In 1933, on the heels of the Great Depression, an unemployed architect and Poughkeepsie native named Alfred Mosher Butts, set to the task of developing a board game based on visual and linguistic skills. Scrabble was born, though it would be another 19 years before a vacationing Macy’s executive happened upon the virtually-unknown game and put it on course to becoming the fifth highest-grossing board game of all time.
In 1933, the top 1% of American households controlled approximately 22.5% of the nation’s wealth. Whether or not Mr. Butts was subconsciously aware of this statistic when he assigned numerical points to his lettered tiles, we will never know. (Alright, alright. I admit this had nothing to do with his thinking, but give me some leeway here. I’m leading up to a few minor and inconsequential insights!)
Letter values in Scrabble were determined by how frequently they are used in the English language. The most common letters (five vowels, and consonants L, N, R, S, T) were assigned 1 point. The least commonly-used letters, Z and Q, were valued at 10 points, with all the others having values from 2-8. There are 100 tiles in a Scrabble set. The total value of these tiles equals 187.
Butts understood that players would need more commonly-used letters in order to successfully form words, so the number of tiles for each letter varies greatly; for example, there are 12 E’s, nine A’s, six T’s, three D’s, two F’s, and one each of J, Q, X, Z. The more rare the letter, the higher the point value.
After doing some advanced statistical analysis (full disclosure, I have never taken a course in statistics, but I did a lot of graphing with second and third graders in my 40-year teaching career), I present the following data: 15 Scrabble tiles (two each of F, H, V, W, Y, one each of K, J, Q, X ,Z) account for 81 points out of the possible 187. Stated differently, 15% of the tiles hold 43.7% of the total point values. The J, X, Q, and Z, four of the 100 tiles, control a whopping 19.2% of the points. Fascinating, eh? Wait, there’s more.
By the end of 2021, the top 1% of American households controlled approximately 35% of total financial assets. (This figure differs, but the range seems to be 33-37%.) Let’s think about this in terms even I can wrap my head around: say there is a stack of a million dollars on a dining room table, to be divided among 100 invited party guests. One guest would receive $350,000, while the other 99 would share the remaining $650,000. If divided equally (Ha!), each remaining person would be given $6,565 — not a bad hunk of change for attending a party, but that $350,000 would leave a bitter aftertaste.
At the end of 2016, an annual household income of a little over $12 million qualified for membership in the top 1% of earners in America. (Obviously, that figure is considerably higher now.) During the course of a Scrabble contest, I estimate a player would have to hold at least two-thirds of the highest-scoring letters, including three of the top four, to be considered as having played a game with the top 1% of all possible tile combinations. (Are you still with me? A key insight is about to emerge from all of this heap of random data!)
I imagine an income of well over $12 million would make it easy to spend money. You want to buy a car, a house, a neighborhood, an island? Write a check and they’re yours. There would be no great struggle in finding what you believe will make your life more comfortable and happy.
Similarly, a Scrabbler who draws most of the high-scoring letters has a distinct advantage over an opponent. But here’s the big difference: unlike the ease of spending money in real life, using uncommon letters on a Scrabble board is often difficult, especially if you are playing seriously and want each of these tiles to earn a minimum of 30 points per turn. You are “privileged” to hold these letters, but you need to be clever and disciplined to play them wisely. And, lest we forget, if the game ends and you have been unable to use your eight or 10 point letters, those points are deducted from your final score and added to your opponent’s: you suffer double jeopardy.
It took more time than I had expected to come to the following conclusion: “privileged” letters in Scrabble do not necessarily lead to easy and successful word plays, but financial privilege generally leads to a life of ease and comfort (let’s leave neurosis, stress and jealousy for another column.)
Alfred Butts never reaped the full benefits for his invention, but he did receive small royalties from sales. When asked, the year before he died at age 94, if he had lived the life of a wealthy man, he replied: “I’ve been told to say I have lived a comfortable life.”
At the end of the day, isn’t that what we all want to say?
Gene Stamell runs a Scrabble Club at Leverett Library. He can be reached at gstamell@gmail.com