![]() ![]() ![]() “For 25 minutes you are enemies across the board, and then you are best friends.” I like to look at my opponent eye to eye,” says Paul. Also key to Scrabble success, apparently, is playing in real life as well as online. ![]() “Keep testing, keep challenging, keep pushing,” he tells me, boasting that he became so notorious for challenging in Dunedin circles that people would yell “CHALLENGE” at him across the street. “135 points! I was dead in the water immediately.” Paul Lister in a post SAMIZDAT haze (Photo: Naomi Johnston)Īlthough it’s easy to feel intimidated when an opponent plays a long, complicated word, Paul says that challenging them is crucial. “Gil played ‘SAMIZDAT’!” he exclaims, gesticulating wildly with his steak knife. But there’s been one word in particular that has left him reeling. “Infinite combinations and infinitely fascinating.” A self-described “word freak”, Paul tells me he is fluent in French, German, Latin and currently learning te reo Māori. “I’ll never get to the bottom of Scrabble,” says Paul Lister from Christchurch, excitedly sawing into his steak, egg and chips. “A tropical American weevil.”Īt lunch, people are already frothing over some of the big plays of the morning. A steady stream of competitors get up to check. A woman with an unspeakably large pom-pom at the end of her pencil approaches the laptop and does a small fist pump. It doesn’t take long for the challenges to start flowing. “You’re going to ask me what that means, aren’t you?” she says, before being summoned to fix another clock. ![]() Liz tells me that the programme they use, Zyzzyva, is also the last word in the Scrabble dictionary. If the word is permitted, the player gets five extra points for their troubles and the challenger gets a very red face. If the word is not allowed, the rules state that it has to be removed from the board and the player of the word loses a turn. Photo: Naomi JohnstonĪnxious to avoid adding to the chaos, I park myself next to the laptop where people can check the validity of their challenged words. Someone else had spilled their tiles in a pile, requiring an elaborate adjudicated redraw. Someone’s board appeared to be above regulation height. The first games were under way – 25 minutes on the clock for each person to make their moves – and already there was drama for The Boss to confront. Her shirt was proudly emblazoned with an acrostic Scrabble poem: Senior Citizens Refreshing Ageing Brains By Lexicon Enhancement. Liz Fagerlund, secretary of the NZ Association of Scrabble Players, was handling last-minute draw rearrangements under a hand-drawn sign at one end of the room that said THE BOSS. There was a charming array of bespoke Scrabble accessories, including Scrabble tile earrings and patchwork board bags. This was one of the first in-person national Scrabble tournaments to happen anywhere since the global pandemic hit, and you better believe there was a raffle full of luxury supermarket goods to the value of over $90 NZD to celebrate. The Cossie Cat slunk its way between the Scrabblers’ legs, oblivious to the magnitude of the situation. I was the lone spectator at the New Zealand National Scrabble Tournament, and was already having the time of my life. All inspect their findings with the theatricality of a magician who has pulled a coin from behind your ear. Others go in slowly and deliberately, a word farmer hand-delivering a word calf. Some frantically whisk the tiles inside the bag, as if prepping a word omelette. With your eyes open, you are very clearly in the paisley 70s womb of the Hamilton Cosmopolitan Club, as an 80-strong room of competitive Scrabblers plunge their hands into their jittery tile bags at the same time. With your eyes shut, you could be trapped in a cave full of furious rattlesnakes. Alex Casey spends a long weekend with the most passionate Scrabble players in the country, and learns more new words than you can shake a tile bag at. ![]()
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