1153. This week, we look at the high-stakes world of Scrabble tournaments with John Chew, head of the North American Scrabble Players Association. We look at the strict etiquette of the tile bag, why professional players count tiles, and how the official word list is managed for competitive play.
1153. This week, we look at the high-stakes world of Scrabble tournaments with John Chew, head of the North American Scrabble Players Association. We look at the strict etiquette of the tile bag, why professional players count tiles, and how the official word list is managed for competitive play.
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[Computer-generated transcript]
Mignon Fogarty: Grammar Girl here. I'm Mignon Fogarty, and today I'm here with John Chew, who is big in the Scrabble world. We're going to talk about Scrabble in the main segment, and he is also in charge of a new Canadian dictionary project. So we're going to talk about that in the bonus section. John, welcome to the Grammar Girl Podcast.
John Chew: It's great to be back. Thanks for having me.
Mignon Fogarty: You bet. Yeah. So, we were talking before we started recording about our backgrounds in academia, and I know you have a background in math. And I'm always surprised how important math is in board games. Can you talk about, sort of the interplay between those two in your background?
John Chew: Sure. I mean, I always wanted to be a mathematician all throughout high school and through college, and then my enthusiasm for it started to wane as I worked, started to work on my doctorate, and I'll let you know how that plays out maybe at our next interview. The thing about the connection between math and board games is there's two aspects to it. One is that mathematics teaches us to be analytical and to take a reasoned approach to things, which in most board games is a useful mindset to take. Even if it's a game where you think it's a psychological or there's a large psychological component, like poker, there's still, if you don't know the math behind it, it's hard. Oh, two things. I guess there's three things. This is going to turn into a Monty Python sketch in a moment. The second thing is, and that if you get heavily into any sort of discipline, especially a scientific discipline. But I think my humanities friends might disagree, but there's a lot of rote memorization and need time to set aside time to learn stuff that has very little application outside your niche interest and mathematics is high on the list of subjects that requires just a lot of retraining your brain. So if you get to a certain point in your studies where you think I'd like to keep on going, learning new things, then board games are a relatively easy way to keep that dopamine flowing to your brain. Just as a lifelong learning project, they're a good way to exercise your brain if you've got the right sort of brain for that.
The last thing is, and the terminology for this has changed over the years, and I think we're currently using neurotypical and neurodivergent. But there are a lot of neurodivergent people, and I would identify myself as one, I think, who enjoy board games because they help them, it helps us them, find their peers and interact with them in healthy ways. And we can take that, what we learn from that playing with people, interacting across a board game into a broader social context and make us better socialized people in general. I often think of my work running the North American Scrabble Players Association as a large group therapy exercise, trying to get people to play nicely with each other so they will play nicely with others. That's what I would say. I know the math, I skipped over a part about math and neuro math being associated with neurodivergence, but I don't think I need to connect those dots very firmly. I think that's kind of obvious.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, no, that's okay. Because there's so much strategy too, you know, in playing the right tiles, on the right numbers and getting the score.
John Chew: Oh, well, sure. Yeah. I mean, at a very basic level, one of the first things that you find if you migrate from playing Scrabble online to playing Scrabble in person is you're expected to keep score, which means that your arithmetic abilities, which almost certainly atrophied into nothingness at this point because you use your phone for everything, or, you know, you just trust what the cash register says, those will come back really quickly. And it's really useful because you'll find out that the cash register's been shortchanging you all this time. If you have to keep figuring out, oh, well, let's see. I played this word across two triple word scores and a double letter. Got to double the value of that, add all those numbers up, triple it twice, that's nine times.
And yeah, there, there's, there is some mathematics required-not, there's some arithmetic required-in Scrabble. And then there's also, as you say, the strategy part of it where you need to be able to visualize, and I'm going to get back to that word in a moment. You need to visualize the future outcome that the game may take. And you need to choose a path along that tree of possibilities to decide what's most likely going to lead to you exceeding the score of your opponent by at least one point, which is how a friend of mine, the current world champion, described the object of the game of Scrabble.
Mignon Fogarty: Is it a little bit like chess in that way where you have to plan ahead?
John Chew: Yeah. Well, people say that soccer is a beautiful sport, but the Scrabble is the most beautiful game in the world. And one of the reasons for that is it's got a little bit of everything. It's got a little bit of luck, it's got a little bit of strategy. When you're starting off the game, it's very much like a card game where you're dealt a random hand and you need to figure out what to do. It's very much a metaphor for life at that point. You're given a bunch of random things and you have to figure out what the best thing is you can do with all of these things. And if you manage to do the right thing over several turns and you get a little dopamine hit each time, you'll eventually get to the end game, which then becomes very chess-like because when there's just a couple of tiles left in the bag. You'll have been carefully keeping track of which tiles have been played and which tiles are therefore still unplayed and which tiles are likely to be in the bag, which tiles are likely to be on your opponent's rack. And you'll think, okay, if I do this, then I'll win. If that tile is in the bag, and then when you draw that tile out of the bag and it is or it isn't, then you'll have a completely chess-like situation where it's a total, I do this, he does that, I do that this, they do that, I do this, and then they win, or I win by five points or whatever. So there's, yeah, there's a random part to begin with, and then there's a deterministic part at the end. So it's both.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, it almost reminds me a little bit of counting cards in blackjack, except that the tiles that have been played are all out on the board so you can see them. You don't have to remember them all.
John Chew: Yeah, and there was a similar debate early on in the history of the competitive game as to whether or not people should be allowed to count the tiles. You get in trouble if you count the cards too visibly in a casino, but everybody expects everybody to be counting tiles in Scrabble in real life. And if you're playing, actually, that's another thing you have to learn how to do when you migrate from playing online to playing in person: you have to manually keep track of the tiles and know how many of which ones there are. But it's just, it's so much richer a game if you have a sense of which tiles are still in play, even in the middle of the game. If you notice that the game has been vowel-heavy or consonant-heavy, or if you know that all the S's or blanks are gone, that can make a big difference to your ideal strategy at that point.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, I mean, do people, like, keep track on paper, like there? Do they keep track of the ones, because it might be hard to hold it all in your head.
John Chew: It depends. Most...
Mignon Fogarty: Is that allowed? I guess I'm asking.
John Chew: Yeah. And everybody keeps track of it on paper. Some very few people will have enough of an ability to absorb that abstract information that they will know how many tiles are left, but that's a waste of your brain. You should be using it to strategize rather than to count. Some people will use devices that they've constructed for the purpose, or they'll just take a sheet of paper that has all the letters on it that's been laminated so they can use a dry erase marker on it.
It used to be, and I don't know if they still do this, there were some very observant, I'm sure they still do this. There were some very observant Orthodox Jews who, when they were playing on the Sabbath would, in order to avoid the prohibition on writing on the Sabbath, they would take an extra set of tiles that were of a distinct design, like from a travel set, and they would manually flip those over as they went. And we're fine with that, as tournament organizers, as long as what they're doing is of equal or greater effort than what regular players do.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow. Yeah, I mean, I saw someone commenting that it's surprising that the Scrabble players can grab their own tiles from the bag because it seems like that would introduce the, you know, slipping in a tile of your own or something. Has that ever happened at a tournament that you know of?
John Chew: I'm frequently called upon to adjudicate rules and infractions at tournaments, at the national championship. It would have to be a pretty serious thing for it to escalate to my level. But if it's just like a warm-up event or a weekend event, then I am called to enforce the rules or adjudicate the rules.
And for sure, the vast majority of rules and infractions have to do with the tile drawing process. Either people draw too many tiles or they're not correct about the etiquette for the tile drawing. And I wish I had a prop handy here, and I'm looking around. Oh, yes. Okay, so this is a tile bag.
Mignon Fogarty: Okay.
John Chew: Everybody has tile bags of their own particular design or favorite? No, I like penguins. So mine has penguins on it. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: I like penguins too. It's sort of a medium-sized bag with a draw at the top for listeners.
John Chew: Yep, has a drawstring. It's knotted so it doesn't come out. It is, yeah, I dunno the size for it.
Mignon Fogarty: Probably four inches.
John Chew: Four inches by six to eight inches maybe.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
John Chew: Got to be big enough that your hand can fit entirely into it comfortably. So I raise the tile bag so that its opening is at or above my eye level. That's to make sure I'm not looking into the tile bag. Make sure that you can see the top of the tile bag. That's so that you can be sure that I'm not dropping tiles back into the bag. Open up my hand that I'm going to put into the tile bag, so you can make sure that if I'm not a magician, I'm not hiding any tiles in my hand. If I'm a magician, I'd have them, I don't know, glued to the back of my hand or something. Then stick my hand into the tile bag, make that rattling noise that is familiar to anybody who's ever been to a Scrabble club. And I draw out the tiles. Some people draw them out one at a time and put them down. Some people will take all of them out. And so, oh, I got an S good, one of the best tiles in the game. And I got an E, ooh, E-S is like one of the best combinations in a C, so I could play SEC, which is the abbreviation for a second. I wouldn't do that unless I was hooking the S to make a longer word or hit a bonus square anyway. So there's all that protocol to it, but at every step, something could, can go wrong. If I overdraw, then there's rules about what to do if I overdraw tiles. If I overdraw tiles and then mess up the protocol for if I've overdrawn the tiles, there's rules to deal with that. And so, I would say a good quarter of our rules have to do with mishandling, with tile infractions.
And this is something that it's a good reason to learn to play online because it's something you don't have to worry about online. Because the computer gives you the tiles. On the other hand, there have been many, many cases in the past of people discovering that the RNG or the randomization of tile drawing on online computer systems is not completely random. And that people were again shortchanged from drawing, from getting, seeing the same tiles too often. And so many people, in fact, one former national champion, one former world champion, said that he feels luckier when he can draw tiles himself than when a computer draws tiles. Which is an odd thing to say, especially if you think too carefully about the fact that the only way that could be true, assuming the computer software were accurate, would be if he was manipulating the tiles in some illicit way, which I don't think he was in this particular case. He just wasn't thinking about what he was saying.
Mignon Fogarty: I wonder, So when I hear that the randomness isn't really random, I wonder like were people taking advantage of that knowledge when they were playing online. Because you could make assumptions mathematically, like if you know that you're going to get more Rs or something like that.
John Chew: People have done that in the past. I think in the most recent instance, it was just an annoyance and a curiosity. I don't think anybody exploited it, but there's a platform called woogles.io, W-O-O-G-L-E-S, where all the cool kids play these days. It was developed during the pandemic as a pandemic project by some temporarily out-of-work software developers in the community. And they ran into this problem.
And the mathematical problem, if I can put on my mathematician hat for a moment, is one of measuring entropy. That is to say, randomness. And if you think about how much randomness there is in the process of drawing a hundred tiles out of the bag, and how many different ways that those could come out, that's a huge number of ways and therefore a huge number of different games that could be played. And in particular, if you're using a standard computer function to generate numbers and that random number only has 32 or 64 bits of randomness, or entropy to it, then it's not going to be enough. What you'll end up seeing is patterns repeating as to which tiles end up getting drawn from the bag. So if you're listening to this as a computer science student, then the correct method is to ask for more entropy every time you draw a tile rather than once at the beginning of the game to set a random seed, as the gamers and the software developers say, to choose which game you're playing. Because there aren't enough seeds to match the number of games.
Mignon Fogarty: Interesting. Is there anything else interesting that can go wrong in a live play tournament? Have you had the power go out or, you know, or what are some odd things that people do?
John Chew: I haven't even stopped talking about things that can go wrong with tiles. I mean, people can, people can palm tiles, people can be falsely accused of palming tiles, people in one World Championship several years ago, there was a serious accusation that someone had slipped a stray tile into a pocket or somewhere on their person. And was demands for the person to be strip searched. There were so, and you know, It's sad that a very small number of people, some were, I think something like. In my experience, it's less than half a percentage of people who will try to cheat rather than study to play Scrabble, and we've got mechanisms in place to prevent that. But as far as, you know, weird things that can happen, you know, when you've been running a tournament, a tournament for as long as I have, pretty much anything can happen. I mean, we get medical emergencies.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh.
John Chew: If you've got like a few hundred people playing a really mentally intensive game for five days, on average you typically have some sort of minor medical incident for I think one out of a hundred people per day, some sort of hospital-required, something requiring a hospital trip on the order of one or two people per thousand per day. And imagine people that run bigger tournaments than I do have to deal with this more often. But one of the first things that we do when we're planning a new location for a tournament or national championship, Cedar Rapids, Iowa, this year, 2026, is we scout out the quickest path to the nearest emergency hospital.
Because we've had people had, seizures, strokes. There was a woman two years ago in a tournament where she sat down to play a game and her opponent said, "I'm not playing you, you're not medically fit to play." And the woman said, "I'm the judge of that. You can't tell me." And her opponent said, "Well, I'm a retired nurse and I can tell that you're having some sort of serious neurological disorder." And the woman basically said, "Well, you know, don't we all?" And the nurse said, "Well, I know that there are doctors in this room and I'm going to ask the tournament director to call a doctor over to examine you." So they called me over, she called the director over, called someone over, called me over, and then I knew which doctor to come and ask to talk to this woman. And he looked at her and said, "Yes, ma'am, you're having a stroke. You need to actually go to the hospital right away if you want to be able to retain your vision and your cognitive capacity." So I personally drove her to the hospital, and as I was driving her there, she was saying, "Oh yeah, this sort of thing has been happening to me on and off every day. You know, every few weeks I get this issue. And I thought it would go away on its own.” But really, if you can't see out of half the side of one of your eyes, you know, go see a doctor, you know, go talk to a doctor. Anything.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow. Wow. So usually Scrabble saved her life.
John Chew: Yeah, indeed. Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: I'm curious, did you grow up playing Scrabble? How did you get into the competitive Scrabble scene?
John Chew: My father, away at the ripe old age of 100.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow. Wow.
John Chew: He was an emeritus professor of linguistic anthropology at the University of Toronto, and he wrote an as-yet unpublished autobiography. It's going to take a lot of editing. As his literary executor, I just... it's written episodically and it shares way too much about some things. But one of the things that he mentioned in it is that he had happy childhood memories of his grandfather. On Sundays would invite all the kids in the neighborhood over to play board games at their house. And this is like in the 1930s. And so, my father, although he had a conflicted relationship with my grandfather, drew a lot of his parenting information from his upbringing and understood that a good father plays board games with his children. I'm pretty sure that my grandfather let my father win a fair amount of the time. My father was, may he rest in peace, not a really good loser. He was a really sore loser. In fact, I learned very early on that he would refuse to play a game with me if I beat him, even a game of chance. He wouldn't tolerate it. And of course, at that point, I was already enough of a gamer to understand there's a way to gamify or manipulate this in that I could intentionally lose games to my dad if I wanted to play them with him. But then whenever I wanted, whenever there was a new board game that I wanted to try out, all I needed to do was beat him at the game we were playing and say, "Hey, why don't we try playing Scrabble next?" or something. And then he would run out and go get me a Scrabble set. So, you know, I grew up with, I don't know, a hundred Scrabble and a hundred board games in the house, and now I've got maybe 500. And my kids have grown up playing board games and playing Scrabble as well. But there was that-that was what got me started.
It took me a while to be able to beat my dad at Scrabble because he knew a lot of words; he was well-educated and a linguist, and he could speak like 40 languages. Be sure he was, you know, if he was making stuff up when he played Scrabble. But we had a lot of dictionaries. So if I challenged a word when he played it, it would take a long time to look it up in all of the dictionaries because this would have been before the official Scrabble players dictionary. And then, you know, I had happy memories of playing Scrabble as I was growing up.
But then I just sort of let it go because I had other things going on in my life. I wanted to do math, mathematics, computer science, and so on. In the late 1980s, I found myself living in Eastern France, in the city of Nancy in the capital of Lorraine. And I was working for a printing company in France and gradually losing my English fluency. Because I was just thinking and working in French all the time. And I walked past this store, this toy store in those cities, that had a Game Boy cartridge to play Scrabble with. And I thought, "Oh, Scrabble, that would be good for my English." As so many people around the world over the decades have made the catastrophic mistake-a similar mistake-I thought Scrabble would be good for English fluency.
So I started playing the Scrabble on this Game Boy, and I thought, wow, this is much better, a much better opponent than my dad. And in fact, this game can beat me sometimes, and I'm thinking, I need to learn what it's doing. I need to figure it out. I got into competitive Scrabble, which is forget about the fancy words. Forget about showing off your English literature words to your girlfriend or whatever. Forget about trying to play dirty words; just try to play the words that score the most or that will win you the game. And so I got hooked on that and I played it for a few years. Then I eventually came back to continue my graduate studies. I was playing, I did my comprehensive exams for my, for at the beginning of my, or after a year of graduate studies, and I got totally burnt out by the experience.
I thought, I never really want to look at a mathematical equation again after these comprehensive exams. I got over that part, but I thought I need a hobby. And it was 1993. I went online. There was an internet in 1993, and people actually, it wasn't, it was a brand new thing, and not too many people knew about it. And I went online and I found this place where people were playing Scrabble online. I think that thought that is the coolest thing. I mean, I had played games online before, but not board games. I'd played video games online and I played video games online as early as the early 1980s, but Scrabble-the idea that you would play a board game, like an intellectually stimulating, challenging board game-that'd be cool. And then I found that there were these people who were playing online, playing the same sort of competitive Scrabble that I was getting against the Game Boy.
There were some really tough players there. And I played them, I enjoyed playing with them. And one day I managed to beat one of them, and he said, "Where are you from, anyway? And I said, "I'm from where," spelling it out carefully to Toronto. And in my mind is Toronto, but “I'm from Toronto, Canada.” And he said, "Oh, well, you should go to the local club there. It's the biggest and oldest club in the world." I said, "Why? I mean, I'm enjoying playing you, and I enjoy playing the computer, and I enjoy playing my dad. But why would I want to play a game with people that I don't know? And when playing a game is such a social activity, right? Why would I want to meet new people just to play a game?”
And this is something that we've returned to repeatedly, especially during the pandemic, when people sort of, do we want to meet new people? We don't want do, have we forgotten how to meet new people? What would it take to get us to meet new people? And so it took me like three months before I was willing to actually follow his advice. And I went there and was the first person to walk through the doors of the Toronto Scrabble Club and say, "Hey, I met this guy on the internet who told me all about you.” And then that, well the rest of it is history. I went on to run the club to run tournaments too.
Mignon Fogarty: Right. You developed software for running tournaments, right?
John Chew: I started off enjoying playing the game. Then I started enjoying playing the game competitively. Then I started telling people how to play the game by directing tournaments and clubs and running software, writing software to, which is still used like at the world championship level and everywhere, to manage tournaments. Then I sat on committees that told people on how to direct people to play Scrabble. Then I headed an organization to tell people how to tell directors, to set policy for people who were telling directors how to place, how to tell people how to play Scrabble. I’m getting tangled up in this. Now I find myself being headhunted by. And I didn't even know these things. These were a thing. This is not how I found how you found me. I found… I had a podcast agent reach out to me last month.
Mignon Fogarty: Huh.
John Chew: I didn't… I thought this has got to be some sort of scam. And he said, do you want to talk to people about Scrabble? I said, “Well, I enjoy it, but it does take a fair amount of my time.” But I realized, okay, this must be the apotheosis of this particular career because I am now being chased after by agents who want me to talk to people about the experiences that I have running an organization that sets the policy, that tells how to tell other people how to direct their tournaments, where people are playing Scrabble, which is a game that I once enjoyed playing myself, and I still do enjoy playing when I can myself, but I'm just, I'm removed from it by so many levels that sometimes, you know. When I started running the National Scrabble Championship, the one condition that I had for that, for taking over that responsibility for being overall responsible for it, was that we should have a warm-up event that was just for people like me who were involved in directing clubs and tournaments, and that we would just play nicely with each other and enjoy the experience of playing rather than directing.
And that worked out okay for a few years. And then the players noticed and said, can we play in that too? So now, instead of getting to play in that, I just watch while like a quarter of the field shows up early to play in the warm-up event. And when I say players, I say it with the same mixture of affection and disgust that system administrators refer to their users and shopkeepers refer to their customers.
Mignon Fogarty: Well, that's amazing. I don't think I was aware of podcast agents. We definitely don't use them. I met you at a Scrabble conference that was in my hometown, I don't know, 10, 12, 15 years ago now.
John Chew: 10 years ago.
Mignon Fogarty: Was it that long ago?
John Chew: Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: So yeah, and we talked back then, and it was so interesting. And then I think someone who knows you suggested I should talk to you again, and I said, you know, that's actually a good idea. It's so interesting.
John Chew: And to be clear, I haven't actually signed up with it with any podcast agents. I still think, you know, I think it's nice to have these things evolve organically.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. Well, one of the things that surprised me when you talked about being in France, one thing I learned from you that surprised me that I think people would like hearing about is how the letters are worth different tiles in different versions of the game. So the letters in, if you're playing in France, the tiles have different values than they do when you're playing in, you know, Canada, right?
John Chew: Yeah. I, and I don't have them all; I don't have the French values all memorized. The ones that stick in my mind are the W and the K are the hardest tiles to play French Scrabble. So they're worth 10 points where they're, where the W is four and the K is five, and in English the Q and the Zed or, Z tile as you guys call it, are worth 10 points in English. But a lot less; I don't remember, but they're probably four or five in French. So I did, one year I ran a tournament for the American Translators Association. You could play in whatever language you wanted to, and you could have your choice of, if there was a word that was acceptable in more than one language, you could designate whichever language you wanted to that it was in, so if you, for instance, played the word "whiskey" and you played it in English, that would be far fewer points than if you played it in French because it has the W and the K in it, so it would be worth at least 20 points.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah, that's fascinating and it makes sense because the letters are used at different rates in different languages.
John Chew: Yeah. And there's a general feeling that there's, that some of the tiles are undervalued or overvalued, but that evolves with language as well, and also whether they're too many of some tiles or fewer of others. I think the one thing that people are consistent about is that agrees that there are, there's one too many I in the bag because there are nine I’s and there really ought to be eight for a more enjoyable playing experience.
It's just, it's too easy to get too many I's on your rack. So, to get mathematical again for a moment, there's a concept called equity, which think people use in backgammon and poker as well. It's the value of the tiles in your hand, what they're going to, not the face value, but how they are likely to affect your final score in your game. So, like the blank has a face value of zero points; to an expert, it could be worth 25 or 30 points. As soon as they draw the blank, they know that their final score is going to be up by an average of 25 or 30 points. Now, these equity values, they depend on your style of play. Like, if you are just a beginning player, the equity value of a blank might in fact be zero points because you don't know what to do with it. Like an expert player would typically use it to score those extra 25 or 30 points by laying all seven tiles down at once and getting the bingo bonus. But if you're just a person, I would stick it at the end of the letter, the end of a word, to make it and call it an S, maybe zero points. But, so the letter I, it depends on the calculation, but my mental approximation for it is that it has an equity value of negative four points, and it's cumulative. So if you've got a rack that's got three I’s on it, on average, you'll score 12 points fewer than if you've got no I’s on your rack. So…
Mignon Fogarty: Wow. Do people ever play… I imagine people have house rules. So do some people play and just take out one of the I’s? I know when I play with my husband, he gets obsessed about finding, using all his tiles, and he will sit there for like 20 minutes looking at his tiles. And so we've had to institute a time limit on how long you can think. So that's our house rules. And are… do people play without the I’s? And what are some other things that people do to alter the play?
John Chew: Oh, that's an, you know, nobody's ever actually suggested because everybody's so hidebound with the rules. I might actually suggest quietly removing the I from a game. You are supposed to check that all 100 tiles are present by squaring them off on the board before you start playing.
There are a lot of fun variations for people who find regular Scrabble not challenging enough or not, or maybe boring. There's a phenomenon in the board gaming community called "Grognard Capture," whereby when a game develops too intense a fan base, the fans who treat the game most seriously want to challenge themselves more. They want to push themselves more, and they end up developing harder and harder versions of the game that end up becoming unplayable to non-intense fans, and games have actually died out as a result of this process. A lot of games have. There was actually a game that was played widely in the Middle Ages in universities in Britain called Erything Maia, which is like chess with numbers. You could stack up pieces with numbers and multiply, and you'd capture things by making equations where if you pointed a two and a three at something and it had a value of six, you could take it. It was a cool game, but nobody plays it anymore because it just got way too complicated.
And so as examples of ways in which people complicate Scrabble that are not necessarily good things for people to try at home, the very… one of the more popular ones is a variant called "Clabbers," C-L-A-B-B-E-R-S, which is just a random rearrangement of the letters in Scrabble. In Clabbers, you can play the letters in whatever order you like. So those letters that I had before the SEC, I could lay those down as C-E-S, E-C-S, C-E-S-S-E-C-S-E, six different ways. And if my opponent challenged, then I would have to say what the word was. But otherwise, and the beauty of that game is that if you want to hook a letter onto the end of the word because you're making another word in parallel, it vastly opens up the possibilities for that.
So you could have the word CES-not a word, but good in Clabbers-on the board. And you can stick an I on the end of it to make CESI, which is even less of a word, but it's also good because it's like ICES. I-C-E-S. You could stick a V on it to make C-E-I-S-V or whatever, C-E-S-I-V, and that would be “vices” and so on, right? And then an H to make C-E-I-S-V-H, which would be chives. And eventually you could get to "achieves" or whatever.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh, I see. So as long as you can rearrange the letters to form a word, it is playable.
John Chew: Right? But they stay on the board in the scrambled order. So that’s Clabbers. Another popular variant is one called “If Only,” where you're allowed to take as long as you play. You pick a number, like a minimum threshold. Most people use either 40 or 50. And you say, “If you can play a word that scores at least 40 points, say, you're allowed to do so while taking one of your tiles and putting it face down on the board and making it into a blank.” This evolves from people. The idea of people thinking, “I could play this cool word if only I had this tile,” and while in If Only Scrabble, you can always, as long as you have a cool word to play, you can play it by turning one of your tiles into a blank. And then there's a sort of further twist to it where you can pull that tile back off the board if you have the matching tile and you remember what it is.
Mignon Fogarty: Oh yeah.
John Chew: Oh yeah. But actually, as far as you and your husband are concerned, you should use a timer. I first started playing Scrabble before I went to, before I started going to the club our house rule was whoever's not on turn gets to read the dictionary. And so this was a strong incentive for the person who is on turn to make their turn as quickly as possible because the person not on turn is going to pick up the dictionary and say, okay, I've got these letters here on my rack. I'm just going to list all 5,040 permutations of them and see which ones are in the dictionary. And if you take too long, I'm going to find my bingo. So that's one way of sort of combining skills improvement or education with time control. But there are plenty of timer apps. You can use a chess app if you want. But the problem with chess apps is that they end the games when the time is up or as you're allowed to go over time and Scrabble. But there's a, for, iPhones, there's an excellent app called ULU, spelled U-L-U, which includes not only word lookup features but it's got a timer built into it so you can get a sense of what it's like to play with a 25-minute timer,
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah.
John Chew: Meaning you're allowed to play, you got 25 minutes to play all of your turns, so about two or three minutes of turn.
Mignon Fogarty: I love the dictionary idea, and I think he would like the "if only" version too, because I think he just sits there thinking if only I had an H. If only I had, you know...
John Chew: Yeah. Yes.
Mignon Fogarty: We could move it forward.
John Chew: Yeah.
Mignon Fogarty: So, one of the important things you do is you develop the list of playable words. And so I'm interested in hearing about that and how that interplays with the Merriam-Webster, like the official Scrabble dictionary.
John Chew: Alright, so Merriam-Webster publishes an officially licensed by Hasbro product called the Official Scrabble Dictionary that nobody uses. It's official in that it's officially licensed, but it is not used by tournaments anywhere for a bunch of reasons. One is that it doesn't go past eight-letter words. So, it's not uncommon for people to actually manage to get a nine-letter word onto the board. And we used to get letters all the time from people saying, "I played this common nine-letter word, and it wasn't in the dictionary." And we have to point out to them, "Do you see any nine-letter words in the dictionary?" No. That's why. So that's one thing.
There are also, this could be the subject of a whole separate conversation is, there are questions as to which words are appropriate for families to use, for kids in school to use, and for adults to use. And this has led to a whole series of newspaper articles and controversy. And the current rule is that if you're playing in a school environment, you're not allowed to play any offensive words, including, not to get too explicit, but allowed to play the N-word, not allowed to play the F-word, but also, if you look carefully at Merriam-Webster's website, you're not allowed to play the V-word. And which word would that be? That would be the word "vegetable." Because the word "vegetable" could be offensive if used to refer to someone who's in a diminished state of consciousness. And so that's probably taking things a little bit too far. And so for tournament purposes, this is one of the reasons why we split off many years ago, and I now edit the NASPA Word List, North American Scrabble Players Association, where we permit offensive words, but not offensive slurs. And we do permit words that are only offensive in some contexts.
So, to give more specific examples of that, go to a tournament or club, and you can play the F-word. We're fine with that. We're all grownups, and nobody will snicker at you or think worse of you. You're not allowed to play the N-word because that's an offensive slur, and that's a word where if you used it to refer to someone at a tournament, you'd be in violation of our code of conduct and probably whatever contract we signed with our venue. So there's an interesting sort of delineation there that we had to make. And once we'd figured out what the right thing to do was, Hasbro and Mattel followed suit and changed the official rules of Scrabble, saying that offensive slurs are not acceptable regardless of the level of play.
So then, or, well actually for a while now, NASPA has been editing the NASPA word list since 2020 without the offensive slurs. And if you look in pretty much almost any popular online word game or word game app, there's a good chance that you'll find that you're actually playing with the NASPA word list because we've got about a hundred licensees to our product. Because it's, especially in this day of language models and generative AI and so on, having a list of words that's been meticulously and scrupulously examined by actual human beings to make sure that every word passes some strict criteria for acceptability is valuable, and it's time and effort that people would rather license from someone who's already done it than to put the work into doing it themselves.
So most games, word game apps that are reasonably popular in North America use our word list, which is nice for our association in two ways. One, it provides a not insignificant source of revenue, but it also takes us back to a situation that the United Kingdom, Great Britain was fortunate to be in when I first started playing board games, where everybody in Britain used the same dictionary for doing word games, and it was called the Chambers Dictionary. It still exists, and so you could, if you were playing Boggle, or you're playing Scrabble, or you're doing crosswords, you could be sure that everybody was using this one big dictionary called the Chambers Dictionary. That's no longer the case in Britain because they've switched from the Chambers Dictionary to a HarperCollins product. We're moving in North America more and more towards word game lexicon harmony, which is an expected sort of side benefit of the work that we've put into developing our official NASPA word list.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. So if someone wants to go from being more a casual player to more of a competitive player, I know, you know, one of the things the competitive players do is they memorize words. Is that sort of the primary thing that you would tell people to do, is just start memorizing words, or are there other strategies that people can learn to quickly up their game as well?
John Chew: The quickest way that you can improve your score substantially is to memorize all of the two-letter words. And there's about a hundred of them, depending on which list and which area you live in, which list you use. You can memorize a list of two-letter words easily in a day. I mean, there are people who memorize a thousand words in a day, and two-letter words, they're easy to memorize. You don't have to memorize their meanings. It is a good idea to memorize whether or not they take an S on the end. But once you know the two-letter words, the reason that you want to learn them is because they let you make overlapping plays. Someone plays a word across the board. If you can make, if someone plays like a three-letter word across the board and you make another three-letter word that's immediately on top of that, you can play that if all three vertical two-letter words are acceptable, and the only way you can know whether that's true is to be sure of your two-letter words. This gives you, and the more words you play in a turn, the more points you score. So instead of just scoring that three-letter word, you're scoring it at least double because it's counting both ways, and you're counting whatever points were on the board to begin with. On top of that, if you focus your attention initially on what’s called the power tiles, these X, E, Q, J, and you pay attention to when there's a bonus square next to a vowel. If there's an A with a blank, an A right before a triple letter square, then you put the X on the triple letter score, and that would score three times eight for the X, which is 24 points plus one for the A. But if you then make like the word “ex” or “ox” in the other direction, you get to count both of those. So now that X that was worth eight points on your rack has given you a 50-point play. And so if you're thinking about-and you can do that, you know, on average you'll get half of the power tiles.
So if you memorize all the two-letter words and you know how to use them, that'll give you at least 30, 40, maybe 50 extra points a turn, which will be enough to win.
Mignon Fogarty: Wow.
John Chew: Beyond that, there's a sort of chicken-and-egg situation of should you learn more words or should you learn more strategy? My advice, my general advice for that would be, once you know your two-letter words, find someone who's better than you to learn, to play Scrabble with, especially at googles.io. Or there's a, there are apps to play good Scrabble against that have good AIs built into them. Play Scrabble intensively repeatedly against them, but learn from your mistakes. Most good software will come with some sort of teaching mode where they tell you, "Well, you should have done that," or "You should have done this. And see, like if you're keeping track of what your problem is. If you're not seeing the three-letter words, then go back and study your three-letter words for a bit. If you're missing seven-letter bingos, going through the seven-letter bingos in probability order.
Mignon Fogarty: What are some, what are your favorite apps?
John Chew: There's a tool called, there's a word study and word lookup tool called Zyzzva. I pronounce this the American way because it takes too long to say it both ways: Z-Y-Z-Z-Y-V-A, which used it, its slogan is "the last word in word study" because it was named before the three-letter word ZZZ was added to our dictionary. We have our own fork of it called called Naspa Zyzzva, which is available on all mobile platforms and on, and a desktop form. And you can use it as a word adjudicator. You can use it as a word study tool, and it's what most people use to learn their words with.
Mignon Fogarty: And is that one where you can play Scrabble too? Like one of the ones you said had a good AI where you can like play against a decent competitor?
John Chew: If you want to play against a decent competitor, I would play one of the bots at oogles.io. Or if you're offline and using a desktop platform, I'd still like it, an older game called Quale, Q-U-A-C-K-L-E, which is nice and configurable. You can load whichever dictionaries you want into it, and it has really good game analysis tools.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful. Thank you so much. What sort of parting advice do you have for Scrabble enthusiasts?
John Chew: If you like the game, if you enjoy the game, don't wait three months like I did to find other people who enjoy the game. It's just three months of your life you'll have wasted. Go find the nearest club or tournament and just introduce yourself. They will be delighted to find one more person who likes playing.
Mignon Fogarty: And did they do that through the NASPA website?
John Chew: Yeah, you can go to the NASPA website, you can email us. You can go look at our club roster online. You can look at our tournament calendar to see where there's a tournament near you. We're all across the United States and Canada.
Mignon Fogarty: Wonderful.
John Chew: If you're reading this from overseas, if you're a member of the World English Language Scrabble Players Association or Wespa.org.
Mignon Fogarty: Nice. John Chew, thank you so much for being here.
John Chew: It's been a pleasure.
Mignon Fogarty: Yeah. And for our Grammarpaloozians, we're going to have a bonus episode. John is also the editor-in-chief of the new Canadian English Dictionary. So we're going to talk about that. So look for that in your feed. For the rest of you. That's all. Thanks for listening.