Scrabble Game

The plates on Mark Landsberg's black Mercedes read "MR. 770." And his name appears in the Guinness Book of World Records next to 770--the most points ever scored in a single Scrabble tournament game. Yet the man who will go down in history for his ability to scramble tiles into winning combinations shuns competitions held around the country, even if they offer him a chance to break his record. The man they call Mr.

From first-time competitors to some of the biggest names in the game, 90 Scrabble players from six states were in Orange County over the weekend for a two-day tournament. "Many players started at home with their parents, or in college, but it's the competition that really gets them into the game," said Gina Du Mez, organizer of the event Saturday and Sunday at the Atrium Marquis Hotel in Irvine. "People travel all over the country to get to tournaments.

The companies that make Scrabble are trying to shut down Scrabulous, an online version of the game that is one of the most popular applications on the social-networking website Facebook. Hasbro Inc., which owns the rights to the crossword game in the U.S. and Canada, and Mattel Inc., which owns the rights elsewhere, believe that the Facebook game infringes their copyrights and trademarks. Scrabulous listed more than 600,000 daily active users on Facebook as of Wednesday.

Don't ask Trey Wright what the word "teopans" means -- he just knows it's a word. At the National Scrabble Assn. Championship in New Orleans on Thursday, the 30-year-old Van Nuys resident became Scrabble's new king when he "bingoed out" and used his last remaining tiles to spell teopans -- or Aztec temples. "My goal when I wanted to become a great Scrabble player was to know every word in the dictionary," said Wright, a classical concert pianist.

The "click-clicking" sound is almost deafening, but the tension in the room is so thick it nearly drowns out the clatter. Hearts pulse, mouths twitch and sweat glistens on the foreheads of the 700 or so players gathered to compete for a world title. Welcome to the cutthroat world of tournament Scrabble. "Scrabylon," a feature-length documentary by Los Angeles-based filmmaker Scott Petersen, 34, captures the real-life characters that make up this quirky subculture.

Financial planner David Pearl, 28, never thought he would make it to the final round of the National Scrabble Assn. tournament in Chicago when he started playing the game in local competitions only one year ago. But after spelling words including "obeah" for 98 points and "ixia" when he was stuck with too many vowels and winning three challenges of the word "otic," he won first place and $1,045.

Hers was a world in which a person's connections spell success or failure. Which explains why nearly 100 of the Los Angeles area's most fervent word lovers were intently hunched over game boards and connecting letters Sunday at the annual Ethel Sherard Celebrity Scrabble Tournament in Pasadena. Sherard was an Eagle Rock resident known as the "Scrabble Lady" when she died six years ago at 95. For thousands of players, she was the person who wrote the book on the game.

They call him Mr. 770. The plates on Mark Landsberg's black Mercedes read MR. 770. And his name appears in the "Guinness Book of World Records" next to 770--the most points ever scored in a single Scrabble tournament game. Yet the man who will go down in history for his ability to scramble tiles into winning combinations often shuns competitions held around the country, even if they offer him a chance to break his own record.

There are two kinds of Scrabble players--people who play a friendly game and real players who want to tear their opponents' hearts out, even as they earn 50 extra points for putting down all seven of their letters. As to my own approach to the game, let me confess that at some point during his adolescence my son stopped playing Scrabble with me and his father because the lad hates blood sports.

Martin Baker used to travel from his Fullerton home to Los Angeles, Long Beach and San Fernando Valley to play Scrabble, but the long drives finally got to him. So he started his own group. He established Club 464 this spring, and the members now spend Friday nights enthusiastically flipping the lettered tiles and crowing over the points they score with each rarely used word. "The game has been around since the 1930s," said Baker, 32, a sign painter.