Earlier this month a Scrabble player named Michael Cresta, in Lexington, Mass., scored 830 points in a single game! He and his opponent scored 1,320 points, making it the highest individual score and the highest game total ever in regulation play.
Stefan Fatsis, the author of the greatest (and only) book I've ever read on Scrabble, has the complete rundown on Slate today. It's actually a great description of how a large number of improbabilities can snowball into something incredible — two mediocre players make enough unlikely choices in succession to create a highly improbable outcome. Sort of a... if an army of monkeys at a million Scrabble boards... kind of scenario... without the frightening hordes of monkeys... um, where was I?
Comments
Suzanne Long - October 30, 2006 9:53 pm
Only slightly on-topic, but glad you liked the Scrabble tile pillows (courtesy digg.com, no less!) http://stephenreed.net/wordplayinstallation/id3.html
Rob - November 2, 2006 12:11 pm
After you mentionned it a while ago, I got my hands on and read Word Freak. Great book! It made me memorize my 2 letter words and give up after a few days of trying to learn my 3 letter words. I guess I'm not the right kind of hardcore.
Regardless, there's a movie called Word Wars which is the (spiritual) movie version of the book. It follows the same people who were in the book, and Fatsis even makes an appearance.