OUT for a day on the tiles, Scotland's best Scrabble players are on their way into an Edinburgh club. For the next seven hours, eight men and four women will do lexicographical battle. The Scottish Scrabble Masters is about to begin.
Raymond Tate, a 52 year old from Paisley with a bushy beard and slicked-back hair, removes his raincoat and reveals a shirt emblazoned with a picture of a silvery god rising from flames. This shirt is a tactic, an attempt to get an edge on opponents;
everyone agrees it's a very psychological game. Tate used to breed Bichon Frisés. Then he was a bookie. Now he's retired and obsessed with Scrabble. "I met my wife at the Glasgow club," he says. "Scrabble, basically, means everything to me."
The players assemble in a small room and sit at tables with velvet covers. On each there is a Scrabble board, quite different from the familiar fold-up sets. These have ridges between the squares to stop the tiles sliding when the boards, on a circular base, are spun between shots. Elite players tote these around in special bags, often embroidered with the logo of the world championship in which they competed – Kuala Lumpur 2003, say, or Mumbai 2007.
Unlike those tournaments, there isn't any money in the Masters, but it is a prestigious title which Helen Gipson, for one, really wants to win. A retired software engineer living in the Borders, she fuels herself between games with caffeine and nicotine, and is arguably the best player in the world. Her online Scrabble name is Pooh, but she's more like Rabbit – determined to come out on top. Gipson spends eight hours a day, seven days a week, studying Scrabble. A computer programme flashes up anagrams of words which she tries to identify. In this way she has learned 50,000 words useful for playing the game.
You get a 50 point bonus for using all seven letters, but the key to winning is knowing all 124 two-letter and 1,292 three-letter words. Learn everything from 'aa', a kind of lava, to 'zo', a cross between a yak and a cow, and you should do well.
Has knowing obscure words changed the way Gipson talks? "No. I'm not very interested in the meanings. Occasionally you come across a beautiful word that has an interesting meaning, but with most you go, 'Oh right, it's another sheep disease.'" Does she have a favourite word, though? "One I came across recently is superb. Birdash – a Native American transvestite."
There's something quite pleasing about the way Scrabble neutralises language. Swearing, for instance, is allowed, the words losing their offence as soon as they are placed on the board. I notice one player play 'wog' against a black opponent, and neither seems uneasy about it.
Scrabble is global, hugely popular in South-East Asia and parts of Africa where English is taught in schools. In Nigeria it's a recognised sport, the top players are funded by the government. Four million Scrabble sets are sold worldwide each year, but the game has a cultural reach beyond its sales. Everyone has played Scrabble. Barack Obama loves it. Amy Winehouse played topless on the beach in St Lucia. Killing time on Big Brother, Tommy Sheridan plotted to pitch a Celebrity Scrabble TV show. In 2009, it's hip to be square.
Competitive Scrabble is quite different from the game most people play. Serious Scrabblers will tell you that it is more mentally demanding than chess, a game they consider wildly overrated. "Scrabble uses both sides of the brain – artistic and analytical – to process language, numbers, strategy, probability," says Allan Simmons, 50, a professional Scrabble expert and the current holder of two major British titles.
He is wearing a black Association of British Scrabble Players T-shirt. He takes his watch and shoes off while he plays so as not to inhibit the flow of life force and thoughts that Taoists call Chi. He collects antique dictionaries, his car reg is W70 RDS, and he plays with a home-made rack that looks like – and may be – a cannibalised picture-rail. Scrabble, by the way, is the only game in which you can say, "Nice rack!" to a female competitor without risking a slap.
Simmons, who goes on to win the Masters, seems different from most top players. Words, for the Scrabble elite, are ammunition; their value comes only from how many points they earn. Simmons, however, enjoys the patterns of letters in an almost sculptural way. "But I have trouble reading books because I get distracted by the words. I see a seven-letter word and think of anagrams for it."
Competitive Scrabble is played against the clock. Each player starts with 25 minutes. At the end of a turn, you hit the button and your opponent's clock starts counting down. The room is quiet, the atmosphere intense. Someone dares to exclaim "Goodness me!" and is shushed. It feels a bit like an examination hall, and cheating is unacceptable. Tiles are removed from a cloth bag held above eye level so players can't peek and select good tiles. Last month in Malaysia, a top player was caught doing this, denounced from the podium, and banned for four years.
Everyone here is excited. Gipson's waggling right foot is a sign of the adrenalin coursing through her body. "I'm seriously pissed off," Ricky Zinger, a Glaswegian, says after she beats him. He also tells me he waited years to be able to play his surname, and finally scored 52 with it.
After each game the most interesting words are written up on a white-board. Some genius has put 'eejit', but mostly it's high-scoring but confusing Scrabble vocabulary such as 'tzigane', 'dowf' and 'cotlands' – a cottage and its lands, the only allowable anagram of Scotland.
Gipson looks pretty pleased with herself as she writes 'mevrou' on the board. But then Simmons steps up. "I can outdo you," he says, taking the marker-pen. "Z-I-G-G-U-R-A-T," he spells, his face the very definition of joy.
The full article contains 1031 words and appears in Scotland On Sunday newspaper.
