On Saturday, July 21, Richard Wagner aficionados will settle into their seats at New York City”™s Metropolitan Opera House for the first installment of Wagner”™s “Götterdämmerung,” a five-hour-plus epic (with two intermissions) depicting a battle between the gods.
Across town at the Comfort Diner on the lower East Side, Karen Fishman will be settling into a seat herself for her own eight-hour epic battle with minor Scrabble deities from New York, Connecticut and Massachusetts.
She”™ll only get one intermission.
Spread the Scrabble tiles A-D-E-E-G-G-M-M-N-O-R-R-T-T-U in front of Fishman, and it might be even money that she would spot Götterdämmerung in the pile. This is a woman, after all, who has on multiple occasions landed “bingos” on the triple-word score ”“ in two directions on the same play.
Fishman enters Hot Fun, Summer in the City Big Apple Scrabble Tournament as the 14th top-ranked Scrabble player in Connecticut (the third-highest-ranked woman), and among the top five in Fairfield County. The tournament includes Bronx legend “G.I. Joel” Sherman, who has earned more than $100,000 playing tournament Scrabble.
Fishman”™s own haul over years of tournament play? A little more than $400, she estimates.
“It”™s really insane because if I put this much effort into any other quest I would probably be a multimillionaire by now,” Fishman said.
By day, Fishman is a real estate agent with Stamford-based Marr & Caruso Realty Group. In her off hours, she hones her skills against other top players who log onto a Romanian Web site that hosts games (Hasbro, which owns copyrights in much of the world on Scrabble, reportedly does not offer an online game due to the allowance of derogatory and obscene words in official tournament rules).
She also racks up between $3,000 and $5,000 in bills each year traveling to tournaments across the country. Unlike many players in local Scrabble clubs who cut costs by sharing hotels at away tournaments, Fishman prefers her own room.
“It”™s kind of freaks and geeks,” Fishman said of the tournament scene on the road. “I know one guy who sleeps in his car in parking garages.”
Much as the 2002 movie “Spellbound” heightened interest in the National Spelling Bee, the 2001 book “Word Freak” by Wall Street Journal reporter Stefan Fatsis kindled interest in the game as he chronicled the characters he encountered during his foray into the upper echelons of Scrabble tournament play. Fishman has played Fatsis three times in the past two years, losing by 100 points on average.
At the start of July, the best player in Connecticut was Stefan Rau, a resident physician who lives in Newington, who was a mere point ahead of Yale Law School professor Robert Ellickson. At their peak, both men have ranked in the top 20 in North America, as has Ridgefield administrative assistant Rita Provost.
Provost is now the No. 2 player in Fairfield County behind Michael Ecsedy, a physics teacher at Joel Barlow High School in Redding. Norwalk entrepreneur John Babina and Norwalk software engineer Kevin McCarthy are currently ranked ahead of Fishman.
Fishman says her strength in tournament play is spotting bingos, when a 50-point bonus is awarded for playing all seven letters on a player”™s rack. Her weakness is time management; as is the case in tournament chess, players are allotted a limited amount of time for each play.
She does not study word lists, but readily adopts unknown words opponents employ against her.
“I am not required to know what (a word) means,” Fishman said. “I am only required to know that it is.”
One need not know German to appreciate “Götterdämmerung” on July 21 at the Met. And one does not have to be able to spot the word “endgame” in those letters to appreciate Fishman”™s skill in spotting them herself.
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