¹ This is the definition of the word “scrabble” according to Merriam-Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary.

² In all seriousness, Scrabble was invented by a man named Alfred Mosher Butts.

³ Scrabble tournaments are a lot like soccer tournaments for four-year-olds in that, oftentimes, everyone goes home with a little something.

⁴ Officially rated tournaments are run by NASPA-approved tournament directors. NASPA is the North American Scrabble Players Association. Tournament directors are generally encyclopedic in their knowledge of Scrabble and can easily clarify any confusion about the rules or negotiate disputes that arise during a tournament. Disputes, they arise.

⁵ This is how serious competitive Scrabble is: there is a national championship, held annually during the summer. The first national tournament was held in 1978. There are also world competitions (the first world championship was held in 1991), a cottage industry of Scrabble-related merchandise, game timers, boards, tiles, etc., plus books, documentaries, and academic articles on the nuances of competitive Scrabble. There are Scrabble-related apps for your iDevices (I use Zarf, CheckWord, the official Scrabble game, Lexulous, and Words With Friends). There are Scrabble games on Facebook (I play the official Hasbro game and Lexulous). Elsewhere online, there’s the Internet Scrabble Club (ISC), where I also play. There is a website, cross-tables.com, dedicated to tracking all the official tournaments in the country with scores and rankings. I am ranked 1,336th in the country. I’m guessing that’s out of 1,400 players, given my lowliness.

⁶ There are more than two hundred Scrabble clubs in the United States. The club in my town meets monthly, while the club in Champaign, Illinois, meets weekly. In bigger cities, some clubs will even meet twice a week.

⁷ He is my Scrabble sensei. I almost beat him once, where “almost” is “not so much.” Early in the match I played TRIPLEX for around 90 points. Then I played another bingo. I was way ahead and deluded myself into thinking I was on easy street. The sweetness of my imagined victory was nearly unbearable. Marty would go on to play ENTOZOAN across two Triple Word Score spaces for 203 points. He was Sub-Zero in Mortal Kombat tearing out my Scrabble spine with his bare hands—FATALITY. We have not played since. I have been properly humbled.

⁸ I love anagrams. When I was a kid, my mom would write big words on lined paper and ask me to find all the possible words. Now, finding words is kind of my superpower.

⁹ In the seventh round of the 2011 World Scrabble Championships, Edward Martin, while playing Chollapat Itthi-Aree, realized a tile was missing. The tournament director came up with a reasonable solution, but Itthi-Aree demanded Martin prove he wasn’t hiding the missing tile on his person. Play resumed, and Martin eventually won by a single point. My friend/sensei Marty was totally sitting right next to these guys when this went down. He said, “It was a distraction.”

¹⁰ There are multiple official word lists. In North America, most Scrabble players use the Official Tournament and Club Word List (OWL). Outside of North America, players use the Collins English Dictionary. At some tournaments here in the United States, you will find smaller Collins divisions for those Scrabble players who want to test their skills using the Collins dictionary. The challenge is remembering which words are acceptable for Collins and then remembering which words are acceptable for OWL when returning to traditional play.

¹¹ Henry is not his name.

¹² I have always enjoyed board games. I love rolling dice and moving small plastic or metal pieces around game boards. I collect Monopoly sets from around the world. I will play any game so long as there is a possibility I can win. I take games seriously. Sometimes I take them too seriously and conflate winning the Game of Life with winning at life.

¹³ Scrabble people are really quite friendly and gracious, but to be clear, they are also intense and serious as hell. I have an imagination. In my head, as we prepared to word rumble, I felt as if we were about to throw down like in the music video for Michael Jackson’s “Bad.” A lot of my life can be described in terms of Michael Jackson’s music. I’d explain the significance of “Man in the Mirror,” but then you’d think I was crazy.

¹⁴ Players can be very . . . particular about how you comport yourself during a Scrabble game. Some players want complete silence during matches, so they won’t appreciate your idle chatter. Some players think you’re cheating if you play with your phone. Don’t take a call should your phone ring, that’s for sure. I once got a dirty look for tapping on my phone without muting it. Apparently, the gentle beeps were simply too much for that player. The longer you play, the more you finely hone these particularities. I, for example, have developed several Scrabble-related pet peeves and preferences. I have strong opinions on the type of scoring sheets I use and the kind of pens I use to keep score (Uni-ball .5mm roller ball). I now have a very low tolerance for players who draw their tiles in annoying ways. I am particularly aggravated by players who do a lot of mixing the tiles up before each draw. IT DOES NOT CHANGE THE OUTCOME. I also do not look kindly upon players who tap the tiles on the board as they tally their points. Why are they doing that? What really sets me over the edge, though, is when players recount my word scores after I’ve announced my score at the end of a turn as if I am incapable of simple math. Certainly, math is not my strong suit, but in general, I have addition under control. When this unnecessary score verification occurs, I sometimes have to sit on my hands to keep from punching a player in the face.

¹⁵ A bingo is when you play all seven letters on your rack. This is one of the most coveted Scrabble plays. I am a bingo player. I have no time to learn all the three-letter words and random obscure words, so I spend most of my time going for bingos because, in addition to the points you earn from the board, you also earn a fifty-point bonus. There are twenty-three possible Scrabble words in “bingo.”

¹⁶ Don’t get it twisted. Competitive Scrabble is both word chess and word poker. You need a game face, and you need to wear that game face hard.

¹⁷ I choose to believe she asked this because I look so fresh and youthful.

¹⁸ Much like in poker where you try to make an educated guess as to the cards your opponent is holding, great Scrabble players will track the letters played throughout a game. By the end of the game, you should know exactly what your opponent has on his rack. It is also important to track because it allows you to make smarter strategic decisions. It’s good to know if high-value letters (J, X, Q, K, V, etc.) are in play because if there are few letters left and you’re holding on to a U or an I and you know the Q is still in the bag, you want to be smart about where you play those vowels so your opponent cannot build a word with his Q unless he has the necessary vowels in his own rack.

¹⁹ Everything turned out fine.

²⁰ “Shit” is a valid Scrabble word.

²¹ There are no bingos with the letters T, R, E, K, I, N, and G. If Henry studied, he would know that.

²² I ended up with an amazing ranking, high enough to almost place me a division up. In the next tournament I played, I would be seeded much higher and I would pay for that, dearly.

²³ The child actors from Diff’rent Strokes, among others, know a little something about this. I was thinking I would pull a Mary-Kate and Ashley. Such was not the case.

²⁴ Also not his name.

²⁵ The Scrabble community is fairly small, and once you start attending tournaments regularly, you will see the same people over and over.

²⁶ I have my own tournament board now as well as a timer (with pink buttons), tiles (pink), and long tile racks (sadly not available in pink). I also have a carrying case with a shoulder strap so I can rock my Scrabble board slung across my shoulders like a boss.

²⁷ Qoph is a Hebrew letter. My opponent not only shared the word’s meaning, he also explained the origins (something about a sewing needle; frankly, I had tuned him out at that point) and pronunciation. After the exciting word lesson, he started telling me all the possible Q words one can spell without a U. I wondered, Is there a Q in “motherfucker”?

²⁸ That was a pretty little lie.

²⁹ I willfully ignored the memory of the outcome of my first tournament, where I won as the lowest-seeded player, without a ranking.

³⁰ “Broasting” is a proper noun, and proper nouns are not valid Scrabble words. Broasting is a trademarked method of cooking chicken.