8/12/97

Lost for words

    You'd think they were playing for the world championships.
    Actually, they were, but what attracted the swarm of media to their table was not so much prowess as politics.
    For Jerusalemite JJ Jonah, and Salah Salih of Saudi Arabia, this was war -- a war of words, but genteel, mannerly, collegial.
    "It was odd," JJ recalled last week on his return from the World Scrabble Championships in Washington DC. "You'd think we had nothing in common, but with Scrabble, we were culturally alike."
    For one game at least, the media abandoned the big-name players at Table 1 to check in on this miniature peace process (this was, after all, Washington DC).
    "The reporters got right to the point. First they asked, 'Did you win?' I said 'Yeah.' Then they asked, 'What was it like playing your enemy?'" JJ rolls his eyes and laughs. "My enemy?! No, we didn't see it like that. We were real friendly." (This was not, strictly speaking, a first: a couple of years ago, a player from Saudi Arabia attended the Jerusalem Scrabble Club.)
    Several newspapers published a photo of JJ, wearing a kipa crocheted with the words "Scrabble" and "JJ," playing against Salih, their national flags displayed alongside the board. "When I told Salih that I heard his picture was in an Israeli newspaper, he couldn't believe it."
    JJ and Paloma Raychbart of Ramat Gan, the two Israelis among 80 players from 36 countries, often found themselves matched against players from the Moslem world -- or against each other (Paloma beat JJ twice). If you keep score of such things, the Israelis were a combined 8-2. JJ defeated the Saudi twice, Rajah Abdullah of Malaysia and Assad ul-Haq of Qatar once each, and had a win and loss against Linda Pray of Oman.
    Paloma had wins against Abdullah, ul-Haq and Wone Mamadou of Kuwait. Perhaps in the interest of regional stability, she had her worst result against the Saudi, losing 594-290. She didn't discuss politics with any of them. "I wasn't going to initiate any conversations like that," she says tight-lipped. But when Paloma, originally from England, took on the player from France, ahh -- that got her Irish up a tad.
    JJ, 27, immigrated from Canada at the age of eight, but considers himself thoroughly Israeli. So naturally, when he was paired against Austin Tan Kiat Hing of Singapore, JJ greeted him in fluent Chinese. He also startled Ken Nakai of Japan with a few words of Japanese. A sudden thought seized him later: "Y'know, I could have talked to the Arabs in Arabic too."
    For all that, the tournament's lingua franca was English. "It was really weird, though: some of the players -- such as the Thais, Singaporeans, the Romanian -- they don't really understand English very well, but they play English Scrabble. They know the words, not the language."
    Even weirder is that some of the North Americans were like that too. "These guys are phenomenal geniuses, their brains work on a higher plane, but say 'Hi, how are you?' and they stare at you blankly and say 'uh ... uh.' I asked one guy how he did in a game, and he answered: 'Academically?' I have no idea what he meant by that.
    "One of the funniest moments of the tournament was when the director, in his opening remarks, said: 'In this room are some of the most brilliant minds in the world. Stop asking what time the first game is tomorrow morning.' I mean, there were signs all over, but they couldn't figure out where the bathroom was."
    At that level, talk is less about words per se, and more about mathematical probabilities, tile management and computerized iterations (for which -- and this is the scary part -- they don't even need computers).
    One such mastermind in attendance, JJ Chew (no relation) of Toronto, once won a high school contest by memorizing pi to over 500 places.
    Joel Sherman, one of the odder oddballs, "walks, talks, and in every way, behaves unusually." But you can get away with a lot when you earn the title "World Champion." The 35-year-old retired bank clerk from the Bronx finished first, then won a best-of-five championship series against the runnerup, his practice mate Matt Graham, to win $25,000.
    Sherman goes by the nickname GI Joel; the GI stands for "gastro-intestinal," a tribute to the various illnesses and constant gaseous ructions that render him unable to work, allowing him to
evote his life to Scrabble.  
    Graham, 31, a standup comedian, might be a better player if he lived in Israel. Earlier in the tournament, he challenged the word HAFTAROT (it's acceptable); in the final game against Sherman, with the letters BDEINOU, he might have won had he seen BEDOUIN.
    "It's incredible, being among them. During the championship series -- the two finalists played in a sealed room, while almost 100 players and fans watched on closed-circuit TV -- we could see their tiles, and the plays they made. In his opening rack, Graham had the letters AFINSTU." Normal people might see FAN, or FUN, or maybe even FAINT. Not these people. "In a second, everyone starting shouting together: 'FUSTIAN! FUSTIAN!' It was hilarious." 
    JJ detected one difference that sets apart the stratospheric geniuses: "they never blame bad luck."
    He was somewhat disappointed with his results, 10-11, 53rd place (Paloma, 9-12, was 60th). Nu? So what happened?
    He shakes his head and grimaces. "Bad luck."
    If he can overcome two other factors, he believes he could muscle into the top 20.
    First of all, experience. "The level of play, the intensity, was unbelievable."
    More important, word knowledge. Players in Israel abide by the 100,000-word American Scrabble dictionary. But that's a pittance compared to the 140,000 entries of the British dictionary, which most of the world uses. (Both were used in the championships.) JJ tried desperately to learn "new" words, burnishing them into that part of his brain that collects and collates obscure words, and even the relationships of individual letters. "Those 40,000 extra words make it a very, very different game.
    "Mind you, by the end of the tournament, I'd learned a lot of new words."
    It must be a relief to be back home, at the Jerusalem Scrabble Club, where JJ is the champion and the vocabulary is mercifully familiar.  
    "Not really," JJ moans. "Now I have to unlearn all those new words."