Reddit reviews Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players

There is an AMAZING book of about Competitive Scrabble Players. "Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive ScrabblePlayers." It's really a great read if you like this style of book. Think Ben Mezrich story telling but with the author actually there.
http://smile.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Competitive-ScrabblePlayers/dp/0142002267

Stefan Fatsis is a heck of a writer.

Also still plays tournaments. at one point with a ranking over 1700, better than 2/3rds of other competitive players

I read "WORD FREAK" maybe 10 years ago, and have re-read it a couple times since, because it completely changed my understanding of the game.

The people in the book all seemed insane, so I'm wondering if any of them are still around the scene?

Consider reading Word Freak. It's a fun and interesting book in which a sports writer tries to be an expert-level competitive Scrabble player. He discusses a lot of strategy in the book.

Here's a few tips:

• Rack balance: Try to keep equal amounts of vowels and consonants in your rack. If you're considering playing an OK but not great word that would leave you with no vowels or no consonants, consider instead playing a word with a slightly lower score but that would put you into a better position next turn.
  
  
• 2-letter words. Learn them, love them. Get in the habit of playing hooks with them. It's always satisfying to score 42 points with ZA or QI.
  
  
• Play defense. Try to lock up the board. Play a word parallel to another word. You want to make it hard for your opponent to play good words or to play on high-scoring squares. Take a look at this tournament game from this year's National Scrabble Championship. Notice how the tiles are all bunched together? Most Triple Word squares are unreachable, and there's hardly anywhere to play a good word. That's what you want to aim for.
  
  These simple tips should be enough to close the gap between you and your girlfriend. If you'd really like to trounce her or if you'd like to become a competitive Scrabble player, there's no way around it: You have to memorize words. There is no substitute for solid word knowledge.

The scene certainly has its characters. It takes a certain type to spend hours studying words and playing a board game. The top players probably tend to be a little obsessive about it (out of necessity, really), but there are perfectly normal people who play at every level. The competitive scene has a whole range of players with different abilities, most of whom are pretty normal. Some take it very seriously, others just play for fun.Word Wars followed around some of the more eccentric players since that's more interesting to a wide audience. It can be a hobby or obsession. Just depends on the person. For me it was somewhere in the middle.

It was mentioned somewhere else in this thread, but Word Freak is a great book on the subject.

you should read this book.

A lot of the Scrabble championship types all do this. They all come from a maths background, not an English one.

There's a surprisingly interesting book on this Word Freak: Heartbreak, Triumph, Genius, and Obsession in the World of Competitive Scrabble Players by Stefan Fatsis

Word Freak is a first person account of a journalist who decided to get into the world of competitive Scrabble. There is a fair bit about the history of the game, but mostly it's about the people he meets along the way. If you're a fast reader or particularly interested in Scrabble, you should give it a try.

It's not a how-to guide, but this book includes the author's strategies. (TL;DR: practice anagrams)

People do this with English too, it's fairly common among competitive Scrabble players, I heard about it on NPR when the author of this book talked about this phenomenon: http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Competitive/dp/0142002267