The Midweek #72: The Texas Scrabble Classic in San Antonio is Looking for a Few Good Supporters

As local organizers prepared for the inaugural Texas Scrabble Classic in San Antonio in April last year, thousands of fans poured into the city in a fever of anticipation. They were coming, of course, not to play the board game but to support the Florida, Houston, Auburn and Duke basketball teams in the NCAA Men’s Final Four tournament held the same weekend.

Scrabble players from around Texas and at least five other states were also arriving, in smaller numbers, drawn by the $7,500 prize purse and the opportunity to experience a tournament in the historic Coates Chapel on the campus of UT-San Antonio’s Southwest School of Art.  Regional Scrabble tournaments with modest purses and entry fees tend to take place in suburban chain hotel ballrooms and other affordable venues. San Antonio’s entry into the national tournament schedule was made possible by one anonymous donor eager to see more cultural happenings downtown, who contributed $5,000.

After years in Texas without a statewide Scrabble tournament that traditionally had been staged in Dallas and Salado, San Antonio organizers were welcoming nationally-ranked players eager to experience a weekend on the River Walk teeming with college basketball fans.

The 2nd Annual Texas Scrabble Classic, scheduled for the Martin Luther King weekend in January 2027, is poised to attract more than double the number of competitors who participated last year, as word of mouth has spread in the tight-knit world of competitive players. The second year purse will surpass $10,000 if organizers succeed in reaching their fundraising goal. 

The Midweek hopes its subscribers will join me in making a contribution to boost The Texas Scrabble Classic, which aspires to become one of the country’s premier regional tournaments. Alex Rivard, the director of education at the Alamo and my son, is one of the Scrabble Classic organizers and a nationally ranked player. I’m one of the lowest-ranked players around, but I look forward to competing and to contributing to the prize pot.

I believe San Antonio eventually could become home to the national Scrabble Players Championship with a little help from the city, downtown hotels, and advocates working to attract creatives from around the country to visit. 

For nearly 80 years, families across America and around the world in many languages have been playing Scrabble around kitchen tables. The game was invented by architect Alfred Mosher Butts, who meticulously (or obsessively) counted letters as they appeared each day on the front page of the New York Times and, based on their frequency, assigned them numeric values and quantities in the 100-tile game bag. There are multiple vowels and common consonants, for example, but only one Z, Q, X, J and K.

The game has transitioned nicely into the digital age, even as people continue to play on traditional rotating boards. Sites like woogles.io and various apps enable online players to meet up or play against a computer program. Scrabble has given birth to knock-offs like Words With Friends and Crossplay, the recently-launched New York Times game.

Tournament Scrabble is not the game being played at kitchen tables, trust me. Ranked players at the highest level have memorized thousands of words you’ve never heard of, who are skilled at both anagramming – turning a rack of seven jumbled letters into words – and at conceiving words that connect with other words already on the board, thus multiplying their scoring potential. One turn can lead to as many as eight new words on the board if a seven-letter word – called a “bingo” and worth 50 bonus points – can be matched in parallel fashion with seven words already on the board. That’s the so-called “short game.”

Remember those single high value letters noted? Try finding these words on your rack: ZEBRAIC, QINDARS, OXALATE, JERBOAS, and AIKIDO. Top players actually know such obscure words, though they might not know what they mean.

Tournament Scrabble requires language knowledge, math skills, and strategy. And luck, given that players are reaching blindly into a small bag to extract tiles to replace the ones played. Racks of all vowels or consonants are not rare, so often the letters just do not add up. Faced with such challenges, players can use their turn to exchange tiles in pursuit of an improved rack. Other times, players with a bingo or high-scoring rack waiting their turn are blocked by opponents with a smart defensive play.

Adding to everyone’s word knowledge is the challenge of successfully spotting an opponent laying down a “phony,” what appears to be an obscure word that actually isn’t a real word. An overly timid player who knows an unsuccessful challenge means a lost turn of play, should the challenged word prove to be good, risks allowing a crafty opponent to play a phony bingo and score big. A player who lays down a phony and is successfully challenged must remove the tiles and surrender their turn.

Competitive tournament Scrabble is its own subculture, with thousands of national and international players who belong to the North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA) and are ranked according to their past tournament play. There are two divisions: the majority playing the NASPA Word List (NWL), and a smaller group of mostly international players who play the more expansive Collins Scrabble Words (CSW) list.

About 250 players are registered to convene this month in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, to play in the 2026 Players Scrabble Championship, a four-division contest of 31 grueling games over five days. It’s a mental marathon. The prize purse is around $50,000. Sounds hefty, but nobody gets rich competing in Scrabble.

This world of competitive Scrabble is best understood by reading Word Freak by former Wall Street Journal reporter Stefan Fatsis, who became obsessed with the game in the 1990s and rose to a high competitive level. Today, his daughter Chloe Fatsis is ranked #18 among all players in North America. Fatsis senior is especially good at profiling the game’s most eccentric players found at the top. 

A few years ago, Alex persuaded me to move from the kitchen table to tournament play, giving us another father-son shared pursuit, although his ranking is more than twice as high as mine, and of late, that gap has been growing. You’d think a journalist would have the necessary vocabulary to compete at a reasonably high level, but I’m a mediocre anagrammer, and with the tournament game clock ticking, I often find myself hitting the panic button as my time expires and penalties set in. 

Alex has long aspired to develop a significant Scrabble tournament in San Antonio while helping to expand the relatively compact number of regulars who turn out weekly for meetings of the San Antonio Scrabble Club. We meet most Thursday evenings for 3-4 “friendly” matches. People new to the game are especially welcome and will find experienced players eager to help. Our club’s youngest player is a teenager who has been competing for several years and recently finished first in a national youth tournament staged in Washington, D.C. He came home with $500 in winnings.

For more than 25 years, the club met weekly at Lion’s Field on Broadway, where a single city employee with the Parks & Recreation department kept the clubhouse open while Scrabble players, a local chess club, and aspiring karaoke singers gathered, among other community groups. Then, without warning, the city announced Lion’s Field would close at an earlier hour, a change that saved little to nothing in the way of money but killed the club tradition. Our appeal was unsuccessful. We now meet at Jason’s Deli on Loop 410 West, where management has generously allowed us to gather.

As a former classroom teacher, Alex helped start or grow high school Scrabble clubs. I’ve long been obsessed with building a city that attracts and retains more creatives. The more cultural choices we give people, the more reasons people have to live and work here or visit here. A multi-day tournament that attracts players from outside the city and state to visit for multiple days, stay in downtown hotels and short-term rentals, and patronize local restaurants is exactly the kind of cool cultural event the city should support.

The 2nd Annual Texas Scrabble Classic will take place January 15-18, 2027, pitting players in multiple divisions against one another for 20 games over three days. This year, arrangements are being made to bring in national Scrabble players and commentators to live stream the tournament. An added bonus for Scrabble aficionados who watch the live stream is the use of software programs by the commentators to spot the best possible board plays while players study their tiles and conjure their best move.

An Early Bird one-day tournament of five games will be held on January 15. It’s an opportunity to learn how to play by tournament rules on the clock. I’ve played in 12 tournaments since my first one in 2024, which makes me still a relative newcomer. 

The San Antonio Scrabble Club is seeking a nonprofit fiscal sponsor to process tax-deductible donations. We are organizing the still-new tournament on a shoestring, and while non-profit status might be in the club’s future, it is not now. Please contact me if your organization can help.

For individuals and entities willing to donate now without a tax deduction, contributions can be sent to me via PayPal or Venmo. Checks can be made out to the Texas Scrabble Classic and sent to me at 110 E. Houston St., San Antonio, TX 78204. A full accounting of funds will be available after the tournament’s conclusion.

Interested players now have six months to join us at the club, hone their games, and get ready for the January tournament. Your turn.