C-M-I-N-E-S. Did you even study? No, I didn't. Wow. How impressive is that.

This is not your grandmother Scrabble. I'm Tricia Bobita. I'm Greta Johnson, and this is the Nerdat podcast. Coming up this week, more word nerdery. We're going to talk about the Scrabble tournament that I went to that kind of changed my life. And an interview with Stefan Fatsis. He's the author of Word Freak, the book that's about 10 years old now, but dove into the world of competitive Scrabble in a way that many had never heard before.

Fatsis is also on the Slate Sports podcast called Hang Up and Listen.

So last weekend, I nerded out over Shakespeare and lightsabbers, and recently Greta had a pretty nerdy weekend, too.

I did. It was about a month ago now, and I went to a regional Scrabble tournament, and it was

amazing. You're walking. It's a competitive Scrabble tournament, and it was amazing.

You walk in. It's a competitive Scrabble tournament. What do you see?

Well, this was at the Asheville Senior Center, almost like a cafeteria-style room with these long tables everywhere and boards set up.

And people are sitting there really quietly staring at this board. It's kind of an amazing thing. And then there were even these silence enforcers. And they had these pictures of people saying sh on little popsicle sticks that

they would hold up if people started talking because you're not supposed to talk. So it's really

very quiet, except for like the tiles being played on the little plastic grids of the board.

And you have to be silent, right? There's no chit-chat because there's no time for that. There's clocks involved. Yeah, they're like the chess clocks. There's 25 minutes per player per game. And if you go past your time, the game doesn't automatically end, but you get points subtracted from your score, which is not a good thing, obviously. I wish that was true in words with friends, because sometimes I play a word for my brother, and then he doesn't play another word for days.

Exactly. That's kind of one of my problems with words with friends. Here's Bill Snoddy. He

usually directs the Scrabble tournaments, but this year he got to take the year off so that he

could actually play in it. You really find people intensely playing a very competitive game.

In fact, this has been called the contact mind sport because it's so intense.

Contact mind sports. That's awesome. Isn't it hilarious? And there was actually a story in Sports

Illustrated about the National Scrabble tournament quite a few years ago. But it features one of the folks who was actually at this tournament, this guy named David Gibson, who is not only the sweetest man you've ever met, but also an excellent Scrabble. He's ranked right now third in North America. And he also has won about $150,000 over his career

of playing Scrabble, which is significant.

Wow.

Here's all the different elements that he's thinking of in a Scrabble game.

You're basically thinking about three things. I think when you make a turn, you think about,

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