The Jesus of Scrabble

I was forwarded the following article by a good friend of mine and I had forgotten about it until I was playing online scrabble at my new job and the person I was in battle with drew reference to it.

Great human interest story, rich and warm with detail.

830! How a Massachusetts carpenter got the highest Scrabble score ever.

On Oct. 12, in the basement of a Unitarian church on the town green in Lexington, Mass., a carpenter named Michael Cresta scored 830 points in a game of Scrabble. His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who works at a supermarket deli counter, totaled 490 points. The two men set three records for sanctioned Scrabble in North America: the most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320), and the most points on a single turn (365, for Cresta's play of QUIXOTRY).

In the community of competitive Scrabble, of which I am a tile-carrying member, the game has been heralded as the anagrammatic equivalent of Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game in 1962 or Don Larsen's perfect game in the 1956 World Series: a remarkable, wildly aberrational event with potential staying power. Cresta's 830 shattered a 13-year-old record, 770 points, which had been threatened only infrequently.

Since virtually all sports involve variable conditions, comparing one performance to another is technically imperfect. Consider the absence of black players in Babe Ruth's day, or the presence of steroids in the Barry Bonds era. On its face, the new Scrabble records seem to avoid such problems. No one's juicing in Scrabble. Points in a game are just points in a game, and Michael Cresta scored 830 of them. On Scrabble's members-only list-serve, Crossword Games-Pro, most players have hailed this harmonic convergence of vowels and consonants as a triumphal moment. But the record-worthiness of the shot heard 'round the Scrabble world is more complicated than it might look.

Let's begin with the fact that Cresta and Yorra aren't expert-level players. They know the basics—like the 101 two-letter and most of the 1,015 three-letter words—but they're both rated in the bottom third of tournament players. In Lexington, where the record was set during the club's regular Thursday-night session, Yorra is known for trying implausible words and hoping they're in the Official Tournament and Club Word List. Cresta has memorized thousands of obscure words (like those ending in WOOD or starting with OVEN) by reading, writing down, and tape-recording pages from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. But he doesn't study the highly probable words that are essential for climbing the competitive ranks. "These are not guys who have low ratings because they haven't played in many tournaments," Mike Wolfberg, the Lexington club's statistician, told me. "They have low ratings because they aren't very good."

So, how did they break the all-time Scrabble scoring record, set during a tournament by two experts, one of whom has been known ever since as Mr. 770? The simple answer is that Cresta-Yorra was a fluke. Given that Scrabble is played in more than 200 clubs and there are more than 200 tournaments a year in North America, the thinking goes, it was inevitable that Mr. 770's record would fall, especially with the growth of serious study and an increase in words in the Scrabble dictionary.

But there's more to it than that. To understand how Cresta and Yorra broke the record, let's take a closer look at the game. (For the full play-by-play, click here.) Yorra opened with JOUSTED, a "bingo"—Scrabble lingo for using all seven tiles, which earns you an extra 50 points—worth 96 points. Cresta then traded in all seven of his tiles in the hope of getting more-playable letters, not an unusual move. Yorra bingoed again, very nicely, with LADYLIKE for 73 points and a 169-0 lead. The first L in LADYLIKE landed between two triple-word-score squares, giving Cresta a shot at Scrabble's holy grail—a "triple-triple," covering two triple-word scores with one word. That's worth nine times the value of the word, plus the 50-point bonus for using all seven letters.

If you made it this far, I am superDUPER impressed with you and you ought to finish the article on the original site.