Many of us Scrabble players believe in the Tile Fairy. Even the sensible ones.
She is the kindly little creature who hovers somewhere above the tile bag, notices you’re desperately short of an E and quietly slips one in just before your opponent draws it. She brings you the blank when you’ve already decided exactly what you’re going to do with it. She turns an ordinary leave into a bingo and then stands back modestly while you take all the credit.
We know perfectly well this is nonsense. But many of us believe it anyway.
It’s somehow more comforting to imagine a tiny supernatural woman managing the distribution of the alphabet than to accept that we’ve voluntarily devoted our weekends to repeatedly putting our hands into a cloth bag. Sometimes, however, the Tile Fairy disappears. The vowels gather together as though attending a family reunion. The consonants form a small but determined trade union. The blank goes to the player who’s already 150 points ahead and, frankly, didn’t need any more encouragement.
At this point, the Tile Fairy quietly leaves…
…and is replaced by the Tile Gremlin.
The Tile Gremlin doesn’t bring tiles. He brings commentary.
“Another dreadful rack.”
“Everyone else is getting the good letters.”
“You’ve blown the tournament.”
“You’re 120 points behind. You may as well try the phoney.”
“Just take the points. Stop looking.”
I know the Tile Gremlin well. He has accompanied me to several tournaments and, unlike myself, never seems to have any difficulty finding the venue. For years I assumed that a good tournament meant the Tile Fairy had been unusually generous and a bad one meant she’d gone away for the weekend, possibly multitasking to help somebody at a Bridge Congress. Then I started wondering whether something else was going on.
David, Goliath… and Arthur Fery
We humans love an underdog. David and Goliath. The giant-killer. The player nobody expected to get this far. This year’s Wimbledon gave us another one. Arthur Fery arrived ranked outside the world’s elite. Yet there he was, standing on Centre Court, beating higher-ranked players and playing with a freedom that seemed to grow with every match. His serve hadn’t suddenly become magical. The tennis balls hadn’t been sprinkled with fairy dust. His forehand wasn’t borrowed from Roger Federer. What seemed to change was something much less visible. He looked completely absorbed in the next point. Not his ranking. Not the crowd. Not what reaching the next round might mean for his career. Just…
…this serve. This return. This point.
Which brings me to Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi.
Or, as I like to call him, Míchal McJixon Maholy.
Because let’s face it, if I am some sort of hopeless Scrabble rookie who doesn’t even know how to spell AXOLOTLS, I’m certainly not going to start confidently spelling Csikszentmihalyi. Fortunately, his ideas are considerably easier to understand than his surname.
Flow
Csikszentmihalyi was a Hungarian-American psychologist who became fascinated by a simple question: What makes people sometimes perform at their absolute best? He interviewed artists, athletes, musicians, surgeons, chess players and countless others. They all described remarkably similar experiences: Time seemed to disappear. They weren’t thinking about themselves. They weren’t worrying about the outcome. They were completely immersed in what they were doing. He called this state Flow.
Flow isn’t about everything feeling easy. Quite the opposite. It happens when the challenge is just difficult enough to demand your complete attention but not so overwhelming that you lose hope. I suspect every tournament Scrabble player has experienced it. You look at a rack and possibilities begin opening rather than closing. You notice the hook on the far side of the board. You remember a word you studied months ago. You compare three or four possible moves without feeling rushed. You aren’t trying to win the tournament. You’re simply solving this position. One move. Then another. Then another. Sound familiar?
It should. Because that’s exactly what Arthur Fery seemed to be doing at Wimbledon. And perhaps that’s what David was doing too. Everyone else saw Goliath. David saw one stone. One throw. One problem to solve.
What the Tile Gremlin really does
The fascinating thing is that the Tile Gremlin doesn’t actually change the tiles. He changes us. When we begin feeling under pressure, our brains are still running on an operating system designed thousands of years ago. Back then, stress usually meant something large, fast and hungry had appeared. The body prepared us to survive. Heart rate rises. Attention narrows. The brain becomes brilliantly efficient at dealing with immediate danger. That’s extremely useful if you’re being chased by a bear. It’s considerably less useful when deciding whether EXO should go here…or over there. Scrabble asks us to do exactly the opposite of what a stressed brain wants to do. We need to scan the entire board. Hold several possibilities in mind. Compare them. Remember obscure words. Think strategically. Stay patient.
Under pressure, that becomes harder. Working memory becomes less efficient. Our attention narrows. Instead of exploring the whole board, we might just grab the first move that offers relief. That’s when we miss the hook we’ve known for years. It’s when we suddenly can’t see a bingo that’s staring us in the face. It’s when a phoney starts looking strangely attractive. Not because we’ve forgotten our Scrabble. Because we’re no longer playing Scrabble. We’re playing defence against our own anxiety. The Tile Gremlin loves that.
Winning streaks… and losing streaks
Think back to your best tournament. Was it really the tiles? Did you suddenly know another thousand words? Or were you simply in Flow? Now think about your worst tournament. How much of it was genuinely bad luck? And how much began with one missed bingo, one painful loss, one unsuccessful challenge, after which the Tile Gremlin climbed onto your shoulder and spent the rest of the weekend providing tactical advice?
Nothing happened to your vocabulary. Your dictionary didn’t evaporate over lunch.What changed…
…was you.
Inviting the Fairy back
The awkward thing about Flow is that you can’t force it. Sitting at the board saying, “Right, I shall now become completely absorbed,” works about as well as very loudly shouting, “Relax!” at somebody having a panic attack. But we can make it easier for Flow to appear. And we all need to work out our own personal way of shaking off the gremlin. I, for example, find it helps not to stare at the standings after every round. Very little useful Scrabble has ever come from discovering that I’m seventeenth out of twenty one.
It helps me not to replay the previous game while sitting down for the next one. It helps to slow down whenever I notice myself rushing. It helps to look at the whole board one more time. And when everything feels like it’s falling apart, I’ve started asking myself one question. Not:
“How do I rescue this tournament?”
But:
“Wait, when did I stop looking for the best move and start trying to escape the game?”
Because that’s usually the moment the Tile Gremlin arrived. And perhaps that’s also the moment the Tile Fairy quietly left.
Fairy or Gremlin?
The tiles still matter. Luck still matters. Word knowledge matters. Rack management matters. Strategy matters. Of course they do. But I suspect our state of mind determines how well we use whatever arrives on the rack. When we’re in Flow, we notice more. We remember more. We stay patient. We remain curious enough to keep looking. When pressure takes over, the very same player, with exactly the same vocabulary, suddenly cannot see what was there all along. So after your next brilliant tournament, or your next complete disaster, don’t ask only about the tiles. Ask yourself another question. When did I stop playing the board…and start playing my fears? Perhaps the Tile Fairy doesn’t live in the bag after all. Perhaps she’s been living in your head all along. And the next time the Tile Gremlin announces after Round Three that your tournament is over, smile politely.
He’s never been much good at Scrabble.
Disclaimer: The fact that the Tile Fairy is female and the Tile Gremlin is male is entirely coincidental and should not be interpreted as commentary on gender roles, stereotypes, emotional regulation, rack management, or the relative tendency of either sex to distribute or inhibit blank tiles.
I would also like to state for the record that I have personally followed almost all of the excellent advice contained in this article and have consequently made no discernible improvement whatsoever.
The Tile Gremlin remains very much at large. He knows where I live, he travels with me to tournaments, has taken up permanent residence on my shoulder, and, judging by recent results, has no immediate plans to move on.
This article was originally published in my newsletter, The Next Decade. Read it on Substack or subscribe to get the next edition in your inbox.