SERIOUS SCRABBLE : With a Little Bit of Luck--and a Lot of Smarts--You Could Rank Up There With Top Word Wizards

By DICK RORABACK

May 20, 1989 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writer

Behind the Driftwood Beach Club, a desultory breeze ripples the swimming pool in random geometric patterns. Out in front, golfers in Bermudas and T-shirts take the measure of a gentle par-3 course. Just across Pacific Coast Highway, the aqua ocean beckons. It is one of those superlative Southern California extravaganzas, the kind of day nobody in his right mind would spend indoors.

Then again, nobody ever accused a Scrabble fanatic of sanity.

Inside the club, row upon row of Scrabble players--114 in all--furrow their brows and toy with their tiles, oblivious to the spring splendors beyond their immediate environs. It’s the annual Huntington Beach tournament, one of a dozen or so sanctioned by the Scrabble Crossword Game Players Inc., and the indoor air is charged with concentration.

Updated World Ratings

Players’ two-day scores, duly notarized both by opponents and by tourney director Stan Rubinsky, will be sent to far-off Medford, Mass., where Alan Frank will feed them into a computer, then mail back contestants’ updated world ratings. (Is Frank himself a fanatic? Ask him how he spells his first name and he replies, “A-L-A-N, just like the ‘large hunting dog.’ ” The prosecution rests.)

For those who’ve never sampled its enchantments, Scrabble is essentially a simple word game, a more structured offshoot of Anagrams, in which each letter (tile) has a numerical value and the board is pocked with bonus squares: double the value of a letter, triple the value of a word, etc. It is part luck (one draws 7 letters at random), part literacy, part strategy and, as played in a tournament, 100% cutthroat.

Psyching out one’s adversary is not unknown in serious Scrabble. Playing a “word” that is not really a word is not allowed; or rather, it may be challenged. If the word is not in the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary (OSPD) (or Webster’s Ninth Collegiate, if more than eight letters), the challenged loses a turn. If the word does prove valid, the challenger skips a beat.

However, because rankings are generally known (“Don’t mess with Mike Baron”; “You challenge Joe Edley at your own risk”), higher-rated Scrabblers--like poker’s master bluffers--frequently commit parricide with impunity. Deborah Sapot, chatelaine of the San Fernando Valley Scrabble Club, explains:

“I’m playing in a tournament and a guy spells squeeze ‘SQUEAZE.’ I know how to spell it, of course, but the guy’s got a ranking in the ozone and the OSPD does allow some highly unusual spellings, so I let it go, even though it’s a Bingo (Scrabblers’ lingo for playing all seven tiles at once for a 50-point bonus).

“My turn. I hook onto SQUEAZE (one may build on a foe’s word) by adding ‘S’ and making my own word--something good like SENITI or SHAUGH, I forget. He challenges SQUEAZES and I lose. And he was a friend of mine! Now an ex-friend. . . .”

At Huntington Beach, a first-time observer plods among the players, perusing their ploys. The visitor has played the game, with no small success, for 30 years with family and friends. Passing along the rows, however, he begins to experience instant anomie, as if suddenly transported to a crossword kaffeeklatsch in Kabul.

Even the smaller words so nonchalantly played here bear little relation to the observer’s own vaunted vocabulary. WAE, someone sets down, and QAIDS. RYA and EME and CION. DEX and KHI. And this, mind, in the “recreational” end of the room! (The tourney is divided into recreational, open and elite groups, according to world rating.)

Finally the tyro, looking over the shoulder of a woman having some difficulty in attaining a respectable score, finds someone with whom he can identify, if only through rotten luck.

“Oy,” says Lorraine Pariser, late of Brooklyn and now pursuing her passion in Covina. “Oy,” she says again, “O-Y, and you could look it up. Can you believe these letters?”

‘Queen of the Vowels’

Pariser’s rack of seven tiles seems to consist entirely of one-point E’s and U’s. “Even back in Brooklyn it was like this,” she rails good-naturedly. “Around the country, I’m known as Queen of the Vowels.”

A trim, blue-coifed woman beside Pariser cannot resist a peek. “Play them off (the E’s and U’s),” she advises, sotto voce. “Get rid of ‘em. What you need, dear, is a good vowel movement.”

Catercorner from Pariser, a man in a black beret surveys an equally disastrous collection of letters--EIIULMX. At length--but not too long: Scrabble tourneys are timed to a 25-minute-per-player chess-type clock--Beret lets out a modest whoop and Bingos, with MILIEUX.

Around the room, a passel of players are “hooking” onto opponents’ words by means of that ever-popular noun, XU. Ten people at random are asked if they know what it means. One does--Lella Davis, all the way from Green River, Utah, to play here. Another--Rubinsky, up from San Diego--comes close. The eight others who played XU flunk with aplomb.

“No,” says Baron, the Albuquerque expert (13th in the world) who literally wrote the latest Scrabble book, “ I don’t know what it means. I do know it’s a noun that takes no plural; that’s all you need to know.”

(XU, incidentally, found only in selected dictionaries like the Random House Unabridged, is an aluminum coin of Vietnam, the hundredth part of a dong. We knew you’d like to know.)

“Over the last 15 years,” Geneva Akers says, “hundreds of new clubs have been established: in America, Canada, England and Australia, of course, but also rabid groups in Africa, France, Israel, Japan, all playing in English. We hear even China is starting a group. Our own club (Huntington Beach) has already outgrown three meeting places. In Southern California alone there are 10 or 12 active clubs (see below).”

At the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills, a talent-show contestant in an adjacent room is trumpeting an enthusiastic Jolson rendition of “Rockabye My Baby.” Several members of the San Fernando Valley Club, playing in a schoolroom, prick up their ears for a moment and nod in rhythm, before bending their focus back to the playing board. Time, measured by the miserly chess clocks, is ticking away here too, though the games are slightly less intense than those at the Huntington do. Slightly .

Players have kicked in a buck or two apiece, and lottery-ticket prizes are awarded for high-point word containing the K, highest 6-letter word, highest word with the most vowels, even for a “secret score.”

“I pick a score--say, 325--that I write down before the game,” president Sapot says. “Closest wins. They’re always trying to find the number, but I put it in the vault. You can draw your own conclusions as to where the vault is.”

Going Downhill

Les Mintz of Northridge is playing the canny Sapot and wishing he weren’t. “She started out with BUSTILY,” he laments, “and it’s been downhill ever since.”

On an otherwise straightforward board, Betty Kanter of Van Nuys has laid down a four-letter Hindu word straight out of the “Kama Sutra” but acceptable nonetheless. “Don’t tell me,” she blushes. “I do study some words, but I never remember what they mean. . . .”

Kanter’s escalade to the Big Game is typical: She started playing at home “with these other women, but it got to be boring. So now I play with the club and my friends are angry.”

“The purpose here ,” amends Jean Wood, a technical writer from Chatsworth, “is to beat somebody.” Wood is just back from a “Scrabble Cruise” to Mexico. “There were 36 of us,” she says, “but my husband wouldn’t play. He hates the game. For one thing, he can’t spell. After all, he’s an engineer.”

From across the room, Stuart Joffee--who drives to Granada Hills weekly from Pasadena to play--rumbles: “I have a challenge: DOOT.” No fewer than five people chorus, “No good.” At one time or another, they’ve all given DOOT a flutter.

“I can’t believe this garbage I’ve drawn,” a woman is saying. “I don’t suppose I can add an ‘N’ to ZOA?”

By sheer coincidence, a singer in the next room is belting out “Three Little Words.”

Back in Huntington, luckless Allen Ringblom, affable ex-Marine from Newport Beach, is rationalizing his Scrabbular wounds. “Barracudas,” he says, “they’re all barracudas!” An anachronism, Ringblom purports to play not for the score but for the sheer joy of the game.

Not so Rubinsky, who will run the U.S. championships in New York this summer and who says he gave up his beloved crossword puzzles the day in 1975 that he got serious about Scrabble, because “I didn’t want to confuse myself with unacceptable words.”

Not so Nancy Buck of Riverside, comely mother of two, successful owner of a business and, truth be told, a merciless wordsmith. “I’ve been involved in Cub Scouts, Little League, soccer, all of it,” she says, “and now it’s my turn. I appreciate the social side of the game, those who play for the literacy, but they’re usually the ones who bring the cookies. Here I can be highly competitive and whomp people, a part of my personality I couldn’t exercise at work.”

Not so Jerry Lerma of Foster City, who met his wife at a tournament and whose first child was born at another, between Bingos.

And surely not Mike Baron, co-author (with Jere Guin) of “The Wordbook,” state-of-the-art Baedeker to the secrets and strategies of Scrabble.

Heedless of the hordes stuffing checks into his pocket (the book is not yet on the market), Baron, an intense but amiable therapist, proselytizes a greenhorn. Memorizing the 86 two-letter words is a must, he explains. Then the letters that combine with them (“the two-to-make-three list”), the 908 three-letter words, the four-letter words containing the high-scoring J, Q, X and Z. “You want to get rid of these four quickly for as many points as possible,” says Baron, barely warming up. “What you want are the Bingo-prone tiles, those we see in most of the seven- and eight-letter words (for the 50-point bonus). They’re usually 1- or 2-point (common) letters: the vowels, and then D-G-L-N-R-S-T. If you want a mnemonic device, try ‘regional stud’ or ‘no girls date u’ or ‘lustier . . . ‘ Well, you figure it out. They’re the real workhorses of the game.”

The lesson goes on--and on--fascinating for a word-fancier but maybe a tittle too high-tech for the fireside game. Still, “I did a statistical analysis of games actually played,” Baron says. “I found that 88% of the difference between a winner and a loser is the Bingo. The winners averaged two to the losers’ one. Alas, there are 48,000 possible Bingos, so I’ve come up with a list of the most likely. . . .”

Holdouts continue to scorn the approach, but when Baron’s data are digested, one reluctantly begins to side with his contention that his study “adds zest to Scrabble.”

Further, when contacted away from the heat of the battle (in Albuquerque, where his telephone number inevitably spells THERAPY), Baron belies his rep as a mere letters-cruncher. “I love the competition,” he says, “but if I never won another game of Scrabble, I’d be hysterically delighted just by the people I’ve met through the game.”

As the Huntington tourney winds down, two participants put the Scrabble phenomenon in perspective:

“I’d be a really good player,” says Allen Ringblom, “but I’m too stubborn. I keep playing words that ought to be in the book but aren’t. Hey, you have to play for fun; otherwise you’re just another barracuda.”

Lined up squarely against Ringblom, and a lot more representative of the tournament players, is ebullient Steve Pettyjohn of Dana Point.

“This is no tea-party game we’re playing here,” he says. “This is full-contact Scrabble!”

Southern California Scrabble clubs (generally meeting weekly):

Camarillo; Pearl Greenfield, (805) 484-1398.

Eagle Rock; George Heussenstamm, (818) 248-0537.

Huntington Beach; call Geneva Akers, (714) 960-2927.

Laguna Hills (two clubs); Geraldine Wenk, (714) 837-7223, or Gina du Mez, (714) 586-2378.

Long Beach; Fred Holden (213) 391-5668.

Los Angeles; Ruth Sparer, (818) 760-4391.

Riverside; Jerrold Baker, (714) 683-0989.

San Diego; Betty Schulman, (619) 238-0303.

San Fernando Valley; Deborah Sapot, (818) 702-9218.