CSW at the 2012 Nationals: A Player's Perspective

Dave Koenig was one of many top US players who made the switch to CSW for the 2012 NSC, finishing 6th over 31 rounds.

In the last week I had the privilege of participating in the 2012 National Scrabble Championship, in which for the first time we were using the Collins Scrabble Words (CSW) lexicon for international tournament play. CSW, which was formed by uniting the separate American and British lexica, is used for virtually all competitive English language Scrabble outside of the United States and Canada. The tournament was an awesome experience in many ways and an important step forward in getting our continent to join the rest of the world in adopting the unified dictionary.

I've played in several previous National Scrabble Championships, and I've always had a great time doing so. The tournament is an opportunity to play against many of the best players out there, to test your own mettle and see how you stack up against them, to get the opportunity to face many new opponents instead of just the ones you usually square off against in your local area, and to socialize with many friends whom you don't get to see often enough.

At previous Nationals almost all of the participants have come from the United States and Canada, which is natural enough because these are the only countries that use the Official Tournament Word List (OWL or TWL) for competitive Scrabble play. There are a tiny handful of overseas players, most notably the now four time champion Nigel Richards of New Zealand, who manage to strip down their Scrabble vocabulary by making note of all of the words they know but can't play in this tournament and come to compete in our Nationals, but not very many.

I had hoped that we would get a strong international representation in the CSW division of our tournament this year, but there were a few obstacles that may have stood in the way of getting more foreign players to sign up. One was that the division was for a long time announced as tentative, contingent on getting enough players to sign up, and this may have discouraged players who had to make large overseas travel plans well in advance. Now that we have successfully run one of these events, I hope that the organizers will announce it in advance as a certainty at the earliest opportunity.

Another possible deterrent was that the prize fund was very limited, and a good deal smaller than what was being offered to the TWL divisions. I have never been one to complain about prize amounts, but it seems unacceptably low to me that only about 50% of the entry fees collected in this division could be returned as prize money. The top TWL division had roughly two times as many people but awarded about five times as much prize money. I understand that having this division happen at all was an important achievement, and I am grateful that it did happen. But this was not an acceptable level of reward for the magnitude of this event. The winners of the second and third TWL divisions, which are rating-handicapped divisions for our intermediate players, won substantially more money than the winner of our CSW division, even though it was an open division in which well more than half of the field were veterans of the WSC.

I am certain that if we can adjust things to both ensure that the CSW division is guaranteed to happen and offer prize money that is commensurate with what is awarded to our top TWL players, we will succeed in drawing even more international players in the future. But in the meantime, let us not overlook the international players who did come. Three Australians, Susan Gordon, Pat Schuberg and Caroline Polak Scowcroft, joined us, as did Ezekiel Markwei of Ghana.

Also, of personal importance to me, I was able to persuade Orlet Bullock to play in the tournament and room with me and several other friends. Orlet is originally from Barbados, went to school in Jamaica, and now lives and works on St. Vincent Island. He represented Barbados at the 2011 World Scrabble Championship, which is where we met.

In addition to the people who traveled from overseas, it is equally important to recognize that offering CSW allowed us to include a number of other players who are currently residing in this country but were already experienced CSW players before they arrived. This includes Martin DeMello of India, who has been living in San Francisco for the last year, and Cedric Lewis of Malaysia, who is currently going to school in State College, PA. James Curley of the UK, who now resides in New York City, would also be on this list, but he unfortunately had to drop out at the last minute.

Also contributing to the international flavour of the division were Zbigniew Wieckowski, who lives in Minnesota but represented the host country Poland at the last World Scrabble Championship, and another one of my roommates Eric Kinderman, an American who has been living in Dubai for the last several years. Eric will soon be moving to teach at a school in China. He plans to start a Scrabble club there and hopefully to send the first ever Chinese participants to the World Scrabble Championship.

It is worth mentioning, too, that some of us American tournament players have decided to devote ourselves exclusively (or almost exculsively) to the CSW game, and that it is only by offering CSW that NASPA was able to attract us to the tournament. I am specifically referring not only to myself, but also to John O'Laughlin, Marsh Richards, John Van Pelt and Sandy Nang, and maybe some others too.

CSW is growing within this country, to the point where I have been able to fill up my tournament schedule without going back to TWL, but most of our competitions are still small, usually with somewhere between 4 and 12 players in a tournament. As a result, we end up playing a lot of the same people many times over. How refreshing it was to be able to play a CSW event in this country with a critical mass of players so that I didn't have to play anyone more than twice and was able to face 25 different opponents, many of them first-time opponents for me!

I have only been playing CSW for one year, having switched over from TWL immediately after the 2011 National Scrabble Championship, and I still have a long way to go in learning the larger lexicon. (At the time of the 2011 Nationals, I'd estimate that I knew about 99% of TWL. I'm nowhere close to that in CSW, though I would like to get there in time for the 2013 World Championship.) But even with my limited CSW word knowledge, I felt that I could be a contender at this tournament, for the simple reason that not many of the CSW players on this continent have anywhere close to complete word knowledge. I haven't looked over many of my games yet. I'm sure that I made some mistakes, just as I'm also sure that I could have given myself better chances to win some games if I had known more CSW words. But overall, I came away feeling that I played very well with the words that I knew and the tiles that I drew. My 19-12, +1072 record was good enough for sixth place, and I was in contention for third place (the lowest paying spot) as late as the penultimate round.

Alas, I was defeated in that penultimate round by my good friend Geoff Thevenot. Geoff is a great player and was in my estimation quite possibly the strongest player in the division. He has been playing CSW longer than I have, and his word knowledge is unquestionably better. That being said, it pains me a bit that my lifetime record against him now stands at 0-6. Though Geoff has done some brilliant things to win some of those games against me, I am sure that I am good enough to win some games against him, but I haven't been able to catch the breaks or make them happen. Certainly in that 30th round battle it felt like the stars were aligned against me. I struggled through difficult racks early on, opening with EUOI, playing off the Q, and then HIOI off of an H a few turns later. By the time I straightened my rack out, I was already down by two bingos. Then I managed to remember correctly a CSW-only bingo that I had learned not too long before the tournament, LARVATED to the triple for a big score. But at that point it was too little too late.

But that is Scrabble. We all have our hard luck stories, and Geoff had his own when he was knocked out of the money by Joel Wapnick in the next and final round. I'm at peace with what my results were, but not with where my game is at. I want to keep improving and win both this event and the World Championship in the future. I believe that I can do it, and I intend to keep working relentlessly to make that happen.

August 2012

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