A record-breaking game of Scrabble, including most points in a game by a player (830), most total points in a game (1,320), and most points on a single turn (365, for “QUIXOTRY”). Yikes.
Let’s begin with the fact that Cresta and Yorra aren’t expert-level players. They know the basics—like the 101 two-letter and most of the 1,015 three-letter words—but they’re both rated in the bottom third of tournament players. In Lexington, where the record was set during the club’s regular Thursday-night session, Yorra is known for trying implausible words and hoping they’re in the Official Tournament and Club Word List. Cresta has memorized thousands of obscure words (like those ending in
WOOD or starting with OVEN) by reading, writing down, and tape-recording pages from the Official Scrabble Players Dictionary. But he doesn’t study the highly probable words that are essential for climbing the competitive ranks. “These are not guys who have low ratings because they haven’t played in many tournaments,” Mike Wolfberg, the Lexington club’s statistician, told me. “They have low ratings because they aren’t very good.”To understand how Cresta and Yorra broke the record, let’s take a closer look at the game. (For the full play-by-play, click here.) Yorra opened with JOUSTED, a “bingo”—Scrabble lingo for using all seven tiles, which earns you an extra 50 points—worth 96 points. Cresta then traded in all seven of his tiles in the hope of getting more-playable letters, not an unusual move. Yorra bingoed again, very nicely, with LADYLIKE for
73 points and a 169-0 lead. The first L in LADYLIKE landed between two triple-word-score squares, giving Cresta a shot at Scrabble’s holy grail—a “triple-triple,” covering two triple-word scores with one word. That’s worth nine times the value of the word, plus the 50-point bonus for using all seven letters.[…] Looking at the game as a whole, it’s clear that a lack of expertise created the conditions for the record. The play that enabled QUIXOTRY, for one, was a clear mistake. When Yorra played SCAMsTER, which scored 65 points, there were eight other bingos available worth 72 points or more that wouldn’t have dangled a letter in a triple-triple alley. Among them were several common words, including the 94-point dEMOCRAT. Most players would have taken a few extra moments to search for one of those moves.
Cool.