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He's got Scrabble down to a
science By Janice O'Leary, Globe
Correspondent June 18, 2006 His bullets are qi and za,
gaydar and feminazi. The gun he reaches for is a paperback dictionary of
100,000-plus words. And his target? The Word-slinger Jason
Katz-Brown has added 4,000 bullets to his bursting lexicon this spring. They
are the new entries in the fourth edition of the Official Scrabble Player's
Dictionary, the rest of which Katz-Brown, 19, had already memorized. Starting his junior year at
MIT this fall, Katz-Brown had conquered all the two- and three-letter words
years ago, knowing that ai is a three-toed sloth and that al is a type of tree
in India. Committed to becoming the highest-ranking player in the nation, he
spent his three-hour daily commute in And it paid off. This spring
he won the Boston Open competition, and he now tops the list of the 9,000
ranked American players. In August, Katz-Brown heads to ``As you get better at
it," he said, ``you realize what a difficult game Scrabble is. I don't
play casual games with people anymore." Not even with family, the
folks who first fueled his passion. For Katz-Brown's 16th birthday, his brother
gave him the book ``Word Freak," about competitive Scrabble
players. ``I was inspired by the challenge of the game and the dedication of
the players," Katz-Brown said. After a few months of
intense playing, he entered his first tournament and won one game while losing
five, ``pretty much the worst you can do," he said. True to his mathematical
mind, he found a method to improve his scores: alphagramming. He prints a
list of words in one column and creates a second column with the letters of
each word arranged in alphabetical order. Then he memorizes the alphabetical
order and the words, often skipping the meanings. During a game, he arranges
the letters on his rack in alphabetical order as his first step. At first his parents didn't
approve of all the time spent devoted to a game, Katz-Brown said. ``And they
were even more scared after reading `Word Freak.' They didn't want me to become
like the obsessed characters in the book." But his mom turned a corner
the first time Katz-Brown went to the nationals, he said. ``There were 160
people in the top category. I was seeded at 157. I finished 16. Then she was
proud." In typically modest fashion,
he added, ``But that game was about luck." Katz-Brown has added
programming to the alphagramming, creating, with a partner, an open-source
online version of Scrabble called Quackle (www.quackle.org
<http://www.quackle.org/> ) that
was released in March. To avoid copyright
infringement, they had to create the game without bonus squares -- players have
to add them before starting. During the semester he tries
to do some alphagramming every day between studies, said. But he gears up over
the summer in preparation for the national tournament. Last year, after
learning the eight-letter words, he placed sixth. ``Jason came out of
nowhere," said John D. Williams, executive director of the National
Scrabble Association. ``He hasn't been playing very long. His will be a career
to watch." Stefan Fatsis, author of
``Word Freak, " said, ``People fully expect that Jason will be a national
champion, if not next summer, then the summer after. ``He's funny, he's humble,
he's cool, he's thoughtful -- he's not some anagramming robot," said
Fatsis, a sportswriter for The Wall Street Journal. Hilda Siegal, director of
the Boston Scrabble Club, has been playing what she calls ``kitchen table"
Scrabble since the game first came out in 1948. Even though she doesn't win the
big tournaments, she still loves the challenge of competitive playing and
understands what drives players like Katz-Brown to memorize tens of thousands
of words a year. ``They're addicted the same
way I am," she said. ``I don't know the meanings of all the words I use,
but I know how to use them to draw a challenge. I always carry my Scrabble
dictionary with me." So does Katz-Brown. But that
didn't help him last fall when he was selected as one of 14 players to
represent the ``They use a different
dictionary," he said. ``They use all of our words, plus another 40,000
that include British spellings as well as Shakespearean and Spenserian words. ``I found out last minute
that I was chosen to go and had only one week to learn the new words," he
said. ``I got in only about 40 hours of studying." And a mere 10,000
words. He placed 60th out of 102
competitors, and then he tried to forget the British words as soon as he could.
``They're useless for the next two years," he explained, since the
international competition is held every other year. But come next summer, you
can bet he'll be learning the entire 40,000. ``I want to win the world
championship once in my lifetime," he said. Katz-Brown has found that
preparation and sleep are the most important things he can do before a duel.
During a big match, he uses deep-breathing techniques to concentrate and shrug
off the intensity. ``It keeps me calm and
focused despite the pressure," he said. This summer, he's interning
at Google in northern He spent a semester of his
senior year of high school in During the academic year in ``I don't feel like I'm
missing out so much when I'm inside studying," he said. At the nationals, sponsored
by Scrabble's manufacturer, Hasbro, the winner gets $25,000 and the runner-up
gets $10,000. He hopes that a combination
of deep breathing, strategy, and luck will allow him to pull out the sort of
blade he's cut with only once before, playing the word ``equators" for 211
points. Janice O'Leary can be
reached at [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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- [quackle] Article about Quackle and Jason Katz-Brown! Ten Den, Chris
