After being thoroughly drubbed in a game of Scrabble on a recent vacation, I did what any well-adjusted person would: let it boil in my brain matter like a hot coal for the next 48 to 96 hours.
This led me down a Scrabble-related research hole. In particular, I wanted to know what the highest-scoring word possible is. That’s, of course, a complicated question since Scrabble players are reliant on the board already created, but I did track down the highest recorded, sanctioned, single word score ever played. As the clickbait cliche goes, the results were shocking.
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Not because of the point total itself. The score was high, sure, but not outlandishly so. The word in question was a little unexpected. Mostly because it’s an actual, functional word relevant to the current English language, instead of an antiquated jumble of consonants. Still, that wasn’t much more than a pleasant discovery. What came as a real surprise to me was the unusual setting and the participants. I had assumed that the record would be set in some world championship, arranged between two Scrabble professionals that have long replaced functional parts of their memory with lists of two-letter words from the 1800s.
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Instead, as documented by a journalist and Scrabble aficionado at Slate, this match took place in a church basement as part of a simple club game. The two Scrabblers on either side of the table? A carpenter named Michael Cresta, and a supermarket deli-man named Wayne Yorra. Together, they broke three separate Scrabble records: 1) most points in a game by one player; 2) most points on a single turn; and 3) most total points in a game.
The aforementioned word that broke records was “quixotry,” an outcropping of the word “quixotic.” The word racked up 365 points all on its lonesome. It touched on two triple word scores, and the eight-point X landed on a double letter score. With the doubled X, the word was worth 35 points, and then through the two multiplicative modifiers, that number rocketed up with slot-machine-like speed to 315. Because it was a bingo, a move that uses all of a player’s seven letters, it earns an extra 50 points, bringing the total to 365.
Unsurprisingly, this single word score also gave Cresta an eye-watering final total of 830 points. For context, the highest game score ever achieved by one player in a tournament is 770, a number impressive enough that Mark Landsberg, who set that record, is now referred to forever as “Mr. 770.”
Tack on Yorra’s also very respectable 490 points, and you have the highest single game score ever: 1,320 points. Set in what started as a game for fun between two competitive Scrabble players who ranked squarely in the bottom half of the rankings.
If you want to see the game move-by-move, Slate also helpfully included a link to do so.