(San Jose Mercury News, 5/28/96, B-Peninsula Section, pages 1B & 4B.)
SCRABBLE PLAYER 'REVIVES', WINS TOURNEY WITH 'LARD'.
To these word nerds, points have meaning.
[by Carolyne Zinko, M/N staff writer]
Poring over his Scrabble board, Jim Geary found himself in a quandary over quags and qursh --and he wasn't the only one with word problems. While blue skies beckoned outside, 69 people spent the weekend in the small banquet room of the Howard Johnson Lodge in Santa clara, arguing over arcane words like 'huipiles','quetzal' and 'qat', hoping to win big in the eigth annual Scrabble Memorial Day Classic, the largest holiday tournament on the West Coast.
"You've got to like being obsessed with words," said the day's biggest winner, Lester Schoenbrun of Oakland, who came out on top of the expert division, one of the four in the torunament, which began Saturday and ended Monday. His pivotal move Monday was spelling 'revives' for 10-8 points after a 'v' landed on a triple-letter square and the word stretched across a double-word score. "I love the tension, the adrenalin flow", he said. "When you're in the hunt for a word, it's completely absorbing".
The tournament is one of a handful sponsored each year by the Bay Area Scrabble Club of San Jose, conducted with the permission of the National Scrabble Players Association. Real diehards also compete in national and world Scrabble championships, said Johnny Nevarrez, tournament director and head of the San Jose club, which meets every Sunday in Schlotsky's Deli on Saratoga Avenue in San Jose.
Competitors young and old came from as far as Washington, Texas and Arizona, vying for cash prizes and gifts, and a chance to test their intellectual mettle against fellow word nerds who spend spare time reading dictionaries, doing crossword puzzles and working out anagrams from words like cocaine (oceanic) and grantee (reagent).
In marathon sessions lasting 10 hours each on Saturday and Sunday and three hours on Monday, players competed one-on-one at 34 game boards scattered on a dozen tables. No dictionaries were allowed, though judges were on hand to monitor the games. Contestants who spelled 'phonies' --Scrabble lingo for fake words-- got away with it if the words went unchallenged by their opponents.
Players of the popular game --in which words spelled with individually lettered tiles, each assigned a point value-- were ranked by ability: novice, recreational, intermediate and expert. First, second and third prizes were awarded in each catagory. Winners were determined by points total after 18 games.
Unfortunately for Geary, a 29-year-old programmer from Phoenix who practices against top-notch Scrabble players nationwide via computer, defending champion Schoenbrun, a 60-year-old legal secretary from Oakland, retained his title in the expert catagory and went home with a $400 cash prize.
In the quandary over 'quags,' the shortened form of quagmires, and 'qursh', as everyone knows, a monetary unit of Saudi Arabia, Geary spelled quags and racked up 48 points. But Schoenbrun spelled 'ourie,' which means 'shivering with cold,' and on the next turn won the game by using his remaining tiles to spell the less-lofty 'lard.'
Overall, Schoenbrun won 15 of 18 games during the weekend and outscored Geary, the leading contender, by seven points.
Other winners included Jason Sommer of Santa Barbara, who won the $400 top prize in the intermediate catagory, Marilyn Gage of Castro Valley, who won $250 top prize in the recreational category, and Mengus Reeves of Auburn, who won a chess clock for the top prize in the novice category.
Where were the reporters all the tournaments I won ahead of Lester?
Last Modified 2/7/00