Inside the world of competitive Scrabble

”The player going first wins 55 percent of the time,” says Stefan Fatsis, and — spelling ”poof” — he’s off. Fatsis is the 38-year-old author of ”Word Freak,” a new book bearing the frenetic subtitle ”Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players” and garnering much buzz through its universal appeal to the inner dork. We’re at the kitchen table in his sunny apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, digital timer and regulation Scrabble set before us. He has begun to deliver me a beating too humiliating to detail.

In my defense, Fatsis did go first and was lucky enough to draw 10 of the 11 ”power tiles” — J, K, X, Q, Z, the two blanks, and the nimble quartet of S’s. (”Luck,” he writes, ”is considered responsible for 15 to 30 percent of the game.”) Besides, I am merely a good living-room player — one among the hordes to whom Hasbro sells nearly 2 million sets a year — whereas, true to his title and despite his healthy yuppie mien, Fatsis is a freak. He freely divulges that his Scrabble prowess ”matters deeply” to his self-worth. He can reach into the briefcase he carries to his day job (as a sports reporter for The Wall Street Journal) to produce a list of the words formed from the seven-tile combinations one is most mathematically likely to draw.

Because they earn 50-point bonuses, plays using seven tiles — known as ”bingos” — are central to competitive Scrabble. Witness Fatsis answering my workmanlike ”mow” with ”diabase.” Diabase happens to be a kind of igneous rock, though hardcore Scrabblers have little use for definitions. As Fatsis says, ”A lot of people have difficulty accepting that it’s okay to create these combinations and not know what their outer meaning is. But they have their own utility. For us, the utility is to play them on the board.”

That ”us” is the motley bunch of top-level players (pill-poppers, New Age philosophers, guys who carry portable expectoration cups) with whom Fatsis fell in during the three years he spent doing research — hanging out at the World Scrabble Championships and playing pickup games in Manhattan’s Washington Square Park. This behavior did not go unnoticed by his friends. ”You know, you tell [them] that you’re going to Scrabble club, and you get weird looks,” Fatsis says. ”Partly, I could fall back on the well-I’m-gonna-write-about-it. The truth is, it was two years before I got a book deal. I got into it because I was drawn into it. It was honest obsession. I procrastinated madly — months and months of not writing this proposal because I was more interested in learning the words and going to tournaments.”

He learned the words — his play of ”quern” (definition: a hand-turned grain mill) for a triple-word score is proof of that — but has he learned his lesson? After my trouncing, after my questions, I say, ”I think that’s all I have to ask.” And he says, ”You wanna play another one?”