As in any 1-on-1 sport, you must start by wrong-footing your opponent. Don't let them think they can read you. If they seem impatient to begin a game, keep talking to your friend about nothing. If they seem eager for mid-game banter, ask them primly to keep it quiet. If they think you're a retired literature professor, show up with A Court of Thorns and Roses:
Over four days in Albany, Scrabble players in the Northeast gather at the New Year to avoid celebrating the holidays with their relatives and having to watch college football. We play 28 games in a hotel ballroom on Wolf Road, next to a really good sushi place called Mr. Wasabi. If your Scrabble rating is just on the cusp of Division B and A, you have to wait until the last minute to see if you're up against people who don't know their 3-letter words or people who think of Scrabble as a Dark Art. I got put in Division A. These are players who know all the 2s, 3s, 4s, and most of the 5s, speak about games having momentum, and assume that the next play by their opponent will be a bingo (using all 7 letters) because it probably will be. The true freaks of the game. Licking my wounds afterwards (I won 12 games, which was about as many as I was expected to), I thought it might be helpful to offer a window into the world of inner Scrabble. Each move listed below is an actual play made during the course of the tournament, in the first case named after the person who made it against me. (Most of the other names have been changed, in case I have to play one of them again.)
The Harshbarger. This is where you deliberately play a bad word (RESPAWN) in the hopes that your opponent will innocently pluralize it (RESPAWNS), allowing you to challenge it off the board when he does. Eric Harshbarger is the first person I've played who freely admitted to doing this. I first saw, or heard about, this perfectly legal move in Buffalo at the National Championships in 2018. Someone had played one on Samantha Howitzer in Division B, who was absolutely fit to be tied about the moral implications of planting a mole and then using it as a sleeper cell to blow up your opponent's network later in the game. The answer, the director patiently explained to her, is to know your words. In my case, I wasn't sure about RESPAWN, but saw that it was itself an anagram of SPAWNER, PAWNERS, and ENWRAPS, so I let it go because it might be good and his letters were going to go down somewhere eventually. I then avoided pluralizing it on the grounds that it might be a trap, which led him to double down on his original move. He played TETRYLS off RESPAWNS for 101 points, confident that I didn't know RESPAWNS was a phony.
The Reverse Harshbarger. This is where you perform a Harshbarger, deliberately playing a bad word in the hopes that your opponent will innocently extend it, but then the word that you thought was a phony actually turns out to be good. This horrifying situation happened to me on Day 2: I played INSHRINE in desperation across the triple, suspecting that it was bad, and my opponent, Mike Ecsedy, accepted it, thinking but not being certain that it was good. He then had the courage to stick a D on it and got a triple both ways (the D was on the top right triple word space) for a zillion points. I challenged his version of my own word, and was shocked to find that it had been INSHRINED in the Scrabble Lexicon. This, my daughter's girlfriend's mother wryly noted that evening back in Vermont, was being "hoist on my own petard."
The Premature Hold. Between every turn there is a moment when a player can interrupt the game and say "hold," in order to think about challenging their opponent's word. A hold takes place on your own time, so you have to wait until the other person hits the clock. A beginner's move is to say "hold" too early, before the opponent has hit their clock, which allows said opponent to quickly remove all traces of the now pretty obviously spurious word and play something else, leaving you in a state of self-loathing for giving the game away. I used to do this all the time, but now I wait to pounce on mistakes until the clock has been hit. But in Division A I discovered a new move: saying "hold" before your opponent has hit their clock to make them think that their word is a phony. (Still following in the back?) I did this by accident, but it worked like a treat. Joe Selenium played CLANSMEN, and I jumped and cried "hold!" (thinking it was KLANSMEN), and then realized too late (thinking of my daughter's girlfriend's Scottish father's clan) that the word was probably good. But the word "hold" had already been spoken, making my opponent think that I knew something he didn't (actually I just can't control the words that come out of my mouth - it's been a problem all my life. Perhaps that's why I enjoy Scrabble so much?). He quickly removed the perfectly good word and never got a chance to bingo again. Ha.
The Wigmore. This move, named after the performing venue where the woman from On Chesil Beach ends up playing Mozart, is where you make your opponent think you have hit the clock so that he ejaculates "hold" too early, allowing you to remove the phony word just in time. In this case, I was the victim rather than the perpetrator: Marmaduke Jinks had just put PAHS on the board and I was trembling with anticipation, waiting for Marmaduke to punch his time clock so I could take the word off. All that studying of 3-letter word hooks was finally going to pay off: I knew that of the 10 letters that could be added before AH (AAH, BAH, DAH, FAH, HAH, LAH, NAH, PAH, RAH, and YAH), only 5 could be pluralized (AAHS, DAHS, FAHS, HAHS, LAHS). The fact that I knew this is, admittedly, pretty sad. I eventually worked out why it's true, though: BAH, NAH, PAH, RAH, and YAH are all interjections, and thus cannot be pluralized, while the others refer to actual things. DAH, FAH, and LAH are all musical notes (hence DAHS, FAHS, LAHS), while AAH and HAH are meta-interjections that can stand on their own as representations of the sound made ("Aah," he breathed, uttering one of many AAHS that he would say over the course of the evening; "Hah," she replied, peppering her conversation with HAHS, as was her wont). So anyway, I'm totally ready to challenge PAHS, as an unpluralizeable interjection. And what does the guy do? He sees that I'm barely containing my excitement (this is almost exactly like waiting to call a bluff in poker). Either he truly doesn't know his 3-letter word hooks, or he is hoping that I don't know them. So he skins Schroedinger's cat: he makes the gesture of tapping the clock, and his fingernail touches the button without pressing it down. This is a genius move, high in the annals of the Dark Arts of Scrabble, a cosmic reach-around that makes me blurt "hold!" in ecstasy, only to be told that "I haven't hit the clock yet," with a casual gesture to the time indicator, which is still flashing on Marmaduke's side. PAHS then comes off, and I lose the game and all respect for humanity as I know it.
The Pre-Existing Condition. Here the player plays detective, and discovers an irregularity that has carried forward from the previous game. In every game, when you are fortunate enough to be able to play a blank on the board, you have to indicate what letter the blank represents on a slip of paper provided for that purpose, known as the blank slip. In Albany, these had been upgraded to dry-erase boards. This allows for absolutely clarity in terms of the word you are trying to play. (At this level, you are not allowed to say the word played, in case you try to make a bad word sound plausible, or (more often) try to introduce a note of uncertainty in your presentation of a perfectly good word: (with raised intonation): LARKISH?". This is called "coffee-housing" and can lead to a loss of turn.) So in this case I played RACEDAYS without adding a hidden question mark ("RACEDAYS?") or an emphatic exclamation mark ("RACEDAYS!"), but just entering the blank, which was a C, on the board provided for the purpose. You can see the word, with its attractive asterisk, on the far right of the board above. The fact that there is no such word (the only legitimate anagram with these letters is DAYCARES, but it wouldn't go down) is neither here nor there - I didn't know that, or I probably wouldn't have played RACEDAYS, and he didn't know that, or he would have challenged the word. What he did instead was say "hold," think for 4 and a half minutes and then say quietly but firmly "I don't like the look of that blank." What he had realized, and I had failed to see, is that I had not circled the C properly on the dry-erase board. The director was called in and determined that my attempts to circle the C had been improper. I remonstrated that I had cried "C! C!" while putting it down, and was told severely but fairly that no verbal indication could be trusted (see above), and only the written record could indicate intent. I further remonstrated that the reason I had been verbally articulating the letter of the blank in the third position of RA_EDAYS (I mean seriously - what else could it have been) was because the dry-erase pen provided for the purpose didn't work, having been exposed to the air too long. There was an indentation around the C on the dry erase board made by my exhausted pen: he examined the indentation and determined it was not conclusive. I knew you had to be very careful with these blank slips - once I had two blanks and put them down on the slip in the wrong order and had to remove the word, losing a turn. Now that the blank slips had evolved into dry-erase boards, an ecological improvement that introduced an uncertain and unproven new technology into the art of writing down letters to indicate blanks, you had to be careful that the blank indicated in the previous game had been fully erased, and in this case under "Second Blank" there was a clear circle around the "O" from the game before. This was because on arriving at the table I had failed to erase it, and on arriving at the moment of new inscription I had left it there, not being able to erase it for the same reason that I couldn't write the "C" (the pen was defective - I had an ink stain on my finger from trying to remove the circled "O" by hand). I tried to show the nature of the non-working pen but it had magically filled back with ink after having its cap replaced and now it worked just fine. (In retrospect, I now think that I had grabbed the pen by the wrong end and had tried to write the "C" with the eraser and erase the "O" with the pen side. That would explain why the "O" wouldn't come out and why the "C" left no indentation. Like I said, new technology.) The director sniffed and said that the presence of the pre-existing "O" was a problem. My opponent graciously admitted that it had been there the whole time, lending credence to my story of the intermittently non-working pen, and allowing for the possibility of a mutual oversight. I pointed out that RAOEDAYS was an unlikely word to play in the circumstances and the director glared at me, repeating that the written record was all there was to go on. Since it was still my opponent's turn, the challenge that the blank had been incorrectly indicated was sustained, and thankfully I was only given a time penalty, having to make the necessary erasing of the O and circling of the C on my own time. Unfortunately, this meant that my clock, which was at 38 seconds, dwindled to 14 seconds. Two moves later, I went out with my last letter and had won the game by 8 points. But I looked at my clock, which now stood at -1.4 seconds, leading to a 10-point deduction. I had lost the game by 2 points, but gained a new appreciation for Scrabble and its Dark Arts.
Shithousery. This term, appropriated from English Football, is the generally accepted phrase for ostensibly good-natured banter that is actually carefully calculated to undermine the opposition, even to the point of questioning the value of their very existence. Examples are "Is this a library?" chanted by the away fans during a particularly quiet spell of a game, or "stay humble, eh?" spoken quietly to Erling Haaland before he takes a penalty (he missed). The undisputed king of the art in Division A is Ben Bloom, a kind and funny man whose book of poems about his life with disability is available from Amazon:
Ben has brain damage, which means it takes him a bit longer to get letters out of the bag. Other people ask for accommodations for minor injuries - not Ben. His disease doesn't affect his Scrabble playing, which is lethal and fast. He can add up point scores in his head in the time it takes you to put the letters down. He's utterly brilliant. Unfortunately, he's from Manchester, which means he's a Man City fan (the "blue sheep" of his family, he says, since everyone else supports Man Utd). I commiserated with him on the decline of Man City's fortunes and he asked which team I supported. I showed him my license plate on my phone (ANF1ELD) and he threw up his arms in mock despair. "Why Liverpool?" he said. I told him why and then admitted that I had once been a Chelsea fan, playing Subbuteo with my brother, who always let me have the blue team so he could play the red one. He was utterly horrified: "You can't change your team!" His T-shirts for the four days of the tournament were, in order, "Shabat Shalom Bitches," "Mountain Jew" (picturing Moses and the Ten Commandments), a Man City jersey with Erling Haaland on the back, and a map of the London Underground. On the third day I went over to him, clapped him on the back and said "I'm really sorry to see you wear a Haaland shirt. I thought you had more sense than that." He flashed back: "I've got brain damage. What's your excuse?"
Like I said, Dark Arts. Go and buy his book. Or you could always read ACOTAR...
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