We came in sec­ond in the third annu­al 826NYC’s Scrab­ble for Cheaters fundrais­ing tour­na­ment on Sat­ur­day at the Brook­lyn Super­hero Sup­ply Com­pany, thanks to heavy (heavy) doses of luck and also because Craig, a big board gamer, is a very strate­gic thinker.

Along the way, by the barest of mar­gins we knocked out the two-time unde­feated cham­pion, The Fight­nin’ Caz­iques, and The Mighty Zyzzy­vas, last year’s sec­ond place team. “Caz­iques” is the plural of a type of West Indian chief but is also the high­est recorded word ever played in a tour­na­ment for 365 points. “Zyzzyva” is a type of wee­vil, but is the last word listed in the Scrab­ble dic­tio­nary. You know you are in for a rough time when your oppo­nents bake that kind of Scrab­ble trivia into their team name, and indeed, mem­bers of both teams played com­pet­i­tively. (“Word Freak” by Ste­fan Fat­sis is a fun book on that world.)

Our team, not-so-Scrabble savvy name: “Gen­eral Tso and his Chicken,” a ref­er­ence to my book and our Hal­loween cos­tumes. Our gay attor­ney friends were “Out­laws.“

The premise of the Scrab­ble fundraiser is that peo­ple can “buy” the right to cheat: any­thing from adding a Q, Z, or X to a word  ($200), to buy­ing a vowel ($50), to the nuclear option of mak­ing up a word as long as you can pro­nounce it and give a def­i­n­i­tion ($500).

The photo at the top of the post has a board where the top row shows you an exam­ple of where the nuclear option was used twice in the game with the Caz­iques. They played GISHRING as part of the intes­tine, and Craig added “ATTPLED.” GISHRINGATTPLED, in case you are won­der­ing, is a dis­ease of that part of the intestine.

It’s a single-elimination tour­na­ment, so with 32 teams (2⁵), you end up with hav­ing to win five games to win the whole tour­na­ment. It is a legit­i­mate bal­ance between Scrab­ble play­ing skill and cash on hand. It all goes towards sup­port­ing the tutor­ing pro­grams, so you feel good even when you cheat.  All in all, 826NYC raised ~$25,000. All for a good cause. It’s super fun, and they had Russ and Daugh­ters bagels (which are not Mon­tréal bagels, but still very good.)

The event attracts a bit of a celebrity fla­vor: John Oliver, a Daily Show cor­re­spon­dent, Sarah Vow­ell, the satirist who is famed for play­ing Vio­let in “The Incred­i­bles,” and Paul Rudd, the actor whom I feel a con­nec­tion with because he starred in “I Love You Man” all about man dates, are seen below. Paul Rudd, accord­ing to one of his oppo­nents, is appar­ently a legit­i­mately good Scrab­ble player. In past years, John Hodg­man (the PC in the Mac com­mer­cials) has played in the tour­na­ment as well.

On the way home, Craig and I started talk­ing about the game and though up a new cheat scheme. He has a lot of friends who design games, pro­fes­sion­ally or as a hobby, includ­ing Wei-Hwa, who was the 2008 Sudoku cham­pion (and also is often kind enough to pick me up from the air­port when I go to the Bay Area).

We deter­mined that an effi­cient pric­ing scheme would cost gen­er­ally between $1 and $2 per point. Bin­gos, play­ing all seven tiles on your turn, is a 50-point bonus. So the ques­tion is “Can this cheat get you to a bingo?” Some of the cheats were priced too expen­sively once you look at it under this lens. Also, we feel it’s good to encour­age a vari­ety of lower-priced cheats, to mix it up with the “nuclear” option, which is still up there at $500.

Here are the ones we would keep:

• Flip a Let­ter, Instant Blank ($100): Any let­ter on your rack may be turned into a blank tile by flip­ping it upside-down.
• Reject a Word ($250): Don’t like the word your oppo­nents just put on the board? The player that played the word must take his word off the board, put the used tiles back in the bag, and redraw the same num­ber of tiles just dis­carded. Play then passes to the next player. This was used against me in the final round with Q[U]ASHES which would have got­ten us 101 points.
• Invent a Word ($500): The ulti­mate cheat! Put what­ever let­ters you like together on the game board and, so long as you can pro­nounce and define it, col­lect what­ever points your one-of-a-kind word gives you.
• Trade Out a Let­ter ($25): You may replace any let­ter on your rack with a new, ran­dom let­ter from the bag. This is not a com­monly used play, because you might as well buy a vowel and have con­trol. But it’s nice to have a $25 play.

Below is an exam­ple of our use of the nuclear option in the third round: BR[U]QLYNE, with the Q on the double-letter, then triple word. We defined it as a type of bri­quette made of South Amer­i­can wood. Along the left edge, our oppo­nents’ much more ambi­tious use of the nuclear option. (The “JK” was silent, they said.) We won even after that, by going out on a bingo, REMOV[I][N]G — one of those was a legit­i­mate blank.

Here are new adds:

• Play­ing a proper noun ($50). This will take some refin­ing as to what qual­i­fies as a proper noun, whether some­thing could be too obscure or whether names should be allowed. This is good for like “Zaïre,”  “Zen,” “Bei­jing,” and “Jill.” Gen­er­ally I would give the ben­e­fit of the doubt to the per­son who is playing.
• Trade tiles with your part­ner ($75 or $100): This allows you to trade as many tiles as you want. It helps to bal­ance your rack.
• Go online ($100): You can use an online ana­gram maker, for exam­ple. You can use the tool as many times as you want in your 2 min­utes. This replaces their too expen­sive dic­tio­nary cheat. Peo­ple need to pro­vide their own online­ness at the table (via mobile or local app), or they can walk over to a lap­top. This should be priced as such, because it essen­tially is help­ing peo­ple find a bingo. It can be very pow­er­ful with a vowel/blank swap.
• Let your part­ner take your turn ($50 or $75). This is not the same as trad­ing turns with your part­ner, because the part­ner would go again as the rota­tion con­tin­ues. It allows you to skip a bad rack, or to play a strate­gi­cally impor­tant bingo.
• Peek­ing at your one oppo­nents’ rack ($50 or $75): Tak­ing a look at one of your oppo­nents’ racks.

There are the ones we would keep, but change the pricing:

• Add 10 to any tile ($100, down from $150): When play­ing a word, you may choose one let­ter in that word and add 10 to its stated point value. This is cur­rently priced at $150, which is too expen­sive, because even in the gen­eral best case sce­nario it gets you 60 points, either through a dou­ble let­ter on a triple word, or triple let­ter going two direc­tions. (There is a rare, but pos­si­ble, play of get­ting 180 in a dou­ble let­ter that hits two triple words along the side, but that remote chance is priced that in there). But it is a low-skill play, and doesn’t require being able to rec­og­nize bin­gos, so you pay a premium.
• Buy­ing a vowel (1 for $75 or $200 for 3, up from $50): Pur­chase a vowel. Any vowel you like. They should clar­ify that to“buy” means to trade a let­ter in your hand for any vowel tiles that remains in bag, so this is less valu­able at the end of the game. They are cur­rently under­priced at $50, because essen­tially they get you to a bingo in the early part of the game. It’s often the best use of money to gain points at $1 a point.
• Pass­port: Play a Word in Any Lan­guage ($100, down from $250). This could even lower, maybe even $50. $250 is incred­i­bly over­priced, because all that it can really do is help you get rid of high value tiles or put them on good squares. For exam­ple, Chi­nese words that com­monly use Q, X and Z; Latin or French, which use more Qs; and Span­ish, which uses more Zs. It is less impor­tant now that QI and ZA have been added to the Scrab­ble dictionary.
• Being able to play a Q, X, or Z on your rack any­where in word ($150, down from $250): This is also cur­rently over­priced, because the gen­eral best-case use is adding 60 points, plus maybe the pos­si­bil­ity of a bingo, and also the slim pos­si­bil­ity dou­ble let­ter that hits two triple words. Gen­er­ally a low-skill play, because it can help with­out. It should clar­ify that it only works in one direction.

These we would get rid of, because they are replaced by the lower-priced online dic­tio­nary look up and are way overpriced:

• Con­sult the Dic­tio­nary ($300): One player may con­sult the dic­tio­nary before play­ing a word. Time spent look­ing in the dic­tio­nary counts against your two-minute turn limit.
• Con­sult the Scrab­ble World List ($400): One player may con­sult the Scrab­ble word list before play­ing a word. Time spent look­ing in the word list counts against your two-minute turn limit.

Some pro­pos­als oth­ers sent in:

• Oppo­nent tile swap ($150 or $200): Pick an oppo­nent, look at their rack, take a tile and replace it with one from your rack. Sub­mit­ted by Justin Kaz­mark, one of our Mighty Zyzzyva opponents.

Of course you would have to play test them, to see how the inter­act in real life. More thoughts, feed­back wel­come on design­ing a “rules for cheat­ing” scheme so that it’s fair.

So below, the cham­pi­ons! The High Main­te­nance Short­ies, which raised almost $3,000 in funds by email­ing their wed­ding guest list. Plus, they prac­ticed play­ing with cheats, so I really thought they deserved to win.

Coin­ci­den­tally I went to col­lege with Lau­ren Hale (right), one half the team, so it was quite nice to play them in the final round. 826NYC is going to add names to “The Cheaters Cup,” à la Stan­ley Cup style. For 2nd place, we got to take home the left­over bagels, which we will use to make pizza bagels for an Oscars party.

We had burned through our cheats in rounds three and four, so we had skimpy resources going in and were legit­i­mately Q[U]ASHED.

Tags: 826NYC, Scrabble, Scrabble for Cheaters