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Photograph by Chad Pilster
Start Making Sense: Matches in the Silicon Valley Showdown Scrabble competition, held at the Pruneyard last weekend, are strictly timed.
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Flexing Triple-Word Power
Despite hot competition, Showdown crowd avoids harsh words
By Genevieve Roja
As Jim Geary assesses the Scrabble tiles which Carol Kaplan has placed on the board, he ponders the word "metecai," contemplating the word's legitimacy, and chooses to let it pass. After the game, Geary will look up the word in the Scrabble-approved 10 edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary and his doubts will be reinforced; the word is a phony.
The United States' second-ranked Scrabble player and the No. 1 ranked player at the Silicon Valley Showdown has just logged his second loss on the first day of competition Saturday at the Pruneyard Inn.
"I'm not as sharp as I used to be," says Geary, a Phoenix, Ariz., native who has climbed to the top of the Scrabble ranks in only two years. "I used to know every word in the dictionary by heart."
That kind of encyclopedic memory feat, which put the 32-year-old Honeywell computer programmer on top of his game, is not altogether uncommon among the competitors at the weekend event. Other Scrabblists, like Lisa Odom, the Showdown's No. 2 player behind Geary, conjured her own word list with a special emphasis on seven-letter words, using flashcards that are scrambled to simulate word plays in real Scrabble competition. Geary says she has 50,000 flashcards in shoe boxes.
Despite the class and rank of players represented today, the stakes aren't too high--the cash pot is around $400 for the winner--but the players are proud nevertheless.
"It's more ego than anything else," says Joe Edley, a two-time national Scrabble champion in 1980 and 1992, president of the National Scrabble Association based in New York and the author of Everything Scrabble.
The challenge is to stay near the top and compete near the top to maintain ratings, which run similar to chess ratings. And while the Campbell tournament is not a qualifying gateway to the nationals or the worlds, held this year in Melbourne, Australia, the competition here is quite intense.
With a quick glance in the packed conference room, Geary, dressed in an aqua-green fleece pullover and jeans and sporting a shaved head, scrutinizes his tiles. In a trademark gesture, his fingertips are so tightly pinned to his temples that a pinkish imprint is left behind when he smacks down the word: "pyrhol." Minutes later, his duel is over and Geary maintains a 3-2 record.
Others around the room aren't as rigid as Geary, but the hardcore Scrabble etiquette endures. Prior to picking tiles, participants rummage through cloth bags--some velvety, others with celestial designs and quiltlike patchwork--that are held at arm's length high above the head to ensure a clean withdrawal.
"It gets very intense," says Los Gatos Scrabble Club organizer John C. Green, who served as one of two judges charged with striking or approving a challenged word. "Some players don't have the particular temperament. Some were the best on the block or the best in the family. They're used to winning, and some can't stand it if they lose."
Nevertheless, the Scrabble community is generally a friendly lot in a Bohemian-style form of outreach. Many out-of-towners like Odom, traveling from Minnesota, have boarded with several competitors in Oakland during their stay. Betty Adams, an 89-year-old novice player, has come from North Hampton, Mass., to compete and visit her grandson in San Francisco.
"It's the camaraderie," says Edley, a San Francisco native who says he became a night watchman to spend more time learning Scrabble word lists in 1978. "People love to talk about their games and luck--the good and the bad. It's just good seeds."
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Campbell, California
