Word Games

There's a new record for high score in a game of Scrabble. Michael Cresta cobbled together 830 points and in the process broke three records: highest score in a game, highest combined score (1,320 points for two players), and highest score for one word (365 for quixotry). Stefan Fatsis, who wrote Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players about his own experiences in the world of Scrabble, describes the record-breaking game in Slate (via Mike at Howling Curmudgeons):

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.

Fatsis goes on to give us a partial play-by-play, but the last sentence in that quote suggests that there's more to it than the game itself. Cresta and his opponent, Wayne Yorra, are not apparently "serious" Scrabble players. They each tend to make unusual plays designed to gamble for higher scores, and this time those gambles paid off. Fatsis describes an instance in which Cresta used his turn to exchange two tiles in a 532-1 chance to get the two correct letters that would allow him to play a Q across two triple-word scores. He hit the correct letters, T and Y, and went on to his record-breaking 365 points on the single word. The "serious" strategic play at that point, according to Fatsis, would've been to play the Q and get it on the board and out of Cresta's rack.

Should Cresta and Yorra's game be given a sort of mental asterisk, as Fatsis seems to suggest? The previous high score, 770, was set by an expert in a tournament, and Fatsis wants that one to be remembered, too. Here's how he poses the question:

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?

So do we judge a performance after the fact by how serious it was? In any activity, if a record is broken, does that record have to clear another hurdle of intent before we can embrace it?