Word Freak
Stefan Fatsis, a Wall Street Journal reporter and National Public Radio regular, recounts his remarkable rise through the ranks of elite Scrabble players while exploring the game's strange, potent hold over them -- and him. Scrabble might truly be called America's game. More than two million sets are sold every year and at least thirty million American homes have one. But the game's most talented competitors inhabit a sphere far removed from the masses of "living room players."
Stats for nerds
7recommend
13mentions
11people
2014–2024years
62% recommend31% neutral8% critical
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- I recommend "Word Freak" by Stefan Fatsis if you're looking for a non-fiction novel about the world of competitive Scrabble. It's one of the most entertaining and well-written books I've ever read. Almost impossible to put down once you've started it.
- I recommend the book mentioned in the aeticle, Word Freak by Fatis. Entertaining even for me hardly interested in Scrabble. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Freak
- I can’t program but for awhile I wrote for a living.
I was an English major in college and got hooked on Scrabble after reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a sportswriter from The Wall Street Journal. I’d always been into gambling and games with a luck factor like poker, backgammon, cribbage, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Always hated chess because the better player (nearly) always wins.
Scrabble’s an interesting game but unless you’re very talented at anagramming and have a good memory, it’s a bit of a slog to learn enough of the “rules” of the game (the words) to make it really fun. At my “peak”, I was studying 20 or so hours a week and wasn’t even making progress anymore, just maintaining the stuff I’d already learned.
It was a way to pass a few years of my life. I traveled around to tournaments, sometimes won enough to break even, met some interesting weirdos, and had a good enough time. But one day I just had enough and put it down and never picked it up again. Just stopped thinking it was fun, I guess.
Biggest thing I took away from it was really seeing how a few minutes (and eventually a few hours) of work a day could help you change how your brain works and how you see the world. I vividly remember one day at work I saw a guy whose name badge said Demetrius. I instantly thought “oh if you add a ‘u’ to his name and rearrange the letters it spells ‘deuteriums.’”
Now, when I think something is too hard or too big to accomplish, I think about that and just start chipping away.
- If you're interested in the history and the weird world of competitive scrabble I highly recommend Stefan Fatsis' book "Word Freak", as well as the documentary film "Word Wards" (2004) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Word_Wars
- Word Freak (http://www.amazon.co.uk/Word-Freak-Eccentric-Heartbreak-Comp...) the book that preceded the film is also a similarly fascinating read.
- it is mildly statistical, but this basically pales to the amount of memorization you can do. It's good to set your rack up so that you have a good chance of getting decent letters in the subsequent turns, but the gradient of improvement is almost always in favor of "memorize more words" (admittedly, by going through the most common to least common groups of six letters plus one more) rather than math.
But in the strictest sense, statistics is more important than linguistics. It just doesn't really matter because memorization is so much more important than both of them.
The book Word Freak was pretty good and as far as I can tell, accurate.
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