Making every letter count
Hlady takes on the world's best in Scrabble competitions

September 19, 2008

By Mark Ferguson

Jason Hlady has a great party trick.

One of the best Scrabble players in the world, Hlady studies anagrams for about two hours every day and knows nearly 30,000 letter combinations. If you give him any eight letters, he can instantly tell you a word using all of them. To Hlady, K-A-H-U-T-C-E-O can be TUCKAHOE and N-T-X-O-P-E-F-I is PONTIFEX.

"It's a party trick that's not a very good trick," he laughs. "My friends are like, you can stop now."

Hlady has competed in Scrabble competitions since 2002 and is currently ranked 35th in Canada. At this level, every player is assigned a rating —a beginner has a rating of around 500 and an expert can be 1600. The highest-ranked player in North America has a rating of just over 2000. Hlady is rated 1680 and competes against the best in the world, including renowned author W.P. Kinsella. But, most of the great Scrabble players are not wordsmiths at all —they're mathematics types.

"People seem to think Scrabble is an English game, but it's not," he says. "It's a game of odds. The top players are often math, music and science experts. It's a spacial and math game. The words matter but to play really well, you have to know the combinations."

Hlady himself has an MSc in Chemistry and an advanced certificate in computer science, and works as an analyst and co-ordinator with Information Technology Services (ITS). For him, preparing for a tournament is the most rewarding part of the game.

"I've always liked word games and games that reward a lot of preparation. I can't play six hours a day with a family and kids, so the whole idea is learning the words."

In Scrabble, any time you use all seven letters in your rack to make a word, it's called a bingo and you're awarded an additional fifty points. Hlady averages over 400 points a game against other experts (he's scored over 600 on a few occasions) and averages about two bingos per game. The biggest single-word point score he remembers came when he played THRUSHES for 193 points. He's even played some nine-letter words that required two letters already on the board, such as ROMANIZED and RUTHENIUM.

Although, he doesn't know the meaning of every word he plays, he knows they'll be found in the official Scrabble dictionary.

For the past year and a half, Hlady has studied anagrams and knows all of the eight-letter combinations and most of the seven-letter ones. He's getting ready for the 2010 Canadian championships where he's hoping to be victorious, but to get there, he'll have to beat his friend and nemesis, George McCauley, another Saskatoon Scrabble expert and fellow member of the local club, LOGOMACHY. The definition is "a dispute about words".

Even with all his anagram study, and his t-shirt listing word that include the letter Q but no U, Hlady knows there is one part of the game he can't control.

"Because there's luck involved, on any day, anyone can beat anyone. If I draw five I tiles out of the bag, there's not much I can do."