I started playing Scrabble seriously four years ago, after reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. Among the awesome players it follows are Joel Sherman, who began competing full time when gastrointestinal reflux prevented him from keeping a job, and Joe Edley, who takes a Zen approach to the game and attributes his success to deep breathing during tournaments. Sure, they came across as obsessive, but what they were doing was so bloody cool. Suddenly, I wanted to become the best player in the world. I wrote a computer program to quiz me on seven- and eight-letter words scrambled into alphabetical order. For thousands of hours over the last few years, I have stared at garbage like DEEINTUV, AAEELRTV, ACENOORT, AAEGIMNT and found "DUVETINE! VALERATE! CORONATE! AGMINATE and ENIGMATA!" until I had solved the "alphagrams" of all the sevens and eights (53,795 words total) at least twice.

This April, I won the Boston Area Tournament in Westford, which attracted the best players in the continent. I bested Joel Sherman, now a good friend, in a wild final game. My last two moves were ALIENORS and then, after he took a brief lead with MOATING, UNVISITED through a disconnected S and D. My 15-5 record propelled my national rating to number one in the National Scrabble Association. I had achieved my goal.

I finished 12th at the open this year, but I'll be back. And no matter what, I know that playing Scrabble is good for my brain. In a brain-imaging experiment at the University of Pennsylvania, images taken while I solved eight-letter alphagrams revealed brain metabolism an order of magnitude greater than that seen in people answering other knotty questions--scientific proof that Scrabble makes you smarter.