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Alfred Butts created the blockbuster word game known as Scrabble during the Depression. A new book examines the meticulous word-tinker, the evolution of the game, and the effect it had on America.

By Stefan Fatsis | Illustration by Kris Hargis

Sidebar | Passion Play with Words and Numbers


Stefan Fatsis C’85 admits that his interest in the late Alfred M. Butts Ar’24, the creator of Scrabble, quickly evolved into a full-blown obsession. In Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble, he describes how that obsession led him to the rural hamlet of Stanfordville, N.Y. There, in a house built by Butts’ great-great-grandfather, rests a modest collection of memorabilia that Fatsis refers to as the “Scrabble Archives.” Butts and his wife, Nina, had bought the house as a summer home in 1954 with some of the royalty income from Scrabble, and after he died in 1993, house and archives passed into the hands of his nephew, Robert Butts.

For Fatsis, the three boxes—one of which holds the original boards, tiles, and blueprints of the evolving game—represented far more than just historical research.


It’s like being allowed to touch Edison’s first drawings of the lightbulb or Frank Lloyd Wright’s sketches for Fallingwater. So when I see the bankers’ boxes piled on a sideboard, it seems a little sad: Alfred Butts created an enduring piece of American popular culture, and here it is reduced to a few boxes in an aging house in the country.
    And yet it also seems to fit. Bob describes his great-uncle as humble and self-effacing, a thin gentleman no more than 5-feet-6 who was proud of his invention but never boastful, a regular guy who happened upon something that wound up amusing the millions.
    Born in 1899 in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., Alfred Mosher Butts graduated from Penn in 1924 with a degree in architecture—he designed that year’s Ivy Stone—and joined the New York firm of Holden McLaughlin and Associates. Less than a decade later, with the Depression in full sway, he was laid off. After trying his hand at writing, painting, and illustrating—half a dozen of his “Vandyke prints” of New York scenes are in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s permanent collection—Butts found himself with more time on his hands than money. In that, he had plenty of company. Realizing that people needed distractions during hard times, his mind turned to games. He studied three types: “men on a board” games, numbers games that used dice or cards, and letter games. And though he hadn’t been much interested in words before deciding to invent a word game, he was meticulous, and had the organized, mathematical mind of a games player.
    Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Gold Bug,” in which the character William Legrand solves a cipher about a hidden treasure by comparing its symbols to letters in the alphabet, provided Butts with a “eureka moment.”
    Poe, Butts noticed, observed that in the English language, “the letter which most frequently occurs is e.”
    “It follows that word games should be played not with a jumble of letters,” wrote Butts, “but with a mixture so proportioned that the individual letters will occur in the same frequency as they do in normal word formation.”
    To determine the proper proportion, Butts pored over newspapers and magazines counting letters and words. On October 5, 1933, for instance, Butts underlined in green and brown ink all of the words of nine letters or more on page 21 of the Herald Tribune, the obituary page; the notice of the death of Earl Cadogan, the British representative to the International Olympic Committee, included landownerhereditarysucceededassistinglieutenantcommandantsecondary, and viscountcy. There were 125 nine-letter words in all, and Butts wrote them down in long columns in block caps on the left side of a page, then tallied up the frequency of their letters in a column on the right. 
    It wouldn’t have mattered to the success or marketability of his game whether there were 10 or 11 or 15 E’s. But Butts’s perfectionist mind insisted that he figure it out. That the game be right was paramount.
    Butts called his first letter game Lexiko, from the Greek lexikos, “of words.” It had 100 tiles, and the object was to make a nine- or 10-letter word. Milton Bradley, Parker Brothers, and the publisher Simon & Schuster all rejected it, and by August 1934, Butts had sold 84 sets himself. Receipts: $127.03. Expenses: $147.46.
    When Lexiko didn’t find a manufacturer, he decided that the fault lay in the game itself. It needed a board. Butts made blueprints of various designs and pasted them onto a checkerboard. It needed better scoring. Butts assigned the letters specific values that corresponded with their frequency; the more frequently the letter appeared, the less it was worth. He reduced the number of tiles on a player’s rack from nine to seven, which was easier to manage and, based on his word-length studies, offered more chances to use all of one’s letters. To enliven scoring and strategy, he decided that placing letters on certain squares on his board would result in doubling or tripling the value of the letter or word.
    And Butts kept toying with letter distribution, his primary passion. 
    In 1938, he told a would-be customer, “I do not make the Lexiko sets any more as I am now working on a game which I believe will be an improvement over Lexiko. I expect to have this new game ready in a few weeks and will let you know the details and price as soon as I am ready to take orders.”
    Rehired by his architectural firm in 1938, Butts regained financial security, but he still wanted to market his game. For a while he called his creation “it,” until finally settling on “Criss-Cross Words.” Though he didn’t have a clue about product distribution, he was convinced that this time his game was a winner.


Still, he kept tinkering. He tried a 14-by-14 grid, a 15-by-15, a 16-by-16, a 17-by-17. He placed the “star”—the starting point for the game—in the upper left-hand corner. He placed it in the center. He placed it five columns in and five rows down. He put a quadruple-word-score square in the lower right-hand corner. He tried four triple-word-score squares. He tried six. He increased and decreased the number of double- and triple-letter-score squares. He changed the colors of these squares. He tweaked the letter distribution. He included a blank. He tried two.
    Perfection isn’t arrived at overnight, and the more I play, the more Alfred’s game seems perfect. I think he was like Alexander Cartwright’s Knickerbocker Base Ball Club laying the bases 90 feet apart or James Naismith setting the height of his peach baskets at 10 feet. The distances and location of the premium squares are just right. The game is a carefully choreographed pas de deux, a delicate balance between risk and reward.
    The first player is rewarded for making a five-letter word, since the value of the first or last letter is doubled; but five-letter words are pretty difficult to find when you have just seven letters on your rack. The first player also benefits from a free double-word score, the star; but laying a tile on the star means the second player can reach a triple-word score, which is seven squares away. Butts wanted scoring to increase as the game progressed away from the center, with the most lucrative plays on the fringes. On the board’s second interior row or column, a five-letter word can hit a triple-letter-score square and a double-word-score square simultaneously, one of the juiciest spots on the board; use it, however, and you are likely to give your opponent access to a triple-word score. On the board’s perimeter, a word can start on a double-letter square and reach a double-word; but that creates a lane for the game’s holy grail, hitting two triple-word scores at once, a triple triple.
    “The arrangement of the premium squares took a long time,” Butts said years later. “It’s not hit or miss. It’s carefully worked out.”
    When I think of Butts, I imagine the ancients in India deciding that the knight should move two squares over and one up or one up and two over. I think of the Greeks or Egyptians determining what to do when a black backgammon chip landed on a space occupied by a white one. Because Butts lived in the 20th century, his game had to be protected legally; it couldn’t just exist. Just as war begat chess, the advancing state of communications in America all but mandated creation of a language-based strategy game. Butts invented a game that filled a void in the hierarchy of games, and in the culture.
    Butts started selling Criss-Cross Words as before: filling word-of-mouth orders from his living room, waiting for someone who could help to notice. For $2 a set and 25 cents for shipping, Butts satisfied customers in Washington, D.C.; Bryn Mawr, Pa.; Hagerstown, Ind.; Louisville, Ky.; Oshkosh, Wis.; and Oneida, N.Y. He mailed about a hundred sets in all, and complained. “I have found it practically impossible to get a patent on any game,” he told one buyer. “The commercial houses do not want games unless they have been proven successful, but if a game is successful there is no protection for the idea.”
    He was tired of making the pieces, hunting for boxes in five-and-dimes, mimeographing the rules. So he just gave up. If an interested partner approached him, fine. In 1947, someone did. He was James Brunot, who worked for a New York state welfare agency and had served as executive director of the President’s War Relief Control Board in Washington. Brunot was living in Newtown, Conn., not far from Danbury, and getting tired of his two-hour commute to New York City. He wanted to start a small business that could keep him at home, where he and his wife, Helen, raised Dorset sheep.
    Brunot later said he was given a copy of Criss-Cross Words by a New York social worker who was one of Butts’s guinea pigs, and he played the game with his wife when they lived in Washington. When Brunot returned to New York, he learned that no one was manufacturing it. He contacted Butts, who figured he had nothing to lose. No one else wanted his game. Why not let this guy have a shot?
    Brunot hired a lawyer who said they could manufacture the game without infringing on any patent. Brunot played down the potential of the business. “It seems apparent that … there is no marketable proprietary interest” in Criss-Cross Words, he wrote Butts. But “we do consider that it would be reasonable and fair in view of all the circumstances to have at least an informal understanding.” He offered Butts a small royalty on sales, which Butts accepted.


Brunot made two significant changes to the board, turning the center star into a double-word-score square and eliminating four double-letter-score squares near it. He also made some minor cosmetic changes, altering the colors and design of the premium squares, which became pastel pink (double-word), baby blue (double-letter), indigo (triple-letter), and bright red (triple-word); the starburst-ridged sides came later. Brunot also conceived the 50-point bonus for using all seven tiles.
    And he changed the name. Brunot later said he never could remember where the word Scrabble came from, or whether he or his wife thought of it. “We made up a list of names we liked and we sent them to our lawyers in Washington, and when they wrote back that nobody had ever used Scrabble as a trademark, we used that,” Brunot said. The name wasn’t chosen so much for its sense as its sound. It means “to scrawl or scribble, or to scratch or grope around clumsily or frantically,” which can describe the act of searching for words on a rack, or grabbing tiles in the bag, but the aural link to scramble was what Brunot was after.
    In 1948, Brunot trademarked the name and obtained a copyright on the board design. Production started that summer. Brunot bought a supply of birch plywood that had been advertised as scrap lumber in The New York Times. He hired a few local woodworkers who sawed into tiles the long strips of wood onto which letters and point values had been silk-screened. Brunot wasn’t equipped to make boards, so he ordered a few hundred from the game-manufacturing firm of Selchow & Righter. After assembling the component parts in his kitchen, Brunot sent copies to Alfred’s former customers, including an order form in each set.
    Alfred had little to do with the game. “Thank you for the set of ’Scrabble,’” he wrote to Brunot in December 1948. “It looks pretty good to me, though I haven’t had time to do much more than glance at it. We are having a terrible rush of work, working nights until January 1. I would like to get two more sets to use as Christmas presents. Not knowing whether I can get it wholesale, I will wait until you let me know how big a check I should send you.” Brunot sent along the two sets, presumably at no charge.
    The newly christened game didn’t set the toy industry on fire. In 1949, Brunot sold 2,413 sets of Scrabble. Butts earned royalties of $149.27. In 1950, sales fell to 1,632 sets, and while Butts received royalties of $101.23, Scrabble lost $450. The next year was only marginally better: 4,853 sets and royalties of $135.43 for Butts. Brunot was still losing money.
    Brunot had named his venture Production & Marketing Company. At least the first part was appropriate. Unlike Butts, Brunot had the wherewithal, and capital, to produce the game in bulk; like Butts, though, he relied mostly on word of mouth to sell it. Promotion was limited to a few small ads in Saturday Review and in college publications like the Smith College Alumnae Quarterly.
    Nonetheless, by the summer of 1952, sales had increased to about 200 sets a week. Customers wrote asking for replacement tiles and complaining that their dogs were attracted to a chemical coating on the wood. But still Brunot considered folding the business if it didn’t do better soon. Then he and his wife went on vacation to Kentucky in search of a breeding ram for their sheep farm, expecting another 200 orders on their return. Instead, they found orders for 2,500 sets. The next week, they received another 3,000 orders. And more the week after that.
    What happened? One theory, suggested by Life magazine in a lengthy profile of Brunot and the game, held that distribution had reached a critical mass by that summer and hit a tipping point among the smart set, who came home from their vacations and tried to purchase the game in stores. A more plausible story was that Macy’s chairman Jack Straus played Scrabble during his vacation on Long Island and was irate when he returned to New York to discover that the store didn’t stock it. Macy’s placed a big order, which triggered orders from other retailers.
    For whatever reason, sales shot up to more than 500 sets a week in the third quarter of 1952 and 2,000 a week in the fourth quarter. By early 1953, Brunot had 35 employees working in two shifts producing 6,000 sets a week. Which was terrific, except that orders were arriving by the tens of thousands, so fast that “they couldn’t even add them up, much less fill them,” The New Yorker magazine reported. Brunot licensed a cheaper version of the game, with cardboard letters and a board that was part of the box, to be made by Cadaco-Ellis Co. in Chicago and renamed “Skip-a-Cross”; it sold for $2. Finally, in March, he licensed the production and marketing to Selchow & Righter. And he converted the machinery in his Connecticut factory to manufacture the first deluxe version of Scrabble, a $10 item in a red imitation-leather case with white plastic tiles and plastic racks that included a built-in scoring device.
    In 1953, nearly 800,000 standard sets, 300,000 cardboard ones, and 30,000 deluxe versions of Scrabble were sold. In the span of two years, sales had increased more than 200 times. In the history of the toy industry, no game had ever taken off so rapidly and unexpectedly. And it didn’t slow down.
    As I pore through Butts’s papers, the story of the game as a game—not as an obsessive, strategic, mathematical exercise—begins to make cultural sense. The country’s shimmering, suburban, stay-at-home, postwar prosperity was fertile soil for the sudden rise of Scrabble. What better way to demonstrate the American know-how and ingenuity that had just saved the world than with a game that tested one’s knowledge and creativity? What better way to luxuriate in the greatest prosperity the nation had ever known than by relaxing over a board game that, unlike Monopoly (Depression-era wealth fantasies) or Life (turn-of-the-century moralism), had no intentional social overtones? Leisure time was a concept just taking root, and what could be more leisurely, if not decadent, than Scrabble? It was a game of the mind that often took hours to play. America finally could devote itself to trivial pastimes. The country was infused with prosperity and suddenly enamored of education. Scrabble fit.
Saturday Review said “the new word game has practically routed canasta among the upper I.Q.’s of the nation.” Timereported that Scrabble clubs “have convened all over the country” and that “hostesses serve a Scrabble board with the after-dinner coffee, and shiny markers with A1 and Z10inscribed are popping up on rural porches and in transcontinental trains.” The Life article said that “in intellectual circles the game is played in French or Latin; in Hollywood, games of dirty-word Scrabble are in constant progress; in New York, the Guys-and-Dolls set has converted Scrabble into the hottest gambling game since gin rummy.” The composer Igor Stravinsky and his wife, Vera, were photographed for The New York Times Magazineplaying Scrabble at their Hollywood home.
    Shortages were epidemic. “Buying a Scrabble set in New York today is something akin to nabbing a prime-rib roast at ceiling price during World War II,” the World-Telegramreported. A New Yorker cartoon showed wedding guests rushing out of a church, leaving the bride to explain to the priest, “Somebody made an announcement that the store next door has Scrabble!” There were a half-dozen or more knockoffs, with names like Score-a-Word, Jaymar Crosswords, and Cabu, sending Brunot’s lawyers into action and prompting Selchow & Righter to take out ads urging customers to wait for the real thing.
Time, Look, Business Week, Cue, Pageant, Reader’s Digest, Family Weekly. When major media called, Brunot fielded the calls and was profiled. And Butts achieved minor celebrity as the quirky out-of-work architect who invented the game as a way to scrape together a few bucks during the Depression. He appeared on NBC’s The Today Show, on WOR radio, on the Faye Emerson and Skitch Henderson TV talk show on NBC. When he was included in Current Biography for 1954, Butts was so delighted that he ordered 12 copies.
    Brunot didn’t appreciate, or understand, the depth or the passion Scrabble was inspiring. Disputes arose early over the use of words like MA and PA, and the musical notes REMIFALA, and TI. “Brunot’s feeling is that if players want to use such words, they can,” Life wrote. “He personally does not give a damn.” Asked about players frustrated by the slow nature of the game, Brunot said, “Let them go out and buy an egg timer. It doesn’t have to have ’Scrabble’ printed on it.” Approached by publishers to endorse one dictionary or another, Brunot was miffed that Scrabble was being taken so seriously. “It’s only a game,” he said. “It’s something you’re supposed to enjoy.”
    If Butts was hurt by Brunot’s dismissive comments, he didn’t show it. He simply answered every question he received—about where to purchase sets and whether colloquial words were acceptable and what to do if an opponent is stuck with the Q and can’t make a play. And he counted his money.


An astounding 3,798,555 units of Scrabble were sold in 1954, one of the greatest performances in toy-industry history. That included more than 2.5 million of the standard sets, 1 million cardboard ones, 82,000 deluxe, and, for the first time, 100,000 in foreign languages. Production of a Braille edition began.
    Scrabble was the nation’s leading board game. Once the publicity abated, Butts had little to do with the game but sit back and await his royalty checks, which he tracked meticulously, in pencil, on block graph paper and yellow legal pads, in his neat architect’s handwriting. “The worst feature of all this is the tough time I have trying to convince people I am not a millionaire,” Butts wrote to an old college friend. “However, I will admit it is a pleasant change to stop worrying about income and begin worrying about income tax.”
    On each set of the standard game, which accounted for roughly three-quarters of all unit sales, Brunot received about 12 cents per set to 2.5 cents for Butts. Butts received no compensation from any other products using the Scrabble license. As bargains go, Brunot and Selchow got a great one. But Butts never complained, at least not publicly. “I never heard him speak ill of Brunot,” Bob Butts tells me during one of several pilgrimages I make to the Archives. “I kind of got the impression that it was his decision to go forward with the deal with Brunot and it was okay with him and that he just didn’t want to play hardball.”
    Alfred wasn’t a businessman. He was an unassuming and competent architect, content to live peaceably with his wife in his rental apartment and his ancestor’s house in the country and pass the time with his modest-man’s hobbies like collecting postcards and crafting wooden jigsaw puzzles. He and Nina had no children. He designed and helped start a local library. He organized his Poughkeepsie High School Class of 1917 reunions. The Scrabble royalties were more than enough for the couple to live the quiet, comfortable life they desired.
    It wasn’t chump change. Alfred’s royalties peaked at $81,376.37 in 1955. “I didn’t expect anything as big as that,” he told Brunot. “Scrabble should improve the vocabulary and I can claim I have played Scrabble longer than anyone else, but now I am running out of words. What comes after ’fantastic’?”
    Much to everyone’s astonishment, the game’s popularity held strong. As expected, after the boom, sales did drop, to 2.3 million in 1955 and to just over 1 million the next year. In one of their infrequent meetings, Brunot told Butts that he figured sales would level off at about 300,000, and that “S&R believes same.” But it wouldn’t happen during Selchow & Righter’s stewardship. The company introduced magnetic travel sets, nonmagnetic travel sets, junior sets, “Waffle-Grid Revolving Board” sets. Sales ranged between 1.1 million and 1.6 million a year through 1970, and Butts’s royalties kept rolling in.
    In the late sixties, Brunot wanted to retire and have Selchow & Righter buy out his business. Butts balked, but eventually agreed. In his papers is a manila envelope, on it written in the shaky handwriting of a 70-year-old man the words final scrabble agreement. Butts would receive $75,000 on January 1, 1971, and $38,000 a year for the next five years. A total of $265,000, plus interest. Brunot would get about five times that amount, or $1.325 million.
    Their business relationship over, the two men responsible for Scrabble dropped out of contact. They were never really friends; for the first five years of their relationship, they referred to each other as Mr. Butts and Mr. Brunot. When Butts once was asked to pass on regards to Brunot, he replied, “I have not seen or heard from Jim Brunot in a long, long time. After his wife died and he sold out all the rights to Scrabble, I believe he moved to North Carolina. But now I don’t even know whether he is still living.” A month later, in October 1984, James Brunot would die at the age of 82.
    As I read the papers, I want to fight for Alfred. It was his game, his brilliant, enduring game, of which more than 26 million sets were sold by Production & Marketing and Selchow & Righter in the 22 years he was involved. Certainly that was worth more than $265,000. Not even allthe money Alfred received over the years seems just. (And he calculated it to the penny: $848,046.28 through 1971, plus the remaining buyout and interest, for a grand total of $1,066,500.) Alfred may have been content, but I see him as another exploited inventor.
    I think of the hundred million or so Scrabble sets sold worldwide over the last half century, and the hundreds of millions of dollars reaped by the game’s three big corporate owners, Selchow, Coleco, and Hasbro. And I think that no marketplace can adequately compensate genius, and this one certainly didn’t.
    Indeed, Alfred had vanished into games history; some company executives didn’t even recognize his name. But they invited him down to New York, and learned that 1981 was the 50th anniversary of his conception of Lexiko, and the company trotted Alfred around the country on a media tour. Alfred got a kick out of it (and a $350 per diem), preparing for radio and television appearances with copious handwritten notes summarizing his life and his game. He liked the attention, particularly from young, female publicists who accompanied him on his rounds. When Selchow manufactured his new word game—which it named, oddly, Alfred’s Other Game—for the box-cover photograph it posed the octogenarian in a tuxedo and seated him in a leather chair next to a buxom model in a black cocktail dress. He made guest appearances at a few Scrabble tournaments.
    Butts appreciated the long-overdue recognition. On his first tour of Selchow & Righter’s factory on Long Island, Butts saw four assembly lines cranking out Trivial Pursuit and one producing Scrabble. The company president, Richard Selchow, turned to him, and said, “Trivial Pursuit is a fad. When Trivial Pursuit is long gone we’ll still be turning out Scrabble.”


Reprinted from Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company. Copyright©2001 by Stefan Fatsis. All rights reserved.

Stefan Fatsis C’85 is a reporter for The Wall Street Journal, a commentator for National Public Radio’s “All Things Considered,” and the author of Wild and Outside.


SIDEBAR

Over the summer, Gazette Senior Editor Samuel Hughes spoke with 
Stefan Fatsis about his new book and his ongoing obsession with Scrabble.

Gazette: How’d you get interested in Scrabble?

Fatsis: Like most people, I played the game as a kid, and I played in high school a lot with a friend. We’d hang out and play games late at night and listen to bad rock music. I really started playing a lot with a girlfriend, like many people do, and when that relationship ended, I kind of stopped playing.
    But I knew that this world existed. I’d read magazine articles; I’d read a piece in Sports Illustrated a few years ago; and I was looking for something to do. I knew I loved the game, loved to play, and I have this predisposition toward obsession and words. I thought, “Maybe this is an interesting world.” 

Stefan Fatsis C’85
Photo: John Rae

Gazette: It became a slippery slope.

Fatsis: It was a slippery slope. Two things sort of happened simultaneously. I got interested in the word part and I found myself playing a lot by myself and studying two-letter words and three-letter words, then I went to this world championship in 1997 and for the first time met the characters, people who play the game intensively, and I was drawn to them. They struck me as a writer’s dream. They were colorful and talkative and quirky, but beyond that they were so passionate about what they were doing and so brilliant at what they were doing that I was drawn to their skill and I kind of wanted to be like them. I wanted to learn how to anagram—to come up with the beautiful words that they were spinning out on this Scrabble board.

Gazette: What is the basis of the appeal of Scrabble? 

Fatsis: I think that it is deeply ingrained in all of us. We use words to write; we use words to communicate in a spoken way—we are assaulted by language. It is fundamental to our being. It’s what sets us apart from other animals, and because of that, it is natural to want to take it and deconstruct it in some way. Breaking down the language is something that people have been doing for centuries.
    Scrabble was created during the Depression, but it didn’t become successful until after the war. The notion of leisure time and education came together and Scrabble was a logical fit—it was a way to show off that we’re smart. I mean, we’re competing here with the Russians to demonstrate our intelligence, and we had all this time on our hands. 
    But once a game takes root in society it’s got to be about more than just some temporary social force; it’s got to be something very seminal to what we do and how we think. And Scrabble has managed to combine the language that’s so basic to how we live with the mathematics, which is so central to how certain people live.

Gazette: Was there a “eureka moment” for you when you decided to actually write the book?

Fatsis: My journalistic antennae were always up; I had written one book before and I was interested in doing another one. Initially I thought, “This is great. I’ll do a book.” But the playing overcame the instinct. I became so obsessed and interested in the game and in competing and going to tournaments and getting my rating up that I procrastinated, like many writers do. It took me almost two years to actually write a book proposal. In a way, it turned out to be a good thing, because it allowed me to develop some level of competence in the game. It really took me three years to achieve what I wanted to achieve in the game, and I’m still sort of a rank hack.

Gazette: You went from being a “good living-room player” to an expert.

Fatsis: I did. Well, for the first year or two I was a hack. It wasn’t till I took a leave of absence from my job after I got the contract to write the book that I was able to devote as much time as I would have liked to all along. Study an hour or two a day, go to all these tournaments, and really sort of devote my life to it.

Gazette: Does one have to have a meticulous mind like Butts’s in order to be a good Scrabble player?

Fatsis: Absolutely—the game is all about math. There are 100 tiles, 98 letters and two blanks. It’s all about combinations, and they are mathematical.
    There are two basic mathematical virtues of this game. One is the probabilities that are involved in calculating what is going on during the game. The competitive players keep track of how many letters have been played during the game. 
    The second aspect is the geometry of the board. Board games are about strategies; strategies are about patterns; patterns are about math. Look at any game—chess, backgammon, checkers, Scrabble—these are games about space and understanding geometry. Being able to sort of instantly process and digest the geometry of board position is a very mathematical practice.

Gazette: So if you were a screenwriter and you were writing Rain Man, you would have had Dustin Hoffman counting tiles instead of cards in Las Vegas?

Fatsis: Absolutely! One of the top players is a former croupier. Another top player is a professional poker player. As I say in the book, its not without reason that Scrabble tournaments are held in places like Reno, Las Vegas, and Atlantic City.

Gazette: Is there life after Scrabble?

Fatsis: Absolutely. I’m back at my job at The Wall Street Journal, but that doesn’t mean I’m giving up Scrabble. Scrabble is life for me right now. I just got back from a 27-game tournament in Reno. I’m still intent on having my rating stay at an expert level. My rating fell below a certain level and it started to upset me, so I played again and studied and got it up to where I wanted to be. On the one hand, it’s sort of the validation that matters at being good at this. But at the same time I just love it. I love anagramming; I love the words; I love seeing them; I love playing the game. So it wasn’t sort of a journalistic mercenary mission. This was a genuine passion.

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