"One-hundred seven." I tremble in unbelief as I lay down WAYBILLS and announce its ungodly score to take a 99 point lead in the most important game of my life. My opponent, Brian Cappelletto, a former National and World Scrabble Champion, replies with his own big play, RADICATE for 65, but he's dead. I win 459-410 in the last game to take 6th place in 2005 National Scrabble Championship. Which is ludicrous, because I was in 72nd place out of 87 halfway through the 28-game marathon, but in the last 14 games I lost only once against the strongest field of Scrabblers I'd ever faced. I emerged as one of the top 10 rated Scrabble players in North America.

The National Scrabble Championship is the highlight of the tournament Scrabble circuit. The National Scrabble Association sanctions several tournaments every weekend across the country, but Hasbro, the game's maker in North America, sponsors only the Nationals, where the first prize is $25,000. ESPN tapes the best-of-five showdown between the top two finishers and airs an hourlong show in the fall. It's must-see television. Last year, one finalist was Panupol Sujjayakorn, an Economics student from Thailand and former World Champion. Like me, he has memorized all of the 83,667 valid words up to eight letters long. That he can't comfortably speak English is irrelevant because he's a wicked machine when it comes to executing solid Scrabble strategy. 

When playing topnotch opponents like Cappelletto or Sujjayakorn, I assume they have perfect word knowledge too. The game then requires the look-ahead of chess and the inferential strategy of poker. I must both maximize my score on the current turn and also keep strong letters on my rack that will probabilistically maximize my score on future turns. I further aim to squelch opponent opportunity by guessing what tiles they are most likely to be holding based on their previous plays. By tracking tiles as they are played I can also deduce exactly what tiles my opponent has in the endgame and plan my final plays to maximize the margin of victory.

In other words, high-level Scrabble is a math game, and the depth at which one can strategize is one reason I keep playing. Together with John O'Laughlin, a fellow expert at the University of Wisconsin, I wrote a Scrabble artificial intelligence and analysis tool called Quackle. I play about five games a day against Quackle and win about half the time, but Quackle is most useful for analysing my tournament losses. Although there is a lot of luck in Scrabble, I always blame losses on not taking full advantage of opportunities during the game, and Quackle can show me what I missed and how to sharpen my skills. Quackle is free, open-source software, so try it out at http://quackle.org.

I started playing Scrabble seriously four years ago after reading Stefan Fatsis's "Word Freak". Among the awesome tourney players it followed was Joel Sherman, whose gastrointestinal reflux prevents him from keeping a job so he competes on the Scrabble circuit full time, and Joe Edley, who takes a zen approach to the game and attributes his success to deep breathing during tournaments. I felt shunning these obsessors to play amongst themselves was cowardly when what they were doing was so bloody cool. I wanted to become the best player in the world. I wrote a computer program to quiz me on seven and eight letter words scrambled into alphabetical order. For thousands of hours over the last few years I have stared at garbage like DEEINTUV, AAEELRTV, ACENOORT, AAEGIMNT and cogitated "DUVETINE! VALERATE! CORONATE! AGMINATE and ENIGMATA!" until I had solved the "alphagrams" of all of the sevens and eights (53795 words total) at least twice.

This April, I won the Boston Area Tournament in Westford, which attracted the best players in the continent to an elite 18-player premier division. I bested Joel Sherman, now a good friend, in a wild final game. My final two moves were ALIENORS then UNVISITED through a disconnected S and D after he took a brief lead with MOATING. My 15-5 record propelled my rating to 1988 and a #1 rank in the National Scrabble Association. I had achieved my goal.

I faltered and finished 12th at the National Championship this year, but I'll be back, and in the meantime have redoubled my efforts to spread the appeal of competitive Scrabble through the MIT Scrabble club. Scrabble is a tough but rewarding game so I'm eager to help anyone interested in improving their skill. Check out http://www.mit.edu/~jasonkb/mit-scrabble/ for online resources or if you want to play with us.