Slippery slope to flokati

While it may never have the chin-stroking intellectual prestige of chess, Scrabble still has its devotees. The word game was first invented in the Thirties by an unemployed architect, Alfred Butts, who was a victim of the deepening American Depression. It took him years to develop and sell properly, and the first mass-produced copies weren't produced until 1948.

By the early Fifties, though, it had risen in popularity faster than any other game in the history of the toy industry. And it continues to sell: to this day, the American owners, Hasbro Inc, shift more than a million copies of the game each year.

Most people just play Scrabble for fun. For the select few who play the game competitively, though, it's a deadly serious pursuit. Over the years, a small but perfectly malformed subculture has risen up around the game, formed by fanatics who live to find new combinations of highscoring letters to trounce their opponents. There are more than 150 Scrabble tournaments a year, culminating with the World Championships and its $25,000 first prize, which attracts players from across the globe (many of whom can't even speak English).

This little-known world is what Stefan Fatsis, a journalist on the Wall Street Journal, sets out to discover in Word Freak. Intrigued by the atmosphere at a championship in Washington - which he says has all the familiarity of a UFO convention - he decided to become a player himself.

This book chronicles the three extraordinary years he spent in the company of the Scrabble elite. During that time, it seems, he descends from his initial stance of bemused, objective observation to a semidelirious state of word obsession. It's a slippery slope, which soon finds him praising "the beauty of words like FLOKATI and GANTLOPE and SEADROME".

Fatsis's immersion in competitive Scrabble comes about mainly through the advice he gets from the real masters of the game. Although they're hardly your average gurus - most of them are the kind of people who read the dictionary for fun, sporting Scrabble boxer shorts - they do have some tips to offer. Fatsis befriends an array of characters: the pill-popping Matt Graham, Gastrointestinal Joel (or GI Joel for short), and amateur lexicographer Joseph Leonard.

HE ends up studying lists of thousands of words (around 100,000 words are allowed in tournament play), and grappling with concepts such as board vision and rack management.

All the preparation does pay off, as his all-important rating slowly climbs from 761 to the expert-level 1,733. His book naturally narrows in focus along the way, eventually becoming an almost unreadable amalgam of anagrams, word lists, and hopeless dreams of laying down QINGHAOSU or WATERZOOI (both acceptable in tournament Scrabble) along a triple-word score.

Despite such tunnel vision, this strange story is highly addictive, and instructive. Portraying one small subculture, Fatsis's unusual odyssey is mapped out in such detail that it illuminates all the absurdity and dignity of the competitive spirit in general. And it certainly won't hurt your performance should you ever dare to play Scrabble again.