What are some exceptional Scrabble Brand Crossword Game (TM) games?

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[ Editor: the record game of October 2006, from an article by Stefan
Fatsis in Slate, 26 October 2006, "830!  How a Massachusetts carpenter
got the highest Scrabble score ever"
(http://www.slate.com/id/2152255/, copyright 2006
Washingtonpost.Newsweek Interactive Co. LLC).  The article's links to
the play-by-play and to a photograph of the final board were not
collected. ]

On Oct. 12, in the basement of a Unitarian church on the town green in
Lexington, Mass., a carpenter named Michael Cresta scored 830 points in
a game of Scrabble.  His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who works at a
supermarket deli counter, totaled 490 points.  The two men set three
records for sanctioned Scrabble in North America: the most points in a
game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320), and
the most points on a single turn (365, for Cresta's play of QUIXOTRY).

In the community of competitive Scrabble, of which I am a tile-carrying
member, the game has been heralded as the anagrammatic equivalent of
Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game in 1962 or Don Larsen's perfect game
in the 1956 World Series: a remarkable, wildly aberrational event with
potential staying power.  Cresta's 830 shattered a 13-year-old record,
770 points, which had been threatened only infrequently.

Since virtually all sports involve variable conditions, comparing one
performance to another is technically imperfect.  Consider the absence
of black players in Babe Ruth's day, or the presence of steroids in the
Barry Bonds era.  On its face, the new Scrabble records seem to avoid
such problems.  No one's juicing in Scrabble.  Points in a game are
just points in a game, and Michael Cresta scored 830 of them.  On
Scrabble's members-only list-serve, Crossword Games-Pro, most players
have hailed this harmonic convergence of vowels and consonants as a
triumphal moment.  But the record-worthiness of the shot heard 'round
the Scrabble world is more complicated than it might look.

Let's begin with the fact that Cresta and Yorra aren't expert-level
players.  They know the basics--like the 101 two-letter and most of the
1,015 three-letter words--but they're both rated in the bottom third of
tournament players.  In Lexington, where the record was set during the
club's regular Thursday-night session, Yorra is known for trying
implausible words and hoping they're in the Official Tournament and
Club Word List.  Cresta has memorized thousands of obscure words (like
those ending in WOOD or starting with OVEN) by reading, writing down,
and tape-recording pages from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary.
But he doesn't study the highly probable words that are essential for
climbing the competitive ranks.  "These are not guys who have low
ratings because they haven't played in many tournaments," Mike
Wolfberg, the Lexington club's statistician, told me.  "They have low
ratings because they aren't very good."

So, how did they break the all-time Scrabble scoring record, set during
a tournament by two experts, one of whom has been known ever since as
Mr. 770?  The simple answer is that Cresta-Yorra was a fluke.  Given
that Scrabble is played in more than 200 clubs and there are more than
200 tournaments a year in North America, the thinking goes, it was
inevitable that Mr. 770's record would fall, especially with the growth
of serious study and an increase in words in the Scrabble dictionary.

But there's more to it than that.  To understand how Cresta and Yorra
broke the record, let's take a closer look at the game.  Yorra opened
with JOUSTED, a "bingo"--Scrabble lingo for using all seven tiles,
which earns you an extra 50 points--worth 96 points.  Cresta then
traded in all seven of his tiles in the hope of getting more-playable
letters, not an unusual move.  Yorra bingoed again, very nicely, with
LADYLIKE for 73 points and a 169-0 lead.  The first L in LADYLIKE
landed between two triple-word-score squares, giving Cresta a shot at
Scrabble's holy grail--a "triple-triple," covering two triple-word
scores with one word.  That's worth nine times the value of the word,
plus the 50-point bonus for using all seven letters.

Triple-triples are rare in Scrabble--I've played no more than a dozen
in a thousand or more games--because they require a confluence of
mathematically improbable events.  Cresta's play, FLATFISH, for 239
points, was especially unusual because it contains infrequently
occurring letters (two F's and an H) and isn't a common word.  Many
good players would have missed it.  Cresta didn't because he had
studied words beginning with F.

Yorra challenged FLATFISH, a reasonable move given the word and its
score, but it was in the official word list, so he lost his turn.
Cresta exchanged tiles on three of his next four turns, while Yorra
bingoed again, this time with SCAMsTER.  (The lowercase letter
represents one of the game's two blank tiles.)  Yorra told me he had no
idea whether the word was legitimate.  (It is.)  SCAMsTER was simply
the first possible bingo he saw.  That put another letter, the R, in a
triple-triple lane.  Cresta, who held I, O, Q, U, and X, recognized he
was three-quarters of the way toward a really huge triple-triple:
QUIXOTRY.  (He had studied words starting with Q.)  He exchanged two
letters from his rack in hopes of drawing the needed T and Y.  From
Cresta's vantage, 57 tiles were unseen, including three T's and one Y.
The probability of pulling one of each was 532 to 1.

Cresta beat the odds.  And when Yorra didn't block the open R--because
he played his fourth bingo, UNDERDOG, for 72 points--Cresta laid down
his 365-point QUIXOTRY (a quixotic action or thought).

After making just three plays, Cresta had an amazing 614 points.  The
rest of the game was pedestrian.  Neither player bingoed again, though
Cresta played the recently added word ZA (short for pizza) for 66
points.  When he laid down VROW, a Dutch woman, Cresta passed 770.

Looking at the game as a whole, it's clear that a lack of expertise
created the conditions for the record.  The play that enabled QUIXOTRY,
for one, was a clear mistake.  When Yorra played SCAMsTER, which scored
65 points, there were eight other bingos available worth 72 points or
more that wouldn't have dangled a letter in a triple-triple alley.
Among them were several common words, including the 94-point dEMOCRAT.
Most players would have taken a few extra moments to search for one of
those moves.

I asked Jason Katz-Brown, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology
junior ranked 10th in North America, to analyze the game.  Unlike most
players mid-level and higher, Cresta and Yorra didn't keep track of the
letters they drew on each turn, so it's impossible to fully examine
their possible moves.  But we do know what letters they played on each
turn.  When Katz-Brown input those into a Scrabble-playing computer
program he co-wrote called Quackle, he found that Cresta and Yorra had
better moves on 14 of their 22 nonbingo turns.  One example: Cresta
scored just 30 points using the second blank when he could have held
it and tried for another bingo.

Technically, Cresta's strategy was unsound.  Fishing for a
once-in-a-lifetime play might be understandable in a casual game, where
winning is less urgent.  But in competitive play--even in a club
setting, where there's less on the line than in a rated
tournament--exchanging letters three times, as Cresta did, to enhance
some combination of Q, U, I, and X is unorthodox at best, suicidal at
worst.  (The strategically correct move was to dump the cumbersome Q
and move on.)  In Scrabble, the player who waits for the miracle word
usually loses.  The implication: Cresta wasn't terribly worried about
whether he won or lost.

"If they weren't really trying to win," an intermediate-level player
named Mike Eldeiry wrote on the Crossword Games-Pro message board, "then
can we really consider it our record?  Fun, yeah.  Neat, sure.
Promotable, why not?  But record, ummmmmmmm, I don't know."  Eldeiry
told me the game reminded him of a 600-foot batting-practice home run.
If experts always shot for the moon, he said, "I think they'd have
cracked 850 by now.  But they'd have lost a lot of games in the
process."

Most CGP posters defended Cresta and Yorra.  Lexington-club regulars
said they just played differently than Joe Expert might have.  The
democratic Scrabbling message: Even someone who doesn't study word
lists for hours on end can achieve greatness.  "Non-experts often make
suboptimum plays," wrote Rod MacNeil, a top-100 player who witnessed
the game.  "This time that resulted in some pretty eye-popping plays.
But they found them."  Another expert, John Van Pelt, said, "When faced
with the possibility of playing a Q-X triple-triple, they see it as a
good opportunity to advance their winning chances.  So they go for it."

Cresta, who is 43 years old, didn't start playing Scrabble
competitively until a couple of years ago.  He told me he loves
learning and playing unusual words; at carpentry jobs he sometimes
transcribes dictionary pages onto walls or sawhorses.  In the record
game, Cresta said he went fishing as soon as he drew Q, U, I, and X.
"I wanted to get QUIXOTE down bad, or QUIXOTIC."  When SCAMsTER hit the
board, he immediately spotted the possibility of QUIXOTRY.  But he also
realized that those other words were possible.  "I like to gamble,"
Cresta said.  "I'm trying to win the game, but I'm trying to get that
word down, too."  Strategy wasn't a big concern.  "I'm not playing a
top player."

The difficulty posed by this game, and by games in general, is judging
the role of circumstances in the commission of records.  In this case,
the sensible moves would have been just another set of moves in just
another game.  The wrong moves produced history.  But is that enough?
If 830--or any record--happens as a result of boneheaded play, tactical
ignorance, or the pursuit of a good time, should it count?  Or should
records be reserved for those who have earned the right to set them,
and who set them in expert fashion?

Here's what I think: Michael Cresta holds the record for club play,
while Mr. 770 keeps his tournament mark.  And here's what Michael
Cresta thinks: "It's really not that big of a deal because I'm really
not that great of a player.  If you get two experts together, that
game's not going to happen."

Thanks to Jason Katz-Brown, John O'Laughlin, Seth Lipkin, and Keith
Smith.

-- Stefan Fatsis, author of _Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius,
   and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players_

[ Editor: a high-scoring constructed game, "decorated window", posted
to the crossword-games mailing list in February 1995 and signed ROTO,
with no other explanation.  In the move list, a row number followed by
a column letter starts a word across, and a column letter followed by
a row number starts a word down. ]

  O V E R S P E C I A L I ? E D
  X             O           L I
  Y             U             S
  P             N             S
  H             T             A
  E F       J O E             T
  N A H     I   R         W   I
  B I O D E G R A D A T I O N S
  U N B E       R         K E F
  T     V       G             A
  A W           U             C
  Z A G         M             T
  O E           E             O
  N             N             R
  E U D I O M E T R I ? A L L Y


   8  H   AD                  6
   8  F   GRADATION          62
   8  D   DEGRADATION        16
   7  C   BE                 10
   D  8   DEV                 7
   7  A   UNBE                6
   B  8   IN                  2
   B  7   AIN                 3
   6  A   EF                 28
   A  5   HE                  5
   A  5   HEN                 8
   A  9   UT                  2
   11 A   AW                  8
   B  11  WAE                 6
   12 B   AG                  3
   A  13  ON                  4
   A  1   OXYPHENBUTAZONE  1508
                             12
                             23
   C  7   HOB                41
   H  8   ARGUMENT           92
   H  1   COUNTERARGUMENT   113
   6  G   OE                  2
   F  6   JIG                53
   1  E   SPEC                8
   1  E   SPECIAL            11
   1  E   SPECIALIZE         14
   1  A   OVERSPECIALIZE     21
   2  N   LI                  8
   O  2   IS                  2
   9  N   EF                  7
   O  9   FA                  5
   O  9   FACT               10
   O  9   FACTOR             11
   O  1   DISSATISFACTORY   725
                             66
                             60
   15 F   METRICAL           60
   15 F   METRICALLY         14
   15 A   EUDIOMETRICALLY    21
   M  7   WO                  9
   M  7   WOK                30
          (Q)                 0  Agreed that these aren't counted. IF
                                 they suddenly ARE COUNTED, there is
                                 a better solution, omitting Q and V.
                                 IF 100 tiles needed, one of those too.
                           ----
                           3102

-- ROTO (crossword-games mailing list, February 1995)