![]() I hovered behind his chair (he has the posture of a yogi and the sang-froid of a Vulcan) while he replenished his rack. Meditation and breathing exercises are part of his mental-fitness program. Edley was inspired by Seth to realize his full human potential, and he chose to express it through Scrabble. Some thirty years ago, he became enamored of “The Seth Material,” a New Age text in eleven volumes that was supposedly dictated by Seth, an enlightened being, to Jane Roberts, a medium and psychic, who received the teachings while in a trance. He is a three-time national champion, and one of the few players to have memorized the entire dictionary of official Scrabble terms (which, if you were wondering, accepts “blind gut” as one word). A few feet away, however, the great Joe Edley didn’t look up or even twitch. A little crowd gathered to congratulate her. While I was watching, she “bingoed out” (emptying her rack to win with a seven-letter coup de grâce, “blidgut”), and whooped for joy. She is a chic blond Gestalt therapist from Toronto, and the highest-ranked female player in North America. Wonkish misfits with awesome powers of recall, most of them male, seemed to dominate Division 1, and, during a break, I met John O’Laughlin, the baby-faced genius who designed Quackle-a Scrabble computer program that, Saint John said, “thinks almost like a human, which can’t be said of everyone here.” But Robin Pollock Daniel did not fit the mold. So far, I’ve been to about eighty-nine hundred branches.” He told me, “I plot my itineraries to dovetail with Scrabble tournaments. ![]() He is the subject of a documentary about his quest to visit every Starbucks on the planet. The handsome Latino guy to his right is Winter.” Winter, a software engineer, just goes by one name. Over there is Sal Piro, the president of the ‘Rocky Horror Picture Show’ fan club, playing with Frank Tangredi, who wrote an Off Broadway play. Like Joel, Adam doesn’t talk much, but he went to Princeton at sixteen. Saint John whispered, “The guy with the red hair, taking notes and shaking his head at careless moves, is Adam Logan, a world champion. Tiles rustled in cloth bags, and I watched as a top-seeded player laid “pealike,” using all seven letters-a “bingo”-which his opponent countered with another bingo, “crolise.” Chew and his colleague Sherrie Saint John-anchors of a live Webcast-took the time to point out a few celebrities. The tension and the brainpower were palpable. Once the games began, a hush fell, and players hunched over their boards. Wolitzer and her son found their places in “steerage,” as she put it. The room was a bright rectangle crowded with tables arranged hierarchically. A few people rushed over to help, but she turned out to be convulsed, for obscure reasons, with hilarity. At that moment, we heard a scream, followed by a thud, and a young woman fell to the floor, apparently having a convulsion. “Socializing is a challenge for a lot of us in the Scrabble community,” John Chew, the tournament’s Webmaster, noted tactfully. Go away.” Later in the afternoon, we had a cordial chat about his role as the “official adjudicator,” but he was hard to draw out. (Sherman’s nickname refers to the soundtrack of gastrointestinal disturbances that often punctuate his games.) When Wolitzer introduced us, Sherman covered his ears with both hands and huddled near a wall. Joel, is a legendary player and a former world champion who figures prominently in “Word Freak,” a pungently written best-seller by Stefan Fatsis about the competitive Scrabble subculture. His assistant director, Joel Sherman, a wiry bachelor from the Bronx known as G.I. The diner’s owner, Ira Freehof, runs the tournament. Players were drifting in from a hearty breakfast at the Comfort Diner, on West Twenty-third Street, armed with leftover carbohydrates. A high-school marching band from New Jersey, wearing Polish folk costumes, was disembarking from a tour bus with a clatter of drums and cymbals. A light rain was falling, and the Avenue had been closed to traffic for the Pulaski Day parade. His mother, in Division 3, invited me to watch them play their final games, and we arrived at the venue, a loft on lower Fifth Avenue, a little before nine o’clock on Sunday morning. Meg Wolitzer, the novelist, had signed up for the three-day event with her son, Charlie Panek, a thirteen-year-old eighth grader who was competing in Division 4, the lowest tier, but was holding his own against adult rivals. ![]() The 2008 Big Apple Scrabble Tournament took place on a weekend in early October.
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