Promoting Tournament Scrabble

[Yarn Chief Sr]

"I wonder if I should waste my breath posting here" were the first words I typed as I prepared to make a LJ entry. Hopefully, instead, this will be the start of something better. I redirected my efforts here as, well, LJ is only okay at doing something I envision can be done better. The problem is, all these efforts start with discussions that soon go nowhere because they get lost in the aether. I'm sure more congnizant and/or ADD people could dig up the myriad discussions we've had about trying to get the ball rolling on getting the numbers up. Another problem is some of the discussions are had behind locked journal entries, and that doesn't do any good in the long run.

When NASPA first formed there was a marketing committee (I think it was Doug and Sam), dedicated, supposedly, to trying to get and retain a demographic we sorely need: young (graduate, post-graduate, and even high-school-aged people. Cree has said on occasion that School Scrabble functions as that, but I really don't see it yet. In theory, they're supposed to come to us, but in practice, they don't. Why would they? They're offered tens of thousands of dollars for a glorified spelling bee and then tens of ... hundreds for the rest of their life. Competitive Scrabble is a money pit, and not one where you can meet people your own age. Both of these things should change for the sake of the longevity of the game.

As academic and social a pursuit as competitive Scrabble is, it is mind-blowing how it hasn't transitioned to be bigger than it is. About a year ago I was in a bakery at a Meetup for board games and a group of people unrelated to the group asked to borrow a set of tiles. They set about playing their own word game, some sort of cross between anagrams and Scrabble, just forming words they could on the table with the tiles before them. Word lovers. And these impromptu sessions do happen more often than we realize. Yet it doesn't translate to more people taking the game seriously because it isn't taken seriously enough. That gap, that plateau, that whatever is what we have to try to transcend. I think Jesse Matthews had some great ideas to that end, in creating these little shotgun events. I think in promotion (not just passive advertisment), NASPA should concentrate on high schools and college campuses where there are other gatherings like Quiz Bowl or Math Counts or other similar academic competitions. Because this is one academic competition that can be played for life.

This discussion fails when breached on LJ (that is, it always fizzles out). But maybe this could be the beginning of some bigger planning efforts to bring in new players to the fold without totally scaring them off in the process. And in the meantime if someone could take it upon themself to dig up old LJ discussions that have fallen along those lines and link to them here, that'd be wonderful.

The most fun tournament events I've been to are those where the director fosters a sense of community or where, after hours, I've found I can make a connection and enjoy myself indulging in the social games such as Anagrams and Tag-Team Scrabble, expanding my horizons, socializing, and meeting people I otherwise wouldn't. This is especially true at tournaments far away.

http://ftangredi.livejournal.com/228872.html

[dacrON]

The perservering game at UCSD, and I imagine a lot of other schools is WWF. There's gotta be a way to tap into that somehow. I'm brainstorming.

School Scrabble will never provide us with tournament Scrabble players. Anyone who believes it does is only kidding themselves, unless they have some new strategy. As I always ask people:

How many consistent tournament players have been produced by School Scrabble?
Or in other words, how many of todays top younger players came from school Scrabble? (as a point of reference, my grade, the HS class of 2007/Uni class of 2011 was in 8th grade the year of the first NSSC).

FWIW, Jesse and I, then Noah and I (okay so maybe its just me who tries to convince others to enjoy it?), have played Scrabble-sans-board, where you just make words and connect them (swapping blanks, makes for good bingo finding).

I am personally committed to trying to grow the SDO (and CO) into really big events. It's been tough to for the inaugural because I am so busy with school, but once I graduate, I really want to spend some time to try and make it bigger than what it is. I applaud Chris for all the work he has done for NASPA, which has laid the ground for us to be able to go out and help increase notoriety. I know even Chris himself has done work as a player (Dallas WWF tourney) to help with promotion. But I think it is up to us to make those extra efforts.

Hell, even one tile anagrams is fun Even non tournament players would laugh their butts off stealing A with AT and then TAN...lol...

Anyway I can go on for hours here. I hope you'll consider linking CGP to this spot, as well as LJ.

[soccerguy]

Some form of Words With Friends tournaments is vital, I think. I've talked in the past about doing 'March Madness' style tourneys for Scrabble at various universities, but what if we simply did them for WWF and then promoted tournament Scrabble while doing such events?

[Yarn Chief Sr]

I generally avoid CGP like the plague it is. Maybe I'd make an exception. You're welcome to. I'm disheartened there hasn't been much more of a response here considering this is the most important thing we can do to improve the Scrabble scene (and a little perturbed that as in the past the threads that don't matter get the traffic here). People don't even know where to begin, and only the expected people to do so have done so (for which I am grateful, of course). But after Tang's announcement, anything I do seems like small potatoes, and I don't have the ins I once did. We need people with connections and influence far greater than mine to interject and take action.

I do like the idea of large scale Collins tournaments in the US, and that might be where I head. I'm thinking maybe like an OT format so people unsure can take a dip for a small cost. Maybe... $150 for Open, $60 for Lite, both divisions CSW, cut-off of 1300. Can a tournament be sanctioned where a cheat sheet of Collins 2s and 3s be allowed (or just 2s)? Meh, just a thought.

I don't like the sense of elitism that pervades in some Collins players minds. It's what turns off antis to the idea of change. Mini WWF tourneys are a good idea, I guess, if they were used to promote Scrabble, sure. I haven't played, so I don't know all that much about it. My bro used to play Word Feud on Droid. That any similar?

[njdevil44]

I do like the idea of large scale Collins tournaments in the US, and that might be where I head. I'm thinking maybe like an OT format so people unsure can take a dip for a small cost. Maybe... $150 for Open, $60 for Lite, both divisions CSW, cut-off of 1300. Can a tournament be sanctioned where a cheat sheet of Collins 2s and 3s be allowed (or just 2s)? Meh, just a thought.

Even a cut-off of 1300 might be too low....I've spoken to a few tourney players about Collins now, and invariably the anti's just say "it's too many words to learn", "those words are too weird", "I'll get phonied to death". I try to tell them that it'll be that way for everybody at their skill level if we switch. Heck I learned just a smattering of Collins and I was able to win a tournament. I've had close to perfect challenge grids in TWL tourneys before, and I allowed so much crap in Charlotte, even with the only 10 point challenge, yet I still won. Word knowledge may form some upper bound on your Scrabble skill, but that bound is probably A) higher than you realize and B) can be reached by improving the other aspects of your game.

I think for a lot of people, they value having a mastery over what they've studied, so now if they have to fill gaps with new # words, that feeling of mastery vanishes and they feel like they've just started over at square one (even though it's more like square 3 out of 4). It's a psychological thing, and I'm not sure what to do to incentivize a switch for these people.

On the OP, I wish I had more ideas on promoting our brand of Scrabble play as well. I've debated to myself about trying to run a basic Scrabble strategy class at our community center, for example. Something to give basic tips on word study, strategy, rack balancing etc., to people who play Facebook Scrabble or WWF a lot, then tell them about our local club meetings and NASPA tournaments. Give them cheat sheets, links to download Zyzzyva and Quackle. We need to swell our ranks in some fashion, but everybody agrees on that. Putting a plan into motion is 1000X harder.

[getofftheoven]

A few scattered thoughts...

Yeah, I've wondered often before why there hasn't been more of a publicity effort on college campuses. Seems like an ideal market.

Agree that School Scrabble as it is now is not doing much to create adult tournament players. People have talked about youth chess before, but youth chess's culture is completely different, from what I gather. Maybe a North American version of the WYSC would be more helpful...another place to look at for kids who might have interest - spelling bees. The national finalist types would be perfect for Scrabble; after all, they've already shown a willingness to learn a huge number of obscure words. What more do you want?

An issue: The recent surge of WWF, FB Scrabble, etc. is almost entirely online. And I don't see any way to have a viable online tournament scene because cheating is so widespread and easy to get away with. So there's a chasm to cross, getting those folks into face-to-face tournament play.

Are there WWF tournaments? I know of at least one - the one put on by a Dallas magazine that Chris Cree won...is there anyone playing WWF at a high level that was not a Scrabble expert beforehand? Just curious.

I wouldn't say Collins players are any more elitist than a group of similarly rated TWL-only players would be. Sure, there's going to be a few - there's bound to be at the upper levels of any pursuit. Most folks are fine.

As for the lexicon issue, I think further debate is just noise; the market's going to decide it anyway. With Michael Tang's recent efforts speeding things up a little...it's starting to appear that in the future, a majority of 1800+ players will be either playing both CSW and TWL or just playing CSW, and tournaments and divisions will reflect that. And more players rated below 1800 will get curious and try it also...but as long as people want to play TWL, for the foreseeable future I think they'll be able to find places to do that.

One thing we often seem to forget...just because a gazillion people play Scrabble or WWF doesn't mean that's anywhere near what the potential market is for what we do. We're weirdos. To even get to the intermediate level of tournament Scrabble, no matter what word list you're playing with, you have to learn a big pile of words and spend some time analyzing positions and such, and from everything I can tell it's a rare person who wants to spend his or her time doing that. And even among groups of people that are our type, there are so many gaming options now, but no more hours in a day, and most of them might even like Scrabble but will end up specializing in a different game. (Though money talks.) I don't say this to pour cold water on anyone's efforts, but rather to say that we should expect more slow, steady growth than explosive growth, and we shouldn't see the lack of "explosion" as failure.

[arenasnow]

I posted this and deleted it last night; I'm not sure why.

I have a wholly different perspective regarding the demographics of tournament Scrabble. Considering I initially came from the Mensa Scrabble-by-Mail SIG (which I joined when I was eight, and became its statistician at 14), where there was usually at most one or two members under age fifty besides me (and frequently none), tournament Scrabble seems very young-skewing to me. Lots of people age 25 or younger joined as a result of Word Freak/Word Wars/ESPN coverage/Scrabulous and while tournament Scrabble will never be "hip", it seems to me that it skews younger than a whole lot of activities at the moment. But I could just be biased because I was in a group where I was decades younger than anyone else (and better than most of them too...) Are there as many young prodigies as in chess? Well, no, but that's because of how much huger chess is generally. I do think the Facebook/social networking folks are probably more into Scrabble because Scrabulous was huge, way bigger than any chess application on Facebook... I would guess given Scrabble's wave of hype the last 5-10 years that the average age of tournament players is younger than that of chess players, but I could just be shooting my mouth off.

So I don't think demographics are a problem. The problem would be how to tap into the online player base, as Geoff said. You don't KNOW how much I wish there were online Scrabble tournaments. I have frequently had transportation issues that would make jetsetting all over the place quite the challenge, I rarely had the money to shell out to stay in hotels, and also leaving my disabled mother at home to run off to tournaments seems obnoxious. I would have played tournaments ten years ago/studied much more much sooner if there were online rated tournaments. I have to imagine there are LOTS of other potential online players who would have issues running off all over the place and therefore prefer to only play online. I don't think poker would be as huge as it is presently if not for the large online poker underground (it helps that ESPN is really pushing poker though...)

Yes, the cheating aspect. Considering the Scrabble-by-Mail SIG which I was in was completely open-book (people used Blankbooks, Wordbooks, Franklins to find plays; had I not used that crutch there's almost no doubt I would have been an expert when I was a teenager) there's a (very, very small) part of me that wishes there was some kind of alternative open-book/void tournament structure so that winning would come down more to raw strategy and less brute-force memorization than it does (although perhaps what that would really do is allow for greater variations in luck), perhaps in exchange for cutting the clock down to 5 minutes a side or something so there would still be time pressure and you couldn't spend that long looking...that would tie in with the blitz games that 99% of youngsters seem to want to play, even though I like longer games myself. If you level the playing field word-wise, it comes down strictly to strategy and luck, and thereby makes it far more like most other popular games. That would also be the method to break the Collins resistance here, and probably bring up the people raised on Scrabulous who almost always play void. I'm not bothering with Collins until I'm forced to since I really can't afford to go to international tournaments and there aren't THAT many Collins tournaments in the US yet.

I'm not REALLY serious about suggesting open-book tournaments. Obviously most experts would go apeshit about open-book Scrabble considering the time they have invested studying (not to mention the bugaboo about how you'd justify word finders and not something like Quackle which picks one's plays for you), but bottom line, I don't think you're going to get most of the people playing void on Scrabulous to memorize entire word lists. That's certainly not saying I'm never going to play in a double-challenge tournament (I am studying words now intermittently among my various multitude of other obsessions), and I never cheat on ISC or anything like that (even though I got kicked off of fairplay for having Quackle open in the background when I was simming a previous game...) And I guess that's the problem with online tournaments. You can cheat using fairplay without being caught (if you're using a Franklin or something), and you can be caught for cheating when you aren't really cheating, like I was... The online crowd is definitely where it's at (and that's where poker really took off), and unless online tournaments were introduced, they probably wouldn't join for the most part (if even I'm a hardcore fanboy of Scrabble culture and still haven't participated in a tournament yet), so it doesn't look like there's a solution there.

Going big time would I think require some colossal sellout like online and/or open-book tournaments (or giving up on both Collins and OSPD and instead using some kind of worldwide college dictionary like Dan Pratt wants) that probably wouldn't be worth it integrity-wise, but online is where the players are, and I don't think most of those people are ready to study tens of thousands of words/play double-challenge...whereas even chess seems more accessible since everybody knows when they're six how all the pieces move even if they don't know the billions of nuances and iterations that the real chess players do.

But I don't see what the huge problem with the demographics is, since Scrabble culture seems to be skewing young anyway (or I've just been hanging out with too many of the young players...) Indeed, one of the appeals for me for tournament Scrabble over the Mensa group is because there are WAY more kids here, and they grok me even more than 90%+ of my college classmates did.

As for college tournaments? That will never take off. I attended a Cornell Scrabble club in an upstairs dorm lounge once where people played 3-4 player games, ran around shirtless, and screamed at me for playing MAQUI and being unable to define it. This was CORNELL, ostensibly one of the most prestigious colleges in the U.S. If people even there won't take it seriously, it would be hard to create a groundswell otherwise (although I think Cornell has a marginally more serious Scrabble club than that one now). At most you'd get 10-20 nerds at any given college at any given time who'd really want to do it, and they'd just rather go online where they can play thousands of other nerds on ISC at any convenient time of day or night, who would usually be better than people in their college Scrabble club anyway. See what I mean? The only way to grow Scrabble is online, but I certainly understand why it can't happen. Despite my argument above, I agree with the general consensus that that would bastardize the game as it has been the past four decades. But I'm simultaneously convinced open-book online tournaments, as horrible as that idea may seem, would be the only way to make Scrabble big...

[dacrON]

id love to play non-tournament players for money and let them use a dictionary. experts who did this could get so rich lol.

clock has to be involved tho to some extent.

[Yarn Chief Sr]

It is important to know the definition of MAQUI, lest you let MAQUIING* or MAQUILY* go. One could argue that all that's necessary for that is to learn the part of speech, but once you've taken that step, the definition isn't too much harder to commit to memory. I think the fact that too few experts can define the majority of words they play is one of the great detriments to the game. Anyone with a good enough memory to learn those words in the first place should be able to take the extra second to say its definition, either aloud or to yourself. It was how I first learned the threes, which, to newbies, look like a completely foreign language. Learning definitions may not have been easy back in the days of flash cards, but these days, it's relatively simple, and helps solidify hooks and validity of the words themselves. More on the other stuff later.

[arenasnow]

I sure as hell would challenge maquiing or maquily, even though I didn't know what maqui means (I did subsequently look it up to please you). There are some words you can often tell the part of speech just from the word. Maqui does not seem like a very realistic verb or adjective, therefore it's probably a noun. Maquiing in particular sounds really goofy. I do take your point; I just think there are better examples, like the famous instance of whomever playing moggier against Lester Schonbrun not knowing that a moggy was a cat. Those are the words that trip you up, because moggy sounds like an adjective but it's not. Maqui sure doesn't sound like a verb or adjective to me. I think with a lot of words you can be pretty sure about the part of speech by the structure of the word - certainly not all, though. And certainly there's not always a surefire way of predicting a word's plurals either.

That incident I'm talking about at the makeshift Cornell Scrabble club was in 2005 or something. I think this was before I had even heard of Zyzzyva, so I probably picked up the word MAQUI from some Q list or something that had no definitions.

Although I'm not a great player yet, and I'm sure I know fewer words than anyone else in this thread, I have a more mathematical/strategic mind than a linguistic one, so I very much fall into the "words are scoring tools" trap (as espoused by Joel Sherman in Word Freak) and don't care about definitions, ESPECIALLY because of the atrocity that the OSPD is and how so many of the definitions are beyond laughable - "to copulate with a ewe", "to hoist an anchor to the cathead", "to strike with a whip used in South Africa" - how can anyone on earth take this seriously? Okay, for the cat definition, I'll accept that that is the proper usage of cat as a verb, but it still sounds kind of ridiculous to me. And for the sjambok definition, I'd be okay with it if it read "to strike with a sjambok (a whip used in South Africa)", but there are tons of retarded definitions like that. Marlon Hill even said in Word Wars, "Looking at definitions will drive you insane", and I think I agree.

I don't necessarily think either of us is right or wrong, but with regard to promoting tournament Scrabble, I very much see your point, as one of the pet peeves of novice players is expert players being unable to define the words they play (although it seems like everyone on Facebook's Scrabble application loves to use qi without knowing what it means...) If I wanted to look up the definitions of these words, I sure wouldn't use the notoriously unreliable OSPD though (except for a laugh); I'd go foraging through real dictionaries. I haven't looked in a more recent edition. I'd sure like to see the justifications for emmy, enuf, and jurassic (and no internet which appears far more often in lowercase than Emmy or Jurassic do...) I'm not gonna go all Dan Pratt and say we have to get rid of 35000 entries or something, but I probably would if I was the kind of person who was playing for the words rather than the strategy... Not that my strategy is good yet, of course...

[getofftheoven]

Heh, definitions, probably my least favorite question to get...because there's no right answer. If I know the definition of some obscurity, I'm showing off, and if I don't know it, apparently Alfred Butts is spinning in his grave like a drill bit.

No, seriously, most of the time it's an innocent question and I don't mind. I like to know what words mean, sure. I like Zyzzyva for that reason; I've picked up tons of definitions (sometimes dubious or laughable ones, true) just by osmosis. But I sure don't *have* to know them, and I don't care if some pseud thinks I should. I may not know the definition of every word I know how to spell, but I know a hell of a lot more definitions than anyone who asks me the question is likely to.

Which gets back to my original point. It's impossible to really get good at any letter-by-letter word game without knowing how to spell a whole lot of words with very specialized uses, no matter what word list is used. And most people won't want to do what it takes to get there, so the hordes ain't comin' no matter what we do. Can't blame them - if learning words felt like drudgery to me, I wouldn't be a Scrabble player.

[soccerguy]

I was gonna write an answer and then I saw you put this. I officially have nothing to say now other than +1 on your thoughts.

Heh, definitions, probably my least favorite question to get...because there's no right answer. If I know the definition of some obscurity, I'm showing off, and if I don't know it, apparently Alfred Butts is spinning in his grave like a drill bit.

No, seriously, most of the time it's an innocent question and I don't mind. I like to know what words mean, sure. I like Zyzzyva for that reason; I've picked up tons of definitions (sometimes dubious or laughable ones, true) just by osmosis. But I sure don't *have* to know them, and I don't care if some pseud thinks I should. I may not know the definition of every word I know how to spell, but I know a hell of a lot more definitions than anyone who asks me the question is likely to.

Which gets back to my original point. It's impossible to really get good at any letter-by-letter word game without knowing how to spell a whole lot of words with very specialized uses, no matter what word list is used. And most people won't want to do what it takes to get there, so the hordes ain't comin' no matter what we do. Can't blame them - if learning words felt like drudgery to me, I wouldn't be a Scrabble player.

[mikelanders29]

I am also an active user on scrabble site which I play in my spare time. I mostly play with my strategies as I like to think of new meaningful words which I have never even listen but it’s all fun to know about new words

[trainrec]

The two the biggest problems of Tournament Scrabble right now are awareness and accessibility.

The majority of people don't know tournament Scrabble exists. They also don't know Scrabble clubs exist (Scrabble club being the primary gateway to tournament Scrabble). We need more advertising of clubs. Quick ads in the free/arts newspapers "Do you like Scrabble or other word games? Come visit your local Scrabble club."

The second issue is transforming casual kitchen / online players into tournament players. Some will never get there, but many others could be persuaded if we tried hard enough.

For Online Players: We need a sanctioned Scrabble website - Why is isc.ro the best available option to play Scrabble?? We need online tournaments for small stakes, and let people use cheats. Hopefully they will then migrate to live tournaments; have become addicted to Scrabble; and will now focus on learning words because they won't be able to cheat.

For Kitchen Players: We need more newcomer-friendly tournaments. Consider revising the double-challenge rule. I would even consider allowing open 'Official Cheat Sheets' for all tournaments.


More can definitely be done to improve the Scrabble scene. I am would definitely volunteer my efforts wherever they are needed.

[jalapic]

I replied to your post in the other thread, but it actually makes sense to do it here too.

I think we need a dedicated online presence e.g. a youtube account - showing clips of what tournaments are like, interviews with players, discussion of strategy etc...

At the minute there are a bunch of scrabble clips out there in random places. Bringing them into one place would help people find out more about tournament scrabble.

[scrblnrd2]

I think one of the best ways to advertise is to have a newcomers division, and advertise that. From there they can get introduced to the world of competitive scrabble. Last year at our Duke PBMT charity tournament, the guy who won the newcomers tournament in 2011 ended up going 20-0 in the next year's bottom division. And while school scrabble does not consistently turn out good players, it gives them the chance to take their scrabble playing one step further to adult tournaments, whereas they might never have heard about tournament scrabble in the first place.

[njdevil44]

I think one of the best ways to advertise is to have a newcomers division, and advertise that. From there they can get introduced to the world of competitive scrabble. Last year at our Duke PBMT charity tournament, the guy who won the newcomers tournament in 2011 ended up going 20-0 in the next year's bottom division.

Actually, he finished 2nd, to another player who has also graduated to NASPA tournaments but only plays locally so far. But yes, having a short (3 games, 4 hours with orientation and prize ceremony) newcomers tournament concurrent with a multi-day allows interested newbies to get their feet wet and decide if our scene is for them. Newcomers aren't going to want to block out even a full day for something they're unsure they're going to enjoy. And if they are, well we probably don't have to sell them on tournament Scrabble in the first place.

[medropout]

Has anyone looked into buying ads in the Scrabble/WWF apps on FB? A NASPA ad could go a long way just to let people know that a higher level of Scrabble does exist.

I probably would have started playing in club sooner had I seen an ad for NSA clubs. It was pretty much luck that actually landed me at club, since I heard about the concept from one person on Scrabulous. Even then, that person didn't even know of any actual clubs; she just knew that there was a national tournament. I was (am) dorky enough to start googling Scrabble events based on that conversation, which led me to the amazing discovery that there was a club in my city.

[josephmcg]

For a 'New Player Event' in Ireland, we ran a facebook ad campaign. This was targeted at people living in Ireland, who liked scrabble and/or used facebook scrabble.

We paid about $0.30 per click.

In a week, the advert was displayed 286,000 times; clicked 202 times; cost $60.
One person attended the New Player Event after hearing about it through the advert.

We also had a link from the ISC login 'welcome message'. This seemed to yield about twice as much traffic as the FB advert.

By comparison, one volunteer recruited 11 players by publishing articles in local newspapers, and puting up posters in libraries.