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Last update - 10:05 06/07/2008 Israel's Anglo Scrabble players take their game very seriously By Adi Schwartz Tags: Israel, board games, Scrabble Less than 24 hours after the floodlights were turned off at Ernst Happel Stadium in Vienna, as the Euro 2008 Cup Final ended, Dr. Evan Cohen switched on a few old fluorescent lamps on the second floor of the International Chess Center at 26 Tagore Street in the upscale Tel Aviv neighborhood of Ramat Aviv (www.scrabble.org.il). For Cohen, it was another Monday, the day when he conducts the Scrabble tournament at the club he founded nearly 10 years ago. The club's 20 members, who turn up every week, are sometimes just as tense as the fans of the Spanish team were a minute before their side won the soccer cup. They bite their fingernails nervously, smooth old wrinkles on their forehead and produce new ones, pinch their chin as if it were to bring salvation, and occasionally emit a giggle or a deep sigh of relief. Most of them were surprised to discover that the addictive game turned only 60 last week. Scrabble is undoubtedly one of the greatest successes in the annals of board games. Mattel, which holds the rights to Scrabble, says that more than 150 million games have been sold worldwide, and that one of every three U.S. households own a game board. The game exists in 29 different languages, and Mattel estimates that 30,000 games are played every hour, somewhere in the world. Online game formats, such as through the social network Facebook, have further increased its popularity. Advertisement The players in Cohen's club use the English version of the game - not because they despise the language of the Bible, heaven forbid, but simply because "Hebrew is not suited to Scrabble. English has good letters and bad letters, common ones and infrequent ones, but in Hebrew you don't have that. V, for example, is a bad letter, because it is in very few words, and Q is worth a lot of points. In Hebrew, almost every two letters make a word, which makes the game a lot easier. Hebrew also has a problem with standard [biblical] versus full [modern] spelling, and there are no authoritative rules as to how to spell a particular word. English has a special Scrabble dictionary, containing all the words that may be used (as of today, 267,751), but Hebrew doesn't have that." Cohen and the 200 competitive Scrabble players in Israel (all of whom use the English version) owe their hobby to the Great Depression. Alfred Butts, a New York architect who lost his job, started to think about a new occupation. In the meantime, he got hooked on board games and crosswords. By 1934 he had come up with an initial version of the new game, but when he offered it to the board-game company Parker Brothers, they turned him down. After Simon & Schuster, the publishing house, also rejected his offer, Butts started to sell the game on his own for $1.50. It was not until 1948 that James Brunot, a games entrepreneur, bought the rights from Butts. Brunot made a few changes, patented the result, and thus engendered the game as it exists today. The major breakthrough into the U.S. market occurred after Jack Strauss, the president of Macy's, played the game with a relative while on vacation and was amazed to discover that Macy's did not stock it. In 1951, only 5,000 games were sold. In 1952, in comparison, Scrabble sold 6,000 games a week. Butts got $260,000 for his part in the story. A great deal has changed, says Chaya Amir, 81, the oldest member of Cohen's club. She is convinced that she saw the game in New York, her hometown, by the Second World War. But the Internet age and globalization have changed it considerably. The game does not require an excellent knowledge of language or literary acumen. The 2003 world Scrabble champion was a Thai who could not speak English. "The best players in the world learn words by heart," says Cohen, originally from South Africa. "They just spend hours memorizing words whose meaning they don't always know. I once played against a 19-year-old boy from Thailand in an international competition. He played fantastically, and it was only by good luck that I beat him. After the game, when I wanted to analyze the moves with him, I discovered that he could not conduct even the simplest conversation in English." Apart from vast numbers of words (Cohen devotes half an hour every morning to memorizing words over coffee), the game demands math and statistics. The idea is to see which of the hundred tiles are already on the board and which your opponents might possess. The goal is not only to gain the highest number of points but also to force your opponent to gain the lowest number. Naomi, an editor and translator who was educated in England who is club regular, says the winning combination is luck and skill. "It doesn't matter how many words you know, if you get bad letters you don't have a chance," she says. In an international competition in Malta, her knowledge of Yiddish turned out to be an advantage. "I put the word 'dreck' on the board," she says. "The official Scrabble dictionary has a lot of words that are not exactly English, and there are even some from Hebrew. My opponent, an elderly, polite British lady, gave me a look filled with pity and said, 'Oh, my dear, I think you have made a mistake.' I was barely able to contain myself and not burst into laughter. She went to check in the dictionary" - which means losing a turn. One thing everyone agrees is that Scrabble is addictive. Men, Naomi says, tend to take losing very hard, almost as with soccer. There are native Hebrew speakers and English-speaking immigrants, but all say that once you get into it, it's hard to get out. Sometimes, before falling asleep, Naomi says, she finds long series of letters dominating her thoughts. She tries to make order of them and find the one with the highest point value. Omri, a native Israeli and Cohen's partner, is memorizing words that contain the letter J - just as a hobby. All told, this is a game for people with a head for long words. Bookmark to del.icio.us   Prisoner exchange Israel signs swap deal, begins exhuming bodies of Hezbollah guerillas. Provocative questions Gaydamak tells TAU student to 'shut up and go to hell' over Angola question.   1.   Scrabble in Israel 06:57  |  Douglas Kazdoy 06/07/08   2.   Re:Employment 15:12  |  Kumud Rimal 06/07/08   3.   The moral: if you`ve got lots of money, you can live in Israel 18:30  |  Rami 06/07/08   4.   Scrabble in Israel 22:13  |  Hilda Ben Nun 06/07/08   5.   re: rami 22:57  |  isaac 06/07/08   6.   A Good Game 05:25  |  Laura Peterson 07/07/08   7.   Israeli champions 00:31  |  Fred Reifenberg 08/07/08

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