Word Freak: heartbreak, triumph, genius and obsession in the world of competitive Scrabble players by Stefan Fatsis

When he invented Scrabble, Alfred Butts was not wearing a T-shirt seen on a Scrabbler recently with the legend "Does Anal Retentive Have a Hyphen?". He was, however, exceedingly precise. The unemployed New York architect kept a careful note of his car trips and classified his collection of postcards: "6C" indicated pictures of stockyards.

When he invented Scrabble, Alfred Butts was not wearing a T-shirt seen on a Scrabbler recently with the legend "Does Anal Retentive Have a Hyphen?". He was, however, exceedingly precise. The unemployed New York architect kept a careful note of his car trips and classified his collection of postcards: "6C" indicated pictures of stockyards.

When he underlined all the words of nine letters or more on the obituary page of the New York Herald Tribune on 5 October 1933, this was not just obsessive behaviour. He was calculating the frequency of different letters, from the Es (157) to Zs (one). He then marked out the tiles and made little racks to stack them. He called this game "Lexiko", after the Greek for word.

As you will know if you have ever been at a loose end on Christmas Day, Scrabble is a board game in which players score by making words from a random collection of letters. Lexiko was not quite Scrabble; Butts sold a few hand-made copies, and then revised the game completely. He designed a board and endowed certain squares with bonus points. He called this second version "Criss-Cross Words".

Few people bought it. One who did was James Brunot, an administrator looking for a career change. He decided to try to market what he rechristened Scrabble, paying Butts a modest royalty. By this time it was 1947. It was not until the end of 1952 that the game took off; and it has not landed since.

Today's competitive Scrabble players make Butts look laid-back. "Competitive Scrabble" sounds as improbable as aggressive tiddleywinks, yet some tricks are as devious as poker's. Stefan Fatsis, who changed from hobbyist to hard-core player to research his intriguing book, began one game with the bogus "MEAOW" – and got away with it. Accepting the phoney word, his opponent placed an S on the end, whereupon Fatsis had the nerve to challenge – successfully – on the grounds that it was the plural of a word that did not exist.

Though Fatsis accepts that "the thrill of victory is restrained", the game still offers "the adrenalin rush of competition". A dedicated player might pop pills by the hundred, sponge off parents, live in a park and in every way devote himself to clicking plastic letters down on the board. "Anorak" would be the word for him – the big-time winners are generally male – except that he probably does not possess any garment that smart. Whether "sportsman" is an apposite word is open to question. One top Scrabbler, "GI" Joel (as in "gastro-intestinal", an area where he has problems) worried about winning a tournament in case raising the victor's cup proved beyond his physical powers. But Word Freak is published by the sporting imprint of Random House, and Fatsis is a sports journalist from The Wall Street Journal.

The intriguingly named writer – if he were allowed to put down his own name, "Stefan Fatsis" would bring in 18 points, or 54 on a triple-word square – ends his survey as obsessed as the best of them. In the US, where they take this sort of thing more seriously than we do, Scrabble seems to attract people who were out to lunch even before they first opened one of Alfred Butts's boxes. They devote their brains, their weekends and sometimes their lives to working out how to slap down KNURS (bumps on a tree) or CONGAING (dancing the conga, of course). To reach like-minded folk, they traipse down freeways or fly to Thailand (Scrabble is addictive even to those for whom English is a second language).

There is also a religious angle. Orthodox Jews have this problem about Scrabble on the Sabbath. Does it count as (forbidden) writing? No wonder the problem of the West Bank remains intractable. But Jewish players, says Fatsis, will happily play YID and blacks will put down NIGGER, if those are the letters they draw. Like everything else on the board, these are just words.

Jonathan Sale