Unicycling and Scrabble

Some of you might already know that I play in Scrabble tournaments. Just as there is a whole unicycle community that most of the public doesn't know about, there is a serious Scrabble scene out there that most people are blissfully unaware of. And while there are a thousand times more people who own a Scrabble set than a unicycle, the number of tournament players is roughly equivalent to the number of serious unicyclists (except in Japan, where unicycling is more of a cultural phenomenon).

At the tournament level, there are still plenty of 'livingroom' Scrabble players who enjoy the game and are happy to ply their trade against others of their ilk. They usually attend their local Scrabble clubs, but they don't worry too much about winning or losing. Further up the hierarchy are people who take the game a bit more seriously but who aren't especially gifted (as well as people who are pretty gifted with the game but who don't take it too seriously).

As in chess, there are player ratings based on expected performance against a given player. If your rating is 200 points higher than your opponent's, then you're expected to win two thirds of your games with that person. The top of the pyramid tends to thin out pretty fast: There are a few thousand people rated around 1000, but there are only a few hundred rated 1600-1750, and fewer than 150 rated higher than that, nationwide. There are only a handful rated around 2000.

I began playing Scrabble as a kid, mainly against my dad in head-to-head games. I discovered club- and tournament Scrabble in 1993, and that marked the end of the games with my dad. In fact, I can't play against anyone in my family or circle of non-Scrabble friends because it's too (understandably) frustrating for my opponent (tho I don't mind a bit -- I just love playing). Luckily, when I could no longer play at the NYC club, the Internet provided a way for people across the world to play against each other in real time, so now I play a few games online everyday.

1993 was also my first year of teaching at Heschel, a school on the Upper West Side of Manhattan that happened to be just over a mile from where I was living at the time. I printed out a few word lists and would study them while I unicycled to school. I also had a hand-held elctronic Scrabble dictionary that I would scroll thru during my rides. I learned all the 3- and 4-letter words this way, riding my 24" Schwinn to school each day. Luckily there weren't too many people on the streets in the mornings.

Within a few years, I was among the highest-rated players in North America; I was once among the top 50. More recently, my rating has wavered around the high-1700s, where it is now (within the top 125). I don't get to too many touraments, and those I do play in are small, local one-day affairs. But I stay sharp thanks to the online games and a little studying, and one day, I hope to return to my sharpest form so that I can pierce the ranks of the upper eschelon once again.

SCRABBLE and UNICYCLING HAVE MORE IN COMMON than YOU'D THINK

Both activities find true enthusiasts only in small numbers. Riding a unicycle gets stares, but so does stating that I'm off to play in a Scrabble tournament. Here are a few other commonalities.

* Discipline: You have to stick with uni'ing for many hours before you're any good, and Scrabble takes many games before you have even a fair understanding of how to take advantage of the 'hot spots' on the board.
* Balance: For unicycling, that's obvious, but all strong Scrabble players understand the importance of rack balance (keeping back certain letters so that you're more likely to score well on the turn to follow).
* Obsession: In order to get really good at anything in life, most of us need to be a bit obsessive. After all, learning all of the 3-letter words acceptable in Scrabble is fairly useless except in the context of the game itself. You don't really need to know that TSK is a verb, for example, any more than you need to know how to mount a unicycle with your weak foot. So both endeavors routinely force me to spend hours practicing something that doesn't generalize to anything else in life.
* Technology: There are more computer programmers in Scrabble than you'd have expected. The same goes for unicycling. I wish I knew just why this is. I think it is somehow connected to obsessiveness and with getting good at something that can be fairly solitary (unlike a team sport).
* Gender: There are a lot more men than women in the upper ranks of Scrabble. Theories abound. My hunch is that it's due to a combination of factors. One piece is the fact that raising a family often precludes some women from having the time necessary to become great at what they love. Another component is that women are probably socialized not to get good at certain things. Studying Scrabble lists is certainly not 'manly,' but I guess it would be tolerated more among men than women. Finally, there is competitiveness. I think that men are inherently more competitive. It would stand to reason, then, that the best players would be the ones who have time to study, aren't chastised about studying, and really care about winning. Unicycling has only recently been seen as acceptable for girls (with the exception, again, of Japan). When I was a teen, I never saw a female unicyclist. Nowadays there are a lot more girls and women getting into the sport.

Here is one big difference. I don't know many unicycle nerds. Scrabble is almost the opposite. At the top level of Scrabble, there are quite a few unmarried men who are unlikely ever to pass along their wonderful genes. Of course, too much unicycling could keep a guy from passing along his genes, too, but that's another issue (see my upcoming post about the importance of a comfortable seat).