Scrabble fan hopes to take on Summit County

SUMMIT COUNTY From the time she was a little girl, Elizabeth Jordan remembers playing Scrabble with her grandfather.He was the one who taught me how to play, she said. I think thats why its always been a very comforting game for me. Theres a family association to it that makes it pleasant.When she moved to Silverthorne from Arizona last August, the first thing Jordan did was look for a Scrabble club in Summit County. But the closest clubs she could find were two in Denver and one in Aspen.I was really disappointed that theres a club in Aspen and not here, she confessed. Now, Jordan is hoping to change all that. In fact, shes already contacted the Silverthorne Recreation Center with an eye to starting a Summit County Scrabble Club that is, if enough people are interested.Scrabble started in the 1940s, gained popularity in the 1950sSummit County may be new at embracing Scrabble publicly as a pastime, but the game has been around since the 1940s, thanks to an out-of-work architect from Poughkeepsie, New York, named Alfred Mosher Butts. Butts set out to invent a board game that would incorporate both the elements of chance and skill. To that end, he studied anagrams and crossword puzzles, and began to calculate letter frequency on the front page of The New York Times.Just as with Monopoly, the original incarnation of Scrabble was rejected by toy manufacturers across the board. Just when he was about to give up, Butts met James Brunot, an entrepreneur who fell in love with the game and decided to help market it. Brunot rented an abandoned schoolhouse and began to manufacture the games at a rate of 12 an hour, hand-stamping the wooden tiles one at a time. Trademarked in 1948, the game struggled along for a few years until, in the early 1950s, a lucky twist of fate changed the course of game board history. Thats when the president of Macys discovered the game while he was on vacation, played it, fell in love with it, and put in an order. Soon, stores were sold out everywhere.For many years, Scrabble was manufactured by the toy company Selchow & Richter, which sold its holdings to Coleco. In 1986, Coleco sold out to Hasbro, which manufactures the game today.Scrabble clubs pave the road for competitionsJordans own road to high-stakes Scrabble began after grad school, when she started her own club in Santa Barbara, Calif. From there, it was a natural progression for her to start playing in tournaments.The clubs prime you for that, she said. They teach you tournament rules.Jordan played in her first tournament in 1992. Since then, she has racked up some impressive results, notably as a division winner in both regional and national games. And her club participation increased as well, culminating in her becoming co-director of the West Los Angeles Scrabble Club for two years.Jordan admits that she became a Scrabble fanatic once she joined the National Scrabble Association and discovered how complicated the game really is.In order to be good you have to study the books and the word lists, she said. Thats when you have to put in the time and thats when the fanaticism starts. Scrabble strategyThe best way to start out with Scrabble, Jordan says, is to keep in mind that its a game of mathematics and probability, not semantics.The best players, she said, are mathematicians and computer programmers, because they have good memories and understand about probabilities.According to Jordan, what a lot of people dont realize is that, with Scrabble, you dont need to have a good vocabulary. The misconception is that people expect that the best players would be English teachers, but English teachers want to know definitions, and thats not important in Scrabble, Jordan said. In fact, Scrabble annoys some people because you have to memorize a lot of words, but you dont need to know what they mean. This cuts out a lot of people who would otherwise play, and thats why people sometimes make fun of the best players because its useless knowledge. If you commit yourself to being good, youve committed yourself to spending time learning words that have no meaning to you, she added. Thats why there are so few experts.To this end, some players on the expert level even memorize the entire dictionary. In fact, Scrabble players study the dictionary the way that ball players study the playbook. But part of the trick is to know exactly what to study.For instance, Scrabble players wont study words with two hs or two cs, because the chances of using those combinations are slim. One good trick, Jordan says, is to study words that can balance your rack words that can get rid those pesky letters like z or q, or words that can use up those dreaded surplus vowels.(Hint: Next time youre playing, try the word sequoia. It contains every vowel.)Players also study to improve their knowledge of those tricky two- and three-letter words, as well as to learn the most common of those all-important seven-letter words.The only way to get those 50-extra-bonus-point bingos is to make those big seven-letter words, Jordan explained. In order to be an expert, you have to learn the ones that will come up most often when youre playing.In Scrabble, the dictionary is the final arbiter. But even so, Jordan said that tempers can run high during tournament play when certain gray area words come up.People argue about those words all the time, she laughed. For instance, the word dumpster used to not be acceptable because its a brand name, but it just became acceptable. Realtor is another brand name that always upset people but its just recently become acceptable as well.Scrabble more popular than ever thanks to internetScrabbles popularity has lately gotten a major boost because of the internet, which gives players the opportunity to stake their skills against opponents from all over the world.Even so, nothing quite matches the glamour and excitement of live play, and thats what Jordan wants to bring to her new home here in Summit County. To that end, she’s inaugurating her new Scrabble Club on 6 p.m. Wednesday at Borders Books in Dillon.Summit County is a good place for Scrabble, because people are intelligent here, and there are a lot of retired people. I think theyd enjoy Scrabble a great deal.