This reminded me of the spelling bee at the start, but quickly turned into a look at some of the "personalities" in the game, and Fatsis' attempt not to become one (while still achieving expert status). I get the appeal of focusing on the characters - in a descriptive sense - but I would have liked to see more balance. The women were barely there and it seems like there were high achievers who also held down day jobs and who I would have liked to hear more from, even if they weren't as quirky. The book was interesting overall and I definitely didn't know the inner workings of competition. Enjoyable as a whole, with some annoyances.

This book went on and on and on. I enjoyed the portions that covered the history of Scrabble and its ongoing evolution, some of the memoir portion, and occasionally the character studies. But when Fatsis word-geeked out and painstakingly detailed the play by play of all those tournaments, my eyes glazed over. It took me 8 months to finish this book! But I still enjoy the game and may make an effort to study some word lists.

Original review written February 9, 2004
I found this book a fascinating example of how diverse and quirky people can be. I love Scrabble, and am a fairly decent "living room" player. Stepping into the world of competitive playing was an eye opener. I am a literate, well educated, articulate person. I was totally stumped by so many of the words that players came up with in the stress of competition. It was a bit frustrating for me, as each time I came across a new word I had to reach for the dictionary to look it up. (Which meant that my reading was somewhat halted- having to make such frequent stops- one page I had to stop 24 times- after that, I refused to keep count- which is good, because I can no longer remember what all the new vocabulary meant!)

I loved reading the history of the game. We have one of the early sets from the 50's and it is a prized possession. No matter how I may lust after the fancy ones that spin and turn, I won't give up my childhood set.

There were things I found distracting when reading the book- because I had to read it in short bursts and hops, I had to constantly refresh myself what some of the shorthand and symbols meant.

I am slightly familiar with the world of competitive chess and the regulars of bingo- of competitive sports as well. This was a glimpse into another type of competitive gaming- and made me itch to get my hands on the scrabble tiles again.

But ultimately, this was so far removed from my scrabble experiences, that I had a hard time relating.

This is an additional comment I made when I read Maggie's review February 10, 2009

I am a total scrabble-holic (finally had to go cold turkey for online scrabble (which was fun because you had all the time you needed to mull over the tiles), because it was eating my life. ) I read this before the invention of online scrabble, where people cheat like the dickens (I'm convinced they have to -- there must be lists of 7 letter words and programs for figuring out combinations etc. That's another reason I quit on-line scrabble. It was too tempting and too easy to potentially cheat, and I don't need that black mark on my soul. I have quite enough already, thank-you-very-much.)

3.5 Stars

Fascinating story of a world I knew nothing about- competitive Scrabble. The best chapters are, as usual, the stories of the premier players. There's a cultish aspect of Fatsis' work; with a board and tiles as the charismatic leader. The history of the game is fairly interesting, but I found the chapters of word lists and memorization techniques and dictionaries increasingly tiring. The strategy discussions are intriguing, with one disturbing exception. Fatsis describes intentionally playing a phony word against a lesser opponenet, who does not challenge it. But when the opponent adds an "s" to the phony, in order to build from it, Fatsis challenges successfully challenges. And he is congratulated for this. But the most startling aspect remains this- we are told that words mean something, are important in our lives, that words convey emotion and knowledge, expertise and ignorance and hatred and love and everything in between. And Scrabble is a word game. But it's not, really. At best Scrabble is a half-word game. It is a game of a collection of letters devoid of meaning.

I lingered over this book
for days. I didn't want
to stop reading about
Scrabble and Scrabble
crazed fanatics.

a fascinating read about a niche (more like a lifestyle) i had no idea was out there (competitive scrabble players with a vocabulary of hundreds of thousands of words and even more tricks up their sleeves)

I feel a bit guilty listing this as "read," because I really only read the first third or so. I just couldn't get into it...I don't know if I'm just too distracted by life at the moment since I had a very similar criticism about another book that I was just reading, but I almost had to keep forcing myself to give this a try. Maybe I expected the real-life characters to be more likeable, kind-of like the documentary version of competitive Scrabble, Word Play. Anyhoo, I would love to know if I'm the only one who had this impression, or if I'm in the minority.

Fatsis, a columnist for various NY magazines, took a year off to investigate the world of competitive Scrabble. As someone who makes a living with words, and who grew up playing Scrabble, Fatsis does more than investigate this world; he immerses himself in it. The book functions half as nonfiction documentary, and half as memoir, as Fatsis details both the professional circuit and his rise through its ranks. Fatsis does a good job of balancing details of Scrabble’s history (both the history of the game and the history of competitive tournaments), in-depth character portraits of the game’s quirkiest top players, and the rapid progression of his own skills. For those interested in getting better at Scrabble, Fatsis also details the lessons he learned and describes the various techniques used by the world’s best players. Ultimately, I had a few issues with the book that prevented it from being anything more than mediocre. First, as hard as Fatsis tries to make the tournaments come to life and convey their excitement, it isn’t enough. Scrabble tournaments simply aren’t exciting unless you are talented enough to grasp (and interested in grasping) the difficulty of the plays upon which the games are won or loss. Describing how playing a five-letter word instead of a seven-letter word cost someone a game doesn’t jump off the page no matter how good the prose. Second, what Fatsis recognizes about competitive Scrabble also becomes the undoing of this book: Scrabble tournaments are won and lost due to a player’s ability to spit out completely obscure words. Not only does this immediately distance 99% of all readers from this insular world, but it also makes the tournament summaries even less accessible. Fatsis describing someone playing WATERZOOI to win doesn’t resonate with anyone. Lastly, despite the book’s attempts to compare Scrabble to all other competitive pursuits and thus make the subject matter more relatable to readers, the obsessive behaviors displayed by the quirky characters upon whom Fatsis focuses his attention only serves to further emphasize how completely unlike other competitive pursuits Scrabble really is. An interesting read in the same way The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat is interesting – you want to read about crazy people. Otherwise, this book is in the take-it-or-leave-it category.

Excellent book which makes Professional Scrabble as exciting as any other sporting event.... Made me want to try to find a local Scrabble club to start playing competitively when I first read this in college a decade ago (did I really just write that?!) I never would have memorized all the legal 2-letter words had it not been for this book!

I'm really enjoying this book and I'm only half-way through! It's by a journalist who wanted to report on the world of competitive Scrabble, but got sucked into it himself. So it's half reporting, half memoir. He tells the stories about the characters (and I do mean characters) that he meets in this world, but he intersperses it with linguistic wordplay; trivia about Scrabble and words and wordplay; some of the amazing plays and games; the history of Scrabble, and games in general in America; issues of lexicography; the politics of everything from choosing word lists to holding tournaments to the fact that, unlike Chess, the game is owned by a corporation; but mostly lots and lots of great word play and wonderful trivia about language and Scrabble. Plus he injects some great quotes by famous people about "words" and "language". And the writing is great. And some of the players he meets are hilarious.

Well, I guess there is a book about everything, even the world of competitive Scrabble.

If I remember correctly, Tom and I found this at a library used book sale, read the back, exchanged a couple of "Eh, why not?"s and added it to our haul. A few months after that, Stefan Fatsis came out with another book and scheduled a book talk at Politics & Prose. We decided to attend. It was an interesting enough talk, but one thing I noticed was that during the Q&A, those doing the questioning continued to steer the conversation back toward Scrabble instead of toward the new book that Fatsis was there to promote. Tom read Word Freak soon after and really enjoyed it; it took me a while to get around to it, but know I can say I've read it too.

It was better than I was expecting. I admit, I was a bit skeptical that Fatsis was going to be able to spend 372 pages talking about Scrabble and hold my interest the entire time. He succeeded. Though the book is wide-ranging in its scope (within the Scrabble universe), it still manages to feel focused, which is a feat. The book covers everything from the origins and history of the game, to the strategy involved at the top levels of play, to the colorful cast of characters that inhabit the competitive circuit (I should get an alliteration award for that sentence...). Woven within these many different topics, we get a front-row seat to watch Fatsis struggle to reach an "expert" rating in competitive Scrabble.

What start out as a George Plimpton-esque bit of "participatory journalism" becomes much more as Fatsis becomes capital-H Hooked on the game. I'm always skeptical of authors who are an active part of the narrative they are writing doing things that are oh-so-conveniently perfect for the story they are trying to tell. That being said, Fatsis strikes me as genuine, both because of how he writes about his frustration and obsession with improving his Scrabble game, as well as the fact that he is still quite highly rated and an active participant in the competitive Scrabble scene over a decade after finishing and publicizing the book (I may have spent some time poking around websites detailing Scrabble player ratings and tournament results).

Fatsis did an excellent job of showing why Scrabble is an atypical board game - one that should be grouped with relatively ancient chess or backgammon instead of its more pedestrian contemporaries like Monopoly or Life. The skill involved in Scrabble is incredible: a mixture of word knowledge via memorization (which as detailed in the book, is insane - tens of thousands of words by the top experts), experience with how to manage the board, as well as having a solid understand of the odds and probability involved in drawing tiles. And, even more impressively, he did so in a way that was actually interesting and made we want to play some Scrabble. No mean feat.

Competitive Scrabble attracts a wide array of individuals, and learning about them and their eccentricities was one of my favorite things about the book. Though many of these experts have their quirks, Fatsis for the most part portrays them in such an endearing manner that I want to hang out with them around a Scrabble board. Again, I may have spent some time looking up some of these folks on the Scrabble website, trying to put faces with names and checking in on whether they are still playing ten years later and if so, how they are faring.

Additionally, in poking around these websites, it appears there have been some rather major changes since Fatsis wrote his book, including the abolishment of the National Scrabble Association, which ran the competitive circuit. I would love an update from Fatsis on the various personalities and state of the game today.

I remember from Fatsis' book talk at Politics & Prose that he runs a local Scrabble club at a library in Northwest DC. Reading this book made me want to rescue my Scrabble set from my parents' house when we go visit and (after a bit of practice of course) head to the club to play a few games.