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Basketball fans streamed into downtown San Antonio over the weekend for the Final Four, but it wasn’t the only highly competitive drama going on. Matt Canik is the event's director.
“You know, I would say in terms of drama, Scrabble can bring as much drama as the Final Four can bring,” Canik said.
Yes, Scrabble. They played at the limestone and stained-glass Coates Chapel at UTSA Southwest.
“We had a mini tournament yesterday, a winner-take-all, it was the two-seed versus a three-seed, and the players played to a tie at 417 apiece,” he said. “This is the drama Scrabble brings. You can't script this stuff.”
This past weekend about 60 convened for the event that had been held yearly, but COVID 19 killed it five years go. Now for the first time in half a decade, it’s back. The former high school teacher just loves the game, but there’s also an undercurrent.
“I feel like the power of both written and spoken word seems to be fading, but Scrabble is my way of fighting back.”
Those who don’t play Scrabble often think of it as a game for brainiacs, but competitor Alex Rivard said no amount of intelligence can prepare you for some of the game’s twists and turns.
“It's extremely competitive, but you're also putting your hand into a bag and grabbing random tiles,” Rivard said. “So there's a pretty large element of luck to it as well, and a lot of a lot of volatility that comes with that.”
Bottom line: having a huge vocabulary can’t keep you from making a bad draw.
“The best Scrabble players are not necessarily word people or English people or wordsmiths. You see a lot of people in the tech world. You see mathematicians doing incredibly well in this game,” Rivard said.
While this tournament is being held just blocks from the Alamo, Scrabble rules can’t flex for Texas sensibilities.
“As much as I would love 'y'all' to be a word, 'y'all' is not acceptable because it has an apostrophe. In the same way that 'don't' or 'can't' with an apostrophe, neither of those would be acceptable,” he said.
Canik said they can’t flex Scrabble Rules, but they can offer cash prizes for special circumstances.
“The highest scoring word that contains the letters T, E, X, A, S will win a cash prize. The highest scoring word with the letters A, L, A, M, O, will win a cash prize,” he said.
Player Bryan Pepper has been playing competitively for three decades and he’s put a lot of thought into how probabilities factor into the game.
“Not to geek out on you but drawing from a tile bag with 100 tiles in it, there is a 12% chance that I will draw a word out of the bag. It's a math game, not a word game,” Pepper said.
If you’re wondering whether Scrabble wordsmiths occasionally use the power of words against their opponents, wonder no more.
“Oh yeah, there's trash talking! Oh, absolutely,” Pepper said.
Suddenly things got quiet, and the competitors settled in to begin a game. No one said a word, but there was a curious, recurring sound. It was the sound of hands digging through and mixing up the tiles in felt baggies that each held.
After every play, players have to dig through those bags for their replacement tiles.
They’re playing for fun, but Canik said there are other incentives.
“$400 for first place in all four of the divisions, 250 for second. It's not a ton of money, but definitely enough to go out and buy a round for your friends, get some tacos or whatever you want to eat on the Riverwalk,” he said.
No one I spoke to mentioned money as a motivator, but Rivard said friendship was.
“A lot of the people participating today are members of the San Antonio Scrabble Club, which meets every Thursday about 5:30 or 6pm at Lions field on Broadway,” Canik said.
Sounds like F-U-N.
