They know every two-letter word in the...

They know every two-letter word in the English language, though they

might not know what all those words mean. They’ve alienated most of

their friends and loved ones by being unbeatable at a certain word

game. And they meet every week in Costa Mesa to do battle on a grid

that’s roughly 12 inches square.

Their game is Scrabble, a subject about which few people remain

neutral. The word-crossing board game, invented by New Yorker Alfred

Butts and trademarked in 1948, inspires a glow of enthusiasm in the

verbose and groans of exasperation in the less lingually minded.

The dedicated few who gather at the cafe tables at Borders in

Costa Mesa come from around the Orange County area, and most of them

started out playing friendly games. But going from playing at home to

playing in clubs and tournaments is like getting into organized crime

-- once you start, you can never go back.

The boards they use are custom-made, with a grid of recessed

squares (so the letters don’t slide around) and bases like Lazy

Susans. The games are timed, with each player getting 25 minutes.

Like in chess games, once a player finishes, he or she hits the timer

to start the opponent’s clock.

Everyone keeps the opponent’s score as well as his or her own, and

some use customized score sheets to mark off the tiles as they’re

played and keep track of left in the letter bag.

“Even though we’re playing a word game, the best players are

mathematicians or people who are good at math because they look at

the probabilities of what can be played,” said Gary Moss, who runs

the Costa Mesa club.

His club’s players span a range of age groups and include

students, teachers, accountants, doctors and retirees.

*

Everyone’s got some sort of story about how he or she began

playing.

“I’m worse than I ever was,” said Penny Baker, modestly summing up

her 30 years of play.

She lives in Leisure World and runs a Tuesday night Scrabble club

in Huntington Beach.

“I’m not a heavy player. I have a little bit of dyslexia, so

that’s why I took up Scrabble, and it’s helped me tremendously.”

Others, such as Pat Kovalcheck of Costa Mesa, started at a young

age and turned to clubs when they exhausted the family’s capacity to

be good sports.

Kovalcheck learned the game from her mother. After her mother

died, her husband and sons bought her the game for her computer.

“Then one day my computer broke and I couldn’t play my nightly

game, so I called the number on the box and asked them, ‘Is there

anyone in Orange County [with a club]?’” she said. “A lot of us get

kicked out of the kitchen because no one will play with us anymore.”

And that’s why they can’t go back to friendly games -- they learn

too many words and strategies that casual players don’t know. They go

for the jugular. And they kick everyone else’s butt.

But all of them have to start somewhere. Moss said at his first

club experience, he lost every game.

“On one hand I felt defeated, but on the other hand I felt very

curious and inspired, a sort of I-can-do-this-too kind of thing,” he

said.

Scott Sellman, of Tustin, is still going through the adjustment

period. At 37, he said that he often finds himself one of the younger

players at clubs and that he doesn’t go avidly -- he’s busy at his

day job in real estate.

He’d gotten to the point of beating most everyone in his family

and wanted a new challenge.

“I went to the club and got smoked. It was a very humbling

experience,” he said. “When I need my ego to be stomped on, I go to

Scrabble.”

*

As their addiction increases, many serious Scrabblers will play

online against live opponents or against the computer. Some have

hand-held electronic dictionaries of the game’s official word list --

they call it the OWL -- and they buy or make study aids to learn the

shortest and longest words, the most obscure, and the ones they can

add to after opponents play them.

Jim Cassidy, who started playing with his wife’s father, explains

how many online resources there are for Scrabble-philes. While he

talks, he gets out his Palm Pilot to show a downloadable official

word list. At this point, it becomes apparent that Scrabble

infiltrates every aspect of the players’ lives.

Lynn Gunn has a cassette of word lists she listened to in the car

to get ready for nationals. It helps even if you don’t remember all

the words, she says, because if your opponent makes one, you’ll know

not to challenge it.

And of course there are mnemonic devices to store anagrams in your

brain.

“If you have ‘senator,’ you have ‘treason.’ You can remember those

things, because the government is so corrupt,” says Gretchen Cowan of

Laguna Niguel.

In her observation, men are more competitive, even at Scrabble,

than women.

“Men are the ones that plan all the wars,” she says. “This is like

war with words.”

*

In its most recent Thursday meeting, the ranks of Gary’s club were

sadly depleted. He estimates 70% of the club, which lately has drawn

as many as 20 people, headed to Reno for the national tournament this

weekend.

“It is a lot of fun because I’m a social person,” says Paul

Trachtenberg, who plays in the Costa Mesa club and is a co-director

of Baker’s Huntington Beach club.

He’s confident of his skills and has high hopes for the

tournament, he said, but he has a goal besides winning -- “emotional

tranquillity, even if you’re a loser.”

Some people spent the days leading up to this weekend studying

nonstop, but not Trachtenberg. He’s competitive, he says, but he’s

working on other things -- a second edition of a Scrabble guide he

first published in 1997.

At the nationals, contestants will play seven games a day. That’s

nothing to many of them -- like athletes conditioning themselves for

a meet, some of the Costa Mesa club members meet on Saturdays to eat

a pot-luck meal and squeeze in about 10 games. Moss said he generally

plays about 40 games a week.

Lower-level players are waiting eagerly for the National Scrabble

Assn. to accept the new official word list, because it will somewhat

level the playing field between them and more seasoned players.

A new edition of the official Scrabble dictionary -- containing

the first revisions in eight years -- hit store shelves in June, but

it’s expurgated to remove R- and X-rated language that’s acceptable

in tournament play. When the new list comes out, it and the

dictionary will form the complete lexicon of legal Scrabble words,

including the much-anticipated “qi.” (It’s an alternate spelling of

“chi,” the life force in Chinese medicine.)

“That will change the whole game dramatically,” Moss said.

And with the national tournament getting airtime on ESPN for the

second year in a row, the game seems to have hitched its wagon to the

“geek chic” star. Sellman said he doesn’t know any players his own

age, but it doesn’t stop him from playing.

Baker said there are definitely more clubs around than in the

past.

“We’d like it to get as popular as bridge and chess, and it seems

to be going strong with all these national tournaments now,” she

said.

*

Most players say one reason they like the game is that it allows

them to make friends from across the country and even the globe. Moss

is no exception, and after coaching a Michigan woman online and

convincing her to visit her local clubs, the two will soon have the

chance to meet.

“When I go to visit my daughter at Thanksgiving, I already wrote

her that I’m going to sit down and play a game with her,” he said.

And even though club players often outstrip their loved ones,

Scrabble at its most basic is still a family game. Baker glows with

pride when she mentions her now-grown granddaughter, who planned to

join her in Reno this weekend.

“I taught her how to play when she was 11, and by the time she was

13, I took her to a tournament in Las Vegas and she took first in her

division,” Baker said.

Now Baker is teaching her four great-granddaughters the game.

Sellman said he and his father don’t have much in common, but they

do play Scrabble regularly. When asked, most players can readily

supply a favorite high-scoring word -- “oxazine” helped Trachtenberg

win a tournament, and Baker earned 223 points for “finickier.” But

Sellman remembers a word his father made.

Actually, Sellman’s not sure what the word was, but, “He got a

220-pointer on me in one play,” Sellman said. “I was really proud of

my dad.”