Lessons from Scrabble
10.02.06 - 1:59 a.m.
Anyway, today I took part for fun in the Scrabble competition organised by Nesa's recreation committee. It was quite well-attended and got progressively intense, starting out with 4 players x 6 boards at 9 pm in the hall recreation room and finishing with 3 players x 2 boards at 12 am!

I came in last of the final 6. It is a falsehood that just because I have a good vocabulary I'm good at Scrabble :) people with good vocabularies are good at Boggle, not at Scrabble! I'm a rather unskilled Scrabble player - when I play Scrabble with the reasonably well-read, I score the lowest. To score high (and the best players tonight were scoring at least 12-30 points with each word) you have to have strategy and to have had practice at the game. I haven't played Scrabble for years, excluding once at Dr Khoo's house with Hsia Pin and Eunice over Chinese New Year, a session I was now grateful for because it was kind of a warm-up for today haha.

Anyway, I am proud to say that in the first round I played the best game of Scrabble I'd ever played in my life, which included a very satisfying SOLEMN (which crossed 2 existing words and was parallel to a third)! Unfortunately, I didn't win it, due to a practised opponent who bingoed (where you use up all 7 letters in one go; with the 50-point bonus that it earned him, he wound up with 93 points for ADVISOR!!) and finished with 230-plus points while I got 170-plus... but who lost interest and let me go to the next round.

In the next round (the 6 winners of the previous round, 3 x 2 boards), I was against Anirudh and Buddhima who are Scrabble powerhouses! This was a much more frustrating game because I kept having all these brilliant-minus-one-letter combinations of tiles... right at the beginning I only had one letter off from QUALITY... and it was so sad to have to keep giving up all these big juicy words one by one for lack of a letter or two! And there was this awful suspenseful part where I COULD ACTUALLY bingo and make an 8-letter word by joining all my seven letters to one letter... a chance in a blue moon... and I was gritting my teeth all through Buddhi's turn... and he left that space open for me!!! BUT THEN during his turn Anirudh went and took up the space next to it boo hoo so that I couldn't bingo after all with my superb ADVOCATE (which moreover would have crossed one double-word and two double-letter spaces, was worth at least 85 points, and would have won me the game!)

When I mourned aloud for my brilliant ADVOCATE which was not to be, all the girls descended upon the innocent Anirudh and scolded him haha though there was no reason to at all... Anirudh said, "If you'd told me what your letters were I'd have left that space for you!" But you see, that would have taken all the power out of it anyway. I wouldn't have wanted it that way, no matter how my heart ached after the loss of my opportunity haha - because it would only have counted if chance had left it open for me. Some others, perhaps, would have vocalised their wish to have that space early on in the turn - and it being a friendly game, they would have been allowed to bingo and win - but that's not how I operate. I have to wait my turn, I have to let The Powers Above control whether or not I get the opportunity - and if I don't get it, it isn't mine you see. If I'd stepped out of turn, or gave so much as a hint of how much I wanted that space beforehand - the victory would be tainted.

That sad blow made me lose heart and really took away my mood to play for a minute or two! (Haha... seriously... my heart ACHED physically for the next two hours!) But I made the most of the corpse of ADVOCATE with a magnificent CLADE that I was very proud of (especially since everyone else had never heard of it - ignoramuses, philistines!) and in the end, although I never got such good letters again (at one point I had two As and three Os) and lost the game, I actually greatly shortened the lead of the other two over the rest of the game and ended up losing by a smaller margin than I had expected to. (211 points to Anirudh, 180-plus to Buddhi and 149 to me.) Plus, despite the loss of the ADVOCATE opportunity, I still had the satisfaction of scoring the highest score with a single word that any of us did in that game - 42 points for QUOD (another word no one else had heard of but me, but time and again I was vindicated by the online Scrabble dictionary).

Also, I was really fortunate to be at the board where the three of us shared the vocabulary-rather-than-points ethic that "Scrabble's not fun if you play with words that no one knows the meaning of". That was a comment on the neighbouring board, which had skilled Scrabble players whom we (or at least I) felt were having a much less fun game, because in their effort to get as many points as possible, they were making all these short words and vowel dumps that they had memorised but did not even know the meaning of - like EUOI and LIN - and near-acronym or near-prefix words I consider rather 'cheaty' like PH and EX. Some of those players didn't care about knowing the meaning of the words at all, only about getting as many points as possible. I know that this is the 'proper', 'expert' way to play Scrabble, but to me that's not the right way to play Scrabble - because then it's no longer about the language, it's about all these short words that you mug up on just so that you can win! Still, their absolute scores are always higher than those of people who make interesting words, and they won the prize money. I guess that's the price you pay for idealism, and it's the reason I'll never be a 'good' Scrabble player, because I never want to win a Scrabble game on technicalities; I want to win by sheer word-power; but Scrabble can't be won on that alone.

So it struck me... Life is so much like a game of Scrabble. Sometimes we end up trailing behind the others not because of a lack of skill, but because our tiles are bad. Life will never be fair, because everyone has different letters - if everyone were to have the same letters, there would be no game. It's the difference that keeps things interesting - and the difference that makes it unfair. Sometimes we'll just have too many vowels or too many consonants to make something intelligible. And there'll always be wonderful things that could have happened that we'll have to give up for lack of just one little piece. Often, you'll encouter the chance of a lifetime, which you just miss because someone got there first, or had better tiles - even though you know you could have made much more of the opportunity - a much grander achievement - in that person's place.

But there's no use feeling sad about what-might-have-been - you'd be a poor sport to drop out of the game even though you've lost the chance to show how good you are. You just have to swallow the pain, make the most of your remaining tiles, throw away the skeletons of words, chances, that are now impossible, and recycle the letters to form other words, which though they may not seem as magnificent and perfect as the first one, are still going to impress and help you catch up. After all, everyone else is also just making the most of the tiles that they have been given, and if they do well they deserve it! And as you get involved in it, the sadness of each setback will be swallowed up in the fun you're having the rest of the time.

(I think of everything else, this was the most important realisation for me - the fact that you can't cling on to the ghosts of words you'd have once loved to make, if you just can't make them because of what's on the board - that in life when dreams get broken, you just have to let go of them, and disassemble them so that you can use the pieces to build new things - you can't keep brooding over what might have been and waiting for a miracle to complete the old plan - because you only have a fixed amount of time and a fixed amount of tiles - and it's only if you keep moving on that you can build something worthwhile! C'est comme ca / on gagne pas / a chaque fois.)

Sometimes it's painful when you have to give up interesting words like SPLURGE and SLURP for the more mundane, like VENT, simply because of the different positions of the squares on the board, meaning that the latter will earn you more points. But that's part of life too. It can't be entirely idealistic if one is to survive. And on the other hand, sometimes people won't understand why you don't make them 'give you chance' - some people will never understand why it matters so much to you that you keep your agony and anticipation to yourself, and earn your achievement with your own hard work. For one, the sweetest victory may be being able to put their ideal word down, even if they didn't wait their turn; for another, playing strictly within the rules of chance may be what matters more than the achievement itself. Often the patience and perseverance of the second group of people goes unnoticed, and people may wonder why they may be so 'stupid' as to invent such rigidity of conduct for themselves - yet how are they to understand how important this code of conduct is to us, although practically no one keeps it? (It's for the same reason that a minority of people in this world continue to use good grammar and spelling, even though practically no one else does anymore. Why? I've agonised about this and I suppose in the end it's because life would be meaningless if one didn't hold to some absolutes and keep doing what one knew to be right even though it seems to be a waste of effort because no one else might think so. I believe that in the end it must count for something. Maybe one gets rewarded in heaven for upholding standards of good English haha. I don't know - wherever the reward is, it's certainly not on earth!)

And the thing about life is that knowing more than others - in this case, a good vocabulary - won't get you points. Often it is the soulless, those who mug the technicalities for points, who get ahead, or else (and deservedly) those with a sharper eye for opportunity - and often knowing more than others will get you laughed at, and your integrity questioned (Scrabble-playing is the activity in which my honesty is most often doubted. You won't believe the amount of people who will first tell you that you have a better vocabulary than them - 'surely you're going to win!' and after that refuse to take your word for the words that you know, insisting on checking them up, like CLADE - as if you'd lie to them! as if earning points for a made-up word would give you any satisfaction in playing the game!). As Hsia Pin said, life is often harder for those who know more - or, to use an expression that me and my brother like to use, who can 'see more' than the rest.

But in the end, even if you lose out in terms of points, you'll have made the board much more interesting than it would have been without you! At the end of the game, your board will have lots of interesting words on it like CLADE, INFER, GNU, SOLEMN and ORCA. And even if you don't come out in first place you can look back on it and say, "That was a good game".

Still, I'm not going to be playing Scrabble for a long time. It's too emotionally draining haha. (It's not mentally exhausting. For me it's emotionally exhausting! I think I get more worked up inside about Scrabble and things that involve my knowledge being called into question than I ever would in any extreme sports, etc haha.)

Oh dear. That wasn't a short entry at all.