This is not my blog.

Hi all! While I'm sure that some of you are getting very sick of my Scrabble posts I just have to keep doing them for a while. It's in my blood now and I just have to get out all of the neat things from this weekend. To that end you can expect a lot more posts until I finish all that I wanted to say about the tournament and then I'll try to do some occasional posts about Scrabble trivia or strategy or something else like that. I need to re-read Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis because it goes into great detail as the author discovers the joys of competitive Scrabble and I've come so much farther since reading it as it was my first glimpse into that odd little world.

To that end ... I got this neat question yesterday from Wabi-Sabi in the comments of my post about the second day of the Scrabble tournament.

I was wondering is playing phoneys considered a part of strategy and readily accepted game play or is it frowned upon.

In our casual home games it has been seen negatively, but it sounds like in competitive play it's deemed more acceptable. Just wondering.

I wrote him back, in comments, to thank him for the awesome question and then set about answering his query. I've talked to a lot of people about Scrabble lately and they all tend to be fascinated with various aspects of the game, first they are amused by the whole "dirty word" purge and restoration that I blogged about a while ago, second they like to hear about the odd words that get played in games and bingos, I'm not sure what third would be ... maybe the first two are just in my mind anyway. Here is my attempt to explain the use of phoney words ... that is ... words that are not found in the OSPD4 or the OWL2 (the two official word lists of club and tournament play). Before competitive Scrabble play the rule was that you could use any word in any dictionary in play but with the rise of competitive play the need for a standard dictionary/word list arose. But that's a story for a different day. The upshot is that if you play a word that is not in an official word source (which varies from country to country) the word is considered a "phoney" (and it is usually spelled that way ... perhaps for ironic effect). Phoney words are denoted with an asterisk * following them as well.

In competitive play there is nothing wrong with playing a phoney ... if you don't get caught. Managing to pull one off without getting caught is tricky the higher up in the rankings you go (and the higher command of the real words amongst your competitors). It was when I read Word Freak that I first learned how phoneys work and how many competitive players consider it a badge of honor to be able to both catch them and get by with them. However, my then-wife was not amused at my new strategy or my excuse for playing convincing fake words. She said that she felt it was not in the spirit of the game ... though I think that she was more mad that I pulled them off better than she did. So I had to be pretty careful in playing them. The club is a different matter though as Lisa and Tina can tell you. They had taken to telling whoever we chatted with that they didn't think that I actually knew real words as they had spotted over a dozen phoneys on my score sheets over the course of the two days. Some of them got caught but most of them didn't.

I've met people who go with the rule that you can only play words that you can use in a sentence (though I can usually make up a sentence for my phoneys as I love the game Balderdash and it's all about that). In club and tournament play you're not supposed to ask during the game if it is a phoney ... either you challenge it or don't, though one woman that I played who was lower in my bracket wanted to ask after a few of my plays (which I found to be uncomfortable because I was playing the phoney ROH* one of the times and the other time I had to be consistent with my earlier reaction when playing NOH). This reaction is very similar to the of kitchen table type game that most people play ... they want to know what the word means even though the high ranking competitive players have completely detached themselves from definitions much of the time (oddly, I have started to find myself doing the same and leaving behind my desire to know what every word means). This is a reason why talking is discouraged in the higher ranks of competitive play. One of the official rules of tournament play is that when you make a play you can't deliberately draw a challenge by saying that you're not sure of the word ... but whether you talk about your phoneys when asked is up to you I suppose (and I did eventually tell her that NOH was a type of Japanese theater and that I had no idea what ROH* was since the acceptable Greek letter was RHO).

When I used to play with the ex we went with the rule that once a phoney is detected it stays on the board (unless challenged at the time) but that you can't play off of it ... like forbidden fruit. Though we didn't realize it, this isn't that different from tournament play. I've played some phoneys knowing that there was a chance that, even if detected, my opponent could keep it because it gave them a potential scoring opportunity (and I've kept some that way myself rather than challenging). Theoretically I could knowingly play a phoney and then could successfully challenge a subsequent play off of the phoney if I wanted to. In one of my games I played TAJA* off of TAJ (forgetting that it is RAJ that takes the "A" for RAJA). A few turns later my opponent played TAJAS* and I didn't catch it thinking that it was the same as RAJAS. He came to tell me this later (after beating me on a second bingo play late in the game). It was only fair since he was the one that I had played the bingo ENGINEER on while making BETE* and HAN*. Thus, the "forbidden fruit" rule that the ex and I followed made sense if both players knew the word was a phoney and could make a successful subsequent challenge.

I found it interesting how some people in the tournament wanted to come tell me, almost apologetically, that a word that I or they had played was not an OWL word. Raf did this in our Scrabble club at his second meeting as he had felt bad for playing a fake word, inadvertently, in our earlier game (which he won at the end). I told him that it was just part of the game. I find this sentiment of wanting to fess up to be touching as I could tell that those tournament folks who did this were people who pride themselves on not bluffing with phoneys. So I try my best to remember that phoneys are perfectly legal but to be careful where I use them. In some of my games I didn't use any and in others I used lots. One of my competitors (who finished 3rd in my division) actually praised me for my chutzpah for having the ability to play that way as a new competitive player. The risk with a phoney is losing my turn ... that that's the same risk that the challenger faces if they challenge an unfamiliar word and it happens to be real ... like when I played NOH, SHRINED, and ROOMIE during the tournament and won those challenges. This is called a double challenge situation where both players stand to lose or gain a turn based upon the outcome of the challenge. Thus, when I go with a phoney it is often because I don't have a decent play otherwise so losing my turn isn't all that bad ... it's just a calculated risk. I've recently read that those countries that play under SOWPODS rules have a point penalty for losing a challenge rather than losing a turn (i.e. if the challenger is wrong they lose 5, 10, or 25 points rather than losing a turn). That would certainly make the game different.

Right now I'm on a mission since the tournament. I played Lisa in half of a fun game after the tournament ended and she was done playing speed scrabble on Saturday night (where you have 5 minutes per side to play a whole game and get penalized a point for every second you go over). At one point she played JINX just one space shy of the triple word score. On my next turn I weighed my rack and it's potential and laid the "Y" down on the triple word space making JINXY*. Now, I thought there was some chance of the word being proper ... but I figured it wasn't a real high chance. Lisa erupted in laughter after calling me on my bullshit words all day and said that she just had to challenge that. Now I've seen this word various places and even blogged about Robert Todd Lincoln as being "Jinxy McDeath" as one of my favorite authors described him. However, I lost the challenge and now have to face Lisa's ribbing about my JINXY* play. So I'm now on a mission to use JINXY* as a word as much as possible in the hope that it will be included in the OSPD5 through my efforts. We'll see ... particularly since I don't feel all that jinxy right now. ;-)

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Labels: scrabble