Give Them 7 Letters, They’ll Give You the Word

This is Scrabble as it might have been played at the O.K. Corral.

On a recent Thursday, 28 members of the Montrose Scrabble Club lean in pairs over their boards, intent on whomping their opponents using only the letters of the alphabet.

The Montrose group has some players who are here mostly to have fun and a somewhat larger number who regard Scrabble as a blood sport.

The serious players--the ones who enter the tournaments held under the auspices of the National Scrabble Assn. and take pride in their national ranking--are the ones with a chess timer at their sides.

As club director George Heussenstamm explains, tournament-level or A players have 25 minutes on the clock to spend any way they like. They are penalized 10 points for every additional minute they need to finish a game.

Many of the tournament players travel a circuit, going wherever they must to find action. Deborah Sapot, of Woodland Hills, heads the club that plays every Monday night at the North Valley Jewish Community Center in Granada Hills.

Sapot carries her tiles in a bag that says, “I’ll go anywhere to play Scrabble,” and her bag doesn’t lie.

A retired principal, Sapot plays at her own club Monday nights, in the Fairfax district on Wednesday nights, in Santa Monica on Fridays and Saturdays, and at the Montrose Club when she can get there. On the fourth Sunday of the month, she goes to a club in Long Beach.

Sapot took up the game shortly after it first appeared 50 years ago, making it the same age as Silly Putty and the Republic of Ireland.

“My mother, my father, my brother and I used to play round robin,” she recalls. “My mother used to add RE- and UN- prefixes and -ED and -ING suffixes to words, and I used to say, ‘Mother, you can’t do that!’ And then the Scrabble dictionary came out, and I looked up to heaven and said, ‘You were right again, Mother.’ ”

Sapot discovered tournament play in the ‘80s when “it was like an underground movement.”

She was introduced to cutthroat Scrabble by Ruth Stern of Shadow Hills, who heads the club at the Westside Jewish Community Center with husband Alan, whom she met there, over Scrabble.

Once the highest ranked woman player in the country, Stern says her group includes a former United States champion and is “pretty competitive” (much like the gladiators and Microsoft).

“Even your bad club players are better than your good home players,” says Stern, an attorney. “It’s like a kid throwing a couple of basketballs and then going and playing against Michael Jordan.”

As to why men tend to outperform women, Stern has a theory: “I think women have the good sense to realize there are other things in life, like kids and making a home. . . . I know a couple of guys and their kids can be in soccer games and plays at school, and they don’t care. They just play Scrabble. I don’t know why their wives put up with it.”

Hard-core players have memorized all the two- and three-letter words, including HM and ATT (don’t ask me what they mean because my dictionary doesn’t say). They study word lists and play against their computers.

Top-rated players need not be poets, who relish the meanings and nuances of vast numbers of words. The god of Scrabble doesn’t care about meaning, but he does insist that the only acceptable words are those on the National Assn.’s Official Word List.

One of the moments of high drama in any serious game is a challenge. When a word is put down and challenged, somebody is going to lose a turn and possibly the game. Thus, in Montrose, the word DOOGIE is ruled “not acceptable” after a quick check of the current word list, costing the player a turn. Later, a man puts down DOURINE. His partner challenges, and, much to her chagrin, the word is deemed legitimate (it means a sexually transmitted disease of horses and mules and is in my dictionary).

Like a royal flush in poker, something called a bingo makes a Scrabble player’s heart leap up. A bingo is when you lay down all seven of your tiles, earning the board value of the word, plus 50 bonus points. “They should be called scrabbles,” Sapot argues.

Anyone who plays often enough has the experience of drawing all vowels or all consonants. Neither is desirable, but consonants usually carry more points and are less of a curse.

Sapot recalls that a friend went through a “Vowel Queen” period when she couldn’t get an X or a K to save her life.

“Don’t study the Scrabble dictionary,” Sapot advised her. “Just go home and get the Scrabble bag and practice pulling consonants out of the bag.”

Aficionados say playing the game keeps them mentally fit and provides welcome opportunities to socialize. Every other year the national association sponsors a major tournament (the last was in North Hollywood).

Lois Hawkins, who sported a pin in Montrose that spelled out her initials in Scrabble tiles, loves the tournaments.

She has been to three so far “and, if the Lord says the same, I’m going next year to Rhode Island.”

“I do without a lot of things just to have that little money to go to those tournaments,” says Hawkins, who is on a fixed income.

How much does she love them?

So much, she says, “I take in a little ironing.”

For more information on the Montrose Scrabble Club, call George Heussenstamm at (818) 248-0537.