Get on board _{by Alessia Belsito-Riera}

Out of the 181 winning tournaments that Scrabble champion Howard Warner has played, 10 have been international, including one European Open, one Trans-Tasman championship, and three World Senior Championships. 13 have been New Zealand Masters and 12 have been New Zealand National Scrabble Championships, including his most recent win at the 44^th National Championship event in June 2024. “I’m ranked number one in New Zealand,” Warner beams.

Warner began his Scrabble career playing games with his family. When he moved to Wellington in his 20s, he “reluctantly” joined a Scrabble club since there were no 500 or backgammon groups. “I thought it was a bit nerdy,” he admits. “But I got into it and after a couple months I was persuaded to come along to a tournament. I did quite well, and I caught the bug. There was no stopping me after that.” He came by Regional News to give us the inside Scrabble scoop.

How does someone get involved in competitive Scrabble?

Anyone can join a club. From there you join tournaments, almost all of which are open to anybody. However, people really struggle to make the leap from domestic play to club play, and then from club to tournament. So many people come from being king of the household, and then they go to a club and find that they are bottom of the heap. But what I tell people is that anybody, at any level, started at the same place.

What tips and tricks would you give someone to improve their game?

Put your ego aside and take advice from people who are better than you. I tell people to just learn the two letter words, then the three letters, then the four letters, and as you go through each of those levels, always learn the ones that contain the big letters first: X, Q, J, Z. You can also learn a few tricks like vowel dumpers and consonant dumpers, words that have a large number of one or the other, which help with balancing your rack. Euoi is the most common word played in Scrabble because it’s a wonderful vowel dumper. The commonest opening play is just the word Qi.

Also, learning things like not setting up good spots for your opponents to use – a little bit of defence as well as offence. Whenever people ask Nigel Richards how to play – Nigel is the greatest player in competitive Scrabble of all time, he’s a Kiwi who lives in Malaysia – he says to score the most you can every turn, which is a pretty good piece of advice. Ultimately, it’s all about points rather than the words – it is a mathematical game.

Can you elaborate on that?

You’re using combinations of letters to score points. It’s more numbers and arithmetic, but also probability theory and spatiality. The ultimate aim of a game is to win at least one point more than your opponent by the end of it.

Would you still say it’s important to be a decent speller?

No. One of the top players in Australia, who was my early mentor, had quite serious dyslexia. His parents got him into Scrabble because it’s a good way of managing dyslexia. Some people who are incredibly good with English are no good at Scrabble. They can be dragged down by this need to justify words instead of just accepting a certain list of letter combinations.

Some people who play have no skill whatsoever with the words as language. A lot of the great players of the world have English as a second language. Thailand is one of the great Scrabble countries because they introduced it into schools long ago to help with English, but all these brilliant young mathematical minds latched onto it. They can barely string a sentence together, but they don’t need to. They just memorise letter combinations. Thailand has won the World Championships three times. Scrabble is a really good thing for migrant families to get into too, because it’s exposing them to the English language but in a way that is fun.

What’s your training regimen?

I use a programme called zyzzyva that’s designed for learning and revising anagrams every day. I don’t learn words anymore because, it might sound pompous, but I know them all…

I heard you know 90 percent of the Scrabble dictionary!

I don’t have to know the ones from nine letters long. The ones from two letters up to eight, I know them inside out, but the important thing is to be able to find them on your rack. You need to be able to look at a set of letters and see immediately all the possibilities.

How do you account for the element of randomness or luck? Can you?

We all have the same amount of luck; it’s about utilising it and making the most of every rack of tiles you get. As you go through a game, you track off letters that have been played and you’re aware of what’s left in the bag. As you come up to the end game, you know exactly what your opponent has. That’s when you use up the most thinking time, because you’re able to work out everything they can do, everything you can do in response to that, and everything they can do in response to everything you can do. At the end of this exchange, you want to come out one point ahead.

Scrabble must be a great exercise for your brain.

Oh yes. A lot of studies say that the best things to prevent Alzheimer’s are puzzles and brain games, and Scrabble has both. There are a lot of older players. However, there’s possibly rather too many and that may put off the younger players, who are inherently better. They’ve got much quicker, more agile brains. They can learn strategies, adapt, think on the fly, learn vast lists of letter combinations. In New Zealand, we still have a very old population, and unfortunately, young ones come to a club and see it’s wall-to-wall blue rinse and they run away!

Would you say that club attendance has decreased since video games have become more popular?

Definitely. Also since you can play games online. There’s way more people playing Scrabble online around the world, but it hasn’t been helpful to us. Words With Friends is no comparison.

You’re also missing the element of human interaction, which is really important.

Yeah, I love that. There are a lot of hidden elements in games, such as body language. Some people are so focused that they’re completely unaware of what their opponent is doing. I like to think that I get a sense for what they’re thinking, where on the board they’re looking. In fact, some players have taken to wearing a cap just so that their opponent can’t see where on the board they’re looking. Also table talk. Some people just give away a lot by chattering. I don’t mind it because I take it all on board and can sometimes alter my decisions accordingly.

If you could pick your favourite thing about Scrabble, what would it be?

I like that it stretches my brain while I’m having fun. And interacting with someone else very intensely for an hour one on one. Games are about playing, which is a basic human instinct that we have as children, and we tend to lose it as we go along. In Scrabble, we keep an element of that.