Music Student is S-E-R-I-O-U-S About Scrabble

Music Student is S-E-R-I-O-U-S About Scrabble

BY DAVID KAPLAN
Rice News Staff
Feb. 25, 1999

Roger Wright, who goes by "Trey," notes
that all three of his names–"Trey," "Roger"
and "Wright"–are not just names but also
words.

When it comes to spotting words, few are as deft
as Wright. A talented graduate student of piano in
the Shepherd School of Music, he is also a nationally
ranked pro Scrabble player.

When Wright attended his first National Scrabble
Association tournament last August in Chicago, he finished
second and took home $10,000. His current No. 2 national
ranking easily qualifies him for the world championship
tournament to be held in London in November.

It’s a game of word knowledge and strategy, and when
he’s in tournament competition, Scrabble is incredibly
fun, intense and exciting, Wright says. He compares
tournament Scrabble to golf, in that you have to play
it to know how great it is.

He doesn’t play the popular version, sometimes called
"grandma," "table" or "living
room" Scrabble. The conventional home game of
Scrabble typically involves more than two people. Wright
will only play one-on-one.

Having been asked to bring his Scrabble set to the
Rice Student Center for a Rice News interview, he reaches
into a cloth bag and pulls out seven letters at random.
He puts them on his game rack in alphabetical order:
e, e, i, m, n, n, o. Instantly he knows they will form
"nominee."

Whenever Wright plays Scrabble, he places the letters
on the rack in alphabetical order. Such an arrangement
of letters is called an alphagram.

For the past four years, in preparation for tournament
competition, he’s been studying alphagrams. From a
computer data base, Wright studied a list of seven-
and eight-letter alphagrams that are capable of forming
words. The list is about 50,000 alphagrams long. He
focuses on seven- and eight-letter words because they’re
worth more points than fewer-lettered words.

By looking at any of those tens of thousands of alphagrams,
Wright can, in a split second, recognize the hidden
word or words.

At the national tournament, Wright faced Brian Cappelletto,
the Michael Jordan of Scrabble. Cappelletto, a 28-year-old
stockbroker, was a Scrabble prodigy at age 5 or so.
"He’s as perfect at word knowledge as a human
can be," says Wright, who managed to defeat Cappelletto
in the final round in order to take second prize. Cappelletto,
with fewer losses overall, placed first and won $25,000.

For Wright, one of the best parts of Scrabble is
the "challenge," in which a player will question
whether his opponent has produced a real word. He recalls
the time he was challenged on "jesuitry"
because his opponent knew that the "j" in
"Jesuitry" is typically capitalized, and
words with capital letters are not allowed in Scrabble.
The judges ruled in Wright’s favor, because the word
does appear in some dictionaries with a lowercase "j."

A Houston native and graduate of the High School
for the Performing and Visual Arts, he first played
Scrabble at a friend’s house when he was 17. While
perusing an insert inside the friend’s Scrabble set,
he discovered that there was a national Scrabble club.
Wright decided to join, but doesn’t quite remember
why.

"It may have been because I thought there’d
be cool word puzzles," says Wright, who enjoyed
crossword puzzles at the time. From the club newsletter
he learned of a Houston Scrabble club and began attending
Sunday gatherings. Scrabble club get-togethers are
like laid-back tournaments.

Wright began to take the game seriously about four
years ago. He studied his alphagrams intensely during
the three summer months prior to the ’98 national tournament.
He has skipped other major tournaments because he doesn’t
want Scrabble to interfere with his study at the Shepherd
School.

At the Shepherd School, Wright is pursuing a master
of piano degree. He considers his teacher, John Perry,
artist teacher of piano, to be "great. His teaching
is very clear," Wright says. "A lot of great
pianists don’t make the greatest teachers, but, along
with being one of the world’s great pianists, Mr. Perry
is a great communicator."

Wright believes the Shepherd School is generally
outstanding. The classes are interesting and varied,
he says, and there’s a very noncompetitive atmosphere
in which "everybody wants everybody else to succeed."

Perry describes Wright as a "world-class talent
who should have a wonderful career."

Wright has found at least one connection between
music and Scrabble: mathematics. A piece of music and
the game of Scrabble are both concerned with spatial
relationships, he says. "A good Scrabble player
is sensitive to the geometry of the game. He can look
at a board, sense its direction and feel where it’s
going."

Wright says his fellow students at the Shepherd School
can go a long time without knowing he’s a world-class
professional Scrabble player. "If I do finally
tell them, they won’t believe it or will think it’s
silly or be surprised."

His wife Shelly Wright is expecting their first child,
a girl, in March. They’ll probably name her Madison.

Although "Madison" is not a word, Wright
is quick to note that it can be rearranged to form
"domains."