end.
One thing that hasn’t changed unfortunately was the level of cheating going on over the internet. It was mostly what’s called “anagramming”: putting a set of letters into a word-finder and playing what comes up. The quick games just made even more obvious the disparity between the obscure finds and the bad moves. Some even went further, having macros to place tiles almost instantly and programs (or bots) that played the game for them. It was a free-for-all. From the chaos emerged a number of players who have gone on to win big titles in the World of Scrabble.
Towards the end of my three-year spell at university I made the decision to look for a Scrabble Club. Being an exceptionally lazy individual, I was fortunate that all the details of a local club were on a website, only one of a handful that were. I’m not sure I’d have pursued it if I’d had to chase up the info. I always wonder how many people there are who would love the club and tournament scene but don’t realize what is out there.
One of the issues of playing online was the difference in the dictionary, or word list as it’s also known. The games I’d enjoyed over the internet used an old American word list. The international word list (Collins Official Scrabble Words) is made up of the American one, plus UK sources. I had a good knowledge of the most useful American words, but all the British-only words were new to me. Even more word games are available these days, with a variety of dictionaries in use, although the vast majority of words are common to all of them. So one cold dark night towards the end of winter, I ambled to Sheffield Psalter Scrabble Club, which met every week at a local pub. I didn’t have a board but it wasn’t a problem as there is always plenty of equipment to go round at clubs and tourneys. So I turned up with my pen and paper (the only essentials as both players need to keep score) with no idea what to expect. After a few timid hellos I sat down and played. There was a nice friendly atmosphere with a whole spectrum of people there from different backgrounds, from young students to pensioners. I won most games, but they were closely fought, competitive matches and I lost a fair few too. I fared reasonably well against everyone at the club except for one player, who beat me every time. In the UK, most Scrabble clubs and tournaments are overseen by the Association of British Scrabble Players (ABSP), who maintain a website, rules, tournament calendar and publish a magazine, amongst other things you’d expect from an association. The player who beat me each time, Lewis Mackay, was one of the top ranked players in the country.
One of the things most people don’t realize is just how much skill is in Scrabble. At this club Lewis would beat the next best player nine times out of ten, if not more. The next best player would beat some other players nine times out of ten, and they in turn would beat the weakest player nine times out of ten. On a good night a dozen players would turn up but still this broad range of abilities existed. This is typical of most clubs.
After a few months a group of us from the club travelled to a charity tournament. I still remember flashes of it, such as the car journey passing Chesterfield’s wonky spire. There are an awful lot of these charity events in the UK. They are not official in the sense of contributing to the national ranking system, but they’re interesting little excursions, usually quite short, taking place in churches or similar venues and often raising money for a good cause. Whilst clubs and tourneys have a broad range of demographics collectively, certain events appeal to some more than others. So I arrived in what was something akin to a church hall. Raffles and cakes adorned the sides, with Scrabblers and Scrabble boards in the middle. I would be lying if I said there weren’t a good number of light-grey perms about too. After an introduction, the first round of fixtures was read out aloud and pinned on the wall, accompanied by a fair bit of squinting.
I don’t remember a great deal about the games, only that I had three of them. I won my first two matches by a comfortable margin. This gave me a high positive spread. Spread is what Scrabblers call the points difference. If you win a game 400–325 then you’re said to have a spread of +75. It is accumulated over a competition, so if you win again by fifty then your overall spread is +125, lose and the spread is reduced and can become negative if you concede more points than you score. Wins are the first factor in determing a rank position. If two people have the same number of wins, then spread is the tie-breaker.
My third and final game was against a similarly young fellow called Chris. I was leading by 50–60 points and feeling reasonably confident when he tried JEANED. I had a feeling it was invalid, but as a relatively new player, you rarely feel certain either way about plausible words like that. So there’s always some anticipation when a move is adjudicated. I challenged the word, and fortunately for me it wasn’t allowed. Chris was ahead of his time, because JEANED was added to the word list a few years later.
That gave me a bit more breathing space and I went on to win comfortably. I then needed to see if other results went my way. If someone else on two wins had won big they would have overtaken