By Chris Cosci

It's more than a game - it's a serious competition. Every move is important and every play can mean the difference between sweet victory and crushing defeat. And for some people, it's a full-time obsession. Of course, I'm talking about Scrabble.

To some people, Scrabble is a mere board game. To others, a game of Scrabble is a fierce duel of wits and skill, where winning is everything and there's no room for losers. On July 22, one man rose above the crowd and became the U.S. National Champion. Joel Sherman, 40, claimed victory thanks to his masterful use of the words "vug" and "helicoid." For Sherman, Scrabble is his life. Seriously. In his profile with the National Scrabble Association, Sherman's occupation is listed as "Scrabble player." A resident of the Bronx, Sherman hasn't held a regular job in over ten years.

Sherman spends his days running a Scrabble club in Manhattan, preparing for tournaments, and playing online and at his club. When it comes time to relax, he kicks back with a good book - the official Scrabble dictionary. He studies high-scoring words and memorizes lists of acceptable two- and three-letter words. On a good day, he claims that he can recall about 90% of the words in the dictionary, which contains roughly 120,000 words of nine letters or less.

Before you quit your day job and start memorizing words like qat and cwm (both acceptable), you must realize that not just anybody can be a full-time Scrabble player. John Williams, executive director of the National Scrabble Association (not to be confused with the composer for Star Wars) claims that only "one or two people can make a living doing this." With Sherman already filling one of those slots, the demand in the marketplace is rather low.

Sherman is a rare case, though. Of the roughly 25,000 competitive Scrabble players worldwide, almost all of them have real jobs. One might assume that the bulk of these players are writers or English professors. Strangely enough, most of the top players are actually mathematicians and computer experts. Sherman explains that Scrabble is really about numbers and probability. He states, "the strategy relies heavily on calculating probabilities of what can be drawn from the tile pool." In a way, I have to agree with him. The luck of the draw plays a major role in Scrabble. Word skills will only get you so far when your rack consists of four I's, two U's and a V. Meanwhile, your opponent plays "quiz" on a triple word score for 66 points, and there's nothing you can do.

However, there's more to Scrabble than math. There's knowing obscure words that nobody ever uses, but still exist for the sole purpose of ticking off people who are just trying to have fun. Most competitive players don't even care about the meanings. One competitor from New Zealand claims, "meaning is a luxury." In fact, one of his opponents was from Bangkok and didn't even speak English. As for Sherman, I'm sure he had no idea that vug is a small crevice in a rock and helicoid is a geometrical surface.

It's this concept that makes the game frustrating for both professionals and regular people. In a friendly game, if one player uses haji and has no idea what it means, the game is no longer just for fun. Regular people feel that the player is cheating, and the professional player is upset because he feels he can't use all of the legitimate words he worked so hard to learn. Former champion Robert Felt compares playing a game with his neighbors to professional athletes facing novices. "It's like I'm Andre Agassi and my neighbor wants to play a friendly game of tennis."

Obviously, Scrabble is very important to many people. It's like a religion. Only, in the Scrabble religion, God is just another five-point word.