Los Gatos Weekly-Times

Photograph by George Sakkestad

Lewis Martinez has eyes only for the Scrabble board during the Memorial Day weekend Cat Fight at the Los Gatos Lodge.

Scrabble is a game just made for Silicon Valley

This catfight was a warmup for national, world ratings

By Clarence Cromwell

Outside, Memorial Day beach traffic has southbound Route 17 backed up for miles and palm trees sway invitingly next to the pool at the Los Gatos Lodge. But about 48 Scrabble players from around the United States are hunched over their letter tiles in a tiny hotel conference room for the third day in a row. No one speaks above a mumble and the only sound cutting through the dull heat is the swoosh of letter tiles that players scoop out of cloth bags.

Occasionally the action heats up when a player challenges a word. Then a judge rushes over with the official dictionary either to bless the word or strike it from the game. And maybe if the conversation rises above a low murmur someone will grunt, "Be quiet." As a spectator sport, it's far from mud wrestling.

Only the name of the tournament gives away players' fierce competitiveness: Cat Fight at Los Gatos. For the few who care to tangle over titles and prize money in the Scrabble universe, this tiny room holds the thrill of a battlefield.

The players have drilled and have battled at other tournaments for months, or years or sometimes decades, to achieve their ranks in a four-digit rating system similar to the one used to rank chess players. They memorize the six-letter sets that are easiest to form into words, so they'll recognize the letters when drawn. They memorize lists of two-letter words--aa, for instance, is a cindery type of lava. One player wrote a detective story using only words that would be legal for Scrabble play--just for practice.

The players put on a friendly face, one player explained, but they're secretly cheering whenever their closest competitors face setbacks. Competition is tense enough that explosive tantrums sometimes erupt over little things: a sack of tiles dropped on an opponent's score sheet or a player who started the clock before his opponent was ready.

"The atmosphere around Scrabble is just like the atmosphere around tennis or boxing," says longtime player Lester Schonbrun, once second in the nation. "It's intensely competitive. We're glad when our closest competitors lose. We're out for blood."

But the Cat Fight is really just a warmup, a chance for players to raise their ratings in hopes of an invitation to the next national or world tournament. The world tournament occurs every other year, and is open by invitation only to the top 10 players in any country. National tournaments are held in off years.

Lester Schonbrun will play at this year's world tournament.

Now a resident of Oakland, Schonbrun was present when Scrabble turned into a sport in the 1960s at the New York Chess and Checkers Club, in Midtown Manhatten--one of the earliest and toughest Scrabble clubs to emerge.

Schonbrun used to stay up for two or three days straight, eating hot dogs from a cart in Times Square and locking horns with New York's intellectual elite over chess or Scrabble boards.

"There were a lot of very top-notch chess players there. There seems to be a carry-over in board skills," Schonbrun said. The players made up strict rules to govern Scrabble games, because they wanted to bet on the games. Now, roughly the same rules govern tournaments, but there's no betting.

In 1971, Schonbrun migrated to San Francisco and became a part of what was at the time the West Coast's strongest club. It met weekly at a Zim's restaurant in San Francisco. During the 1970s, New York and San Francisco would be home to many champion Scrabble players.

Recently, the West Coast center of the game slid south to Silicon Valley. Players say San Jose's two clubs are among the nation's strongest because computer hackers excel at the game.

John C. Green Jr. is a Website programmer and a former chess player who lives in Los Gatos. He also reads grammar books for pleasure, he says.

"Once I found the game, it was a natural thing to get into," he said. "The skills that make you good at computer programming make you good at this: memorizing obscure things and being absolutely, perfectly correct."

Rich Moyer, a Los Gatan who met his fiancée over a Scrabble board, arranged the tournament. Moyer said he decided to organize a tournament after another local tournament became defunct. Moyer's first tournament took place last year in Santa Clara.

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