While thousands of basketball fans streamed into the Hemisfair area to enjoy Final Four festivities on Friday, the Coates Chapel elsewhere downtown was an entirely different scene.
Thirty Scrabble players, varying in age and game experience, quietly and intensely engaged in matches of wordplay.
But this was not just any gathering of Scrabble veterans, it was the beginning of the Texas State Scrabble Championship, a three-day event featuring nearly 60 wordsmiths at the University of Texas at San Antonio Southwest Campus.
One competitor, Patricia Barrett, knows the difference between a casual, no-stakes game and a high-stakes assembly of Scrabble players.
“At home or in a Scrabble club, you can talk. Here, you can’t talk. It’s just good Scrabble manners,” she said.
Barrett and fellow competitors participated in a five-game early bird event to kick off championship competition, where players from around Texas are registered to play 13 games over Saturday and Sunday. Cash purses are up for grabs in five divisions.
This weekend also marks a return of the Texas State Scrabble Championship, an annual event that began in the 1980s and continued until the COVID-19 pandemic compelled organizers to shelve the competition.
Co-organizer Matt Canik, said he and fellow players were initially disheartened when the pandemic shut down the state championships given that Texas is one of the few states to host a Scrabble state competition.
“I contacted both of the historical organizers, Mike Willis and Brian Pepper, and asked for their blessing to resurrect this thing, and they gave me an enthusiastic thumbs up on the condition that they were allowed to play,” Canik said.
Co-organizer Alex Rivard said many members of San Antonio’s Scrabble community are delighted by not only a revival of the state Scrabble championships, but by an increasing number of Scrabble tournaments locally and elsewhere.
“(Canik) and I are two of the younger members of the San Antonio Scrabble community,” Alex Rivard said. “It’s really important to both of us to help make the game more accessible to people in San Antonio, around Texas and beyond.”
Canik, Rivard and other players said various elements and strategies involved in Scrabble make the game generally irresistible and occasionally frustrating.
According to game rules, two to four players score points by placing tiles, each carrying a single letter, onto a 15-inch by 15-inch game board bearing 225 squares.
The tiles, randomly plucked from a Scrabble bag, must form words that read left to right in rows or downward in columns, and that are found in a standard dictionary.
According to Matt DeWaelsche, who has been playing in Scrabble tournaments for 40 years, any Scrabble player “who’s any good is very smart.”
“It’s just fun hanging out with smart people. You meet so many interesting people in Scrabble,” he added.
Canik recalled how, in his youth, his older brother focused on math and certain tactics to consistently beat family members at Scrabble.
“I don’t know what he was doing, but he would beat us every time,” he said.
Canik turned to playing Scrabble online where he could learn and appreciate the game at his own pace.
“Once I realized I could play Scrabble without having to lose to my big brother every time we played, it became fun,” he added.
Orry Swift said his exceptional spelling skills helped him to perform in spelling bees in his youth. Those skills translated to success at Scrabble.
“As for my strategy, that has changed over time. Originally, it was just focusing on short words,” Swift said, adding that he eventually sought to memorize multitudes of words and learn the skill of unscrambling words.
“Studying these words, knowing they already exist, is not enough. It’s kind of like learning a new language,” Swift said.
Rivard said Scrabble allows players to be both competitive and creative in a game that demands patience, and involves time constraints, a lengthy set of rules, and a singular word list.
”There’s also the volatility and the luck factor of reaching into a bag of tiles and pulling seven random letters. On your best day, you might be the best player in the world, but you could also lose to somebody who is not nearly as good at the game,” he added.
Event organizers are hopeful such game aspects will drive more public interest in Scrabble, and help to spark a resurgence in Scrabble tournaments.
“We’re bringing this competition back, we’re thrilled about it,” Canik said.
