A Four-letter Noun For Fraternal Scrabble Expert? Easy, It's A Wade

Bill and Tim Wade's secret weapon in the Scrabble wars is an old red cardboard box that originally contained a couple of bottles of wine.

In the box the two Scrabble experts from Muncie, Ind. have computer printouts listing all the seven-letter combinations they are likely to see on their racks and the thousands of seven-letter words, known to tournament players as "bingos," that can be made from them.

The bingo lists, the originals of which were compiled by a computer at Brown University—how they found their way into the Wades' box is the brothers' closely kept secret—have helped the Wades become two of the best Scrabble players in America in only slightly more than two years of competing in major tournaments.

Scrabble Crossword Game Players Inc., which has its national headquarters in Holbrook, N.Y., doesn't compute average scores for its 517 recognized expert players, but it says that a total of 350 to 400 points a game is the earmark of a premium player. Tim, 32, averages 400 points and Bill, 23, 450 in sanctioned club and tournament play.

They do it, they say, without spending a lot of time cramming words into their heads like students the night before a vocabulary test. "You can't learn 21,000 words, but you can learn the most common racks," says Bill.

Still, the Wades say that thanks to the printouts, other word lists, flash cards and five or six practice games against each other a week, they now have about half of the 100,000 words listed in The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary at their command. They also know the all-important two-letter words (there are 86) and three-letter words (908) in the dictionary by heart.

Those aren't uncommon feats among the tournament Scrabble players, a curious collection of word-game fanatics who will travel hundreds of miles to spend all day or all weekend playing the game. The uncommon thing about the Wades is that they are fairly "normal," even though Scrabble often attracts players who bring to mind such seven-letter racks as strange and bizarre.

Bill is a tall, boyish graduate assistant in the mathematics department of Ball State University. Tim is shorter, darker, with a thin black mustache and a wry smile that can drive opponents to distraction. He's a bartender who moonlights as a substitute math teacher.

The brothers started playing at home against each other, but after a few years they decided to see if they were in the same league with tournament players. They were. Tim won the first tournament he entered, and Bill scored a major league 570 points in his first tournament game.

Scrabble still was little more than a game for the Wades, until Bill qualified for the North American championships in Los Angeles in 1980. "It was a joke," he say's, "until I woke up and realized I had won a trip to L.A. I thought, 'Good grief, all this from a word game!' "