In the latest chapter of Aki Alliance, Aki is competing in a Scrabble Championship. This came from me trying to come up with a competition that has not already been covered a million times in movies and TV, and thinking of the silliest thing I could. So when I opened up the newspaper this week and saw an ad for the Mumbai Scrabble Championship, I knew I had to compete.

I found out that Kevin, one of my coworkers, was going also, so I made T-shirts and decided to represent Aki’s Nakagawa Scrabble Team.

However, Kevin arrived 20 minutes late and was disqualified from the game and sent home.

The T-shirts were also intended as a joke, but when I arrived, many of the others had their own Scrabble-Team related T-shirts, though theirs were professionally embroidered and leftover from the Scrabble competitions they’d been to all over the world. This ‘Championship” was nothing more than a game they play every other month, but they took it as seriously as one might take the world finals. These people take their Scrabble seriously.

They had custom boards they’d ordered from Thailand, satin latter bags, vintage boards from before most people in the room were born, collectors edition Scrabble Dictionaries that were falling apart from age.

Now, before the game started, and on breaks, these were the nicest people in the world. Encouraging everyone to have fun, and not worry about winning. But when the clock started, they got their game faces on.
The primary game plan of a professional Scrabble player, I learned, is not to make words, but rather to memorize the 2 page list of 2-3 letter high scoring words that are considered acceptable, even if no one in the room knew what they meant. I’d spell a nice 7 letter word and they’d laugh at me for ‘opening up the board” and then make 43 points by placing the word “QZ” on the right space.

Now, my previous experience with the game came from playing with my kindergarten students in Korea, where the only rule was that they had to use it in a sentence. So I expected it to be a little more structured, but these people freaked me out.

My final game was my first using one of the double timers (like they use in chess). It times your moves so that each person gets 25 of the 50 minutes, and doesn’t take too long planning their moves. I was not used to it, and about 7 minutes in remarked “Oh! I’ve been forgetting to hit the button!” The guy I was playing with, smiled, brushed it off with a wave of his hand, and said “Oh, don’t worry about it” So I just started ignoring the clock. I didn’t touch or look at the clock until 15 minutes later when my timer ran out. “You’re out of time!” He said, “from now on, you get -10 points for every minute you play” I looked carefuly to see if he was joking. “But…. it’s been timing me the entire time. You told me not to worry about it, so I never hit the button.” “It’s not my fault you never hit the button, it’s not my fault to remind you.” “Since you’re already beating me by like 700 points, is that really necessary?”

After that game, we broke for lunch. And I snuck for the door. I just couldn’t handle 5 more hours of that. But hey….. this chapter of Aki should get interesting.

This entry was posted on Monday, March 6th, 2006 at 1:42 pm and is filed under Stories. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.