Hard core Scrabble

A social scientist looking for the greatest collection of right-brain types in the Twin Cities would have hit the jackpot this weekend in the Grand Cayman Room of the Holiday Inn in Bloomington.

There, over the span of 48 hours, a group of 75 people, a surprising number of them left-handed and into computers, played 28 games of the word-game Scrabble. They started at 7 a.m. and did not pull their last tiles out of the bag until 11:30 p.m. Saturday and Sunday.

The Red Eye Scrabble Tournament, the only one of its kind in the country, pushes the limits of how many games of competitive Scrabble can be jammed into two days.

This ain’t your rainy-day board game up at the cabin. Winners in the three divisions each would win $500, the results affecting rankings leading up to the national championships with a $25,000 prize in Orlando this summer.

The mood inside the room was intense but chess-match muffled, Scrabble etiquette being what it is. Trash talking and other exuberance, known as “coffee housing,” were greatly discouraged. At times, the only thing that could be heard was the careful shaking of the letter tiles in their sacks, sounding like the equivalent of 30-some sets of teeth collectively chattering. The timing clocks that allow each competitor 25 minutes of play a game clicked away silently.

Tournament coordinator Stephanie Steele, a stay-at-home mom from St. Paul and a competitive player who will knock off three games over breakfast with a friend, originally had a hard time persuading the bigwigs at the National Scrabble Association to sanction the event. They worried that too few top-level players would come, fearful that the marathon nature of the tournament would scare away the best of the competitive players. The association relented when it was assured that the players were highly competitive.

These are the days of extreme sports, and adrenaline junkies of the more sedentary kind have flocked to the event, with a significant number of nationally ranked players in attendance. Contestants were an eclectic group. The youngest was 14-year-old Jason Vaysberg of Plymouth. Many contestants were in the 60s. Competitors came from 17 states and two Canadian provinces.

Fatsis’ book also inspired competitive player Winter, which is his complete legal name. Winter holds the previous record for consecutive weekend Scrabble tournaments played, at 19, and has broken the record this year. The Red Eye Tournament is his 24th consecutive weekend tournament. A Houston native, he flew in from Philadelphia and tries to adjust his work schedule as a computer programmer to accommodate where tournaments are being played.

For him, Scrabble combines the tactical nature of chess with the luck of the draw of poker, which he also plays. There are perhaps 3,000 competitive Scrabble players in the United States and he believes he is good enough to one day crack the top 10.

“Scrabble is my social life,” he acknowledged on Sunday, with four games left to play. “I can tell you this, though, my personality being what it is, if I did get in the top 10, that probably wouldn’t be good enough.”

For Polish immigrant Zbigniew Wieckowski, who points out that his first name is 23 points and his second is 26, the game is a good way to improve word skills. He came from Poland in 1990 and began playing competitive Scrabble about a half-year ago.

“Every foreigner should be made to play,” he said enthusiastically.

There was also a tip of the hat to the topical: Prizes were to be awarded for the most points for the word including the letters M-L-K, it being the weekend of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s birthday celebration. By Sunday afternoon, it was 98 points for “milkings.”