Welcome to National ® Association Club No. 171 Washington, DC Intro | Schedule | Events | Members | Links | More

front: coach Bob Linn challenges Sandy Loiterstein; rear: Jim Crouch (l.) faces Ted Gest (r.)

National SCRABBLE Association Club No. 171 provides a friendly, convenient place for crossword game enthusiasts, English language jocks, and others in search of a stimulating intellectual challenge to play SCRABBLE® Brand Crossword Game. Whether you're a beginner or a tournament-level expert, you'll find a challenge in our group. Relax and have fun: come as you are, whether your last stop was the office or the beach.

The club meets every Tuesday from 5:30PM to 10:00PM on the first floor of the Chevy Chase Community Center. We also meet on the first Monday of the month at the Bethesda branch of Barnes and Noble.

Of course, you can feel free to come and go according to your own schedule: you will surely find someone to play regardless of when you arrive (although arrival at closing time probably isn't the best idea).

Club 171 tournaments:

Club 171 sponsored its second annual summer tournament in 2002. The tournament wrapped up in mid July of 2002. Click here to view the final tournament statistics and rankings, or here for last summer's (viz., 2001) results.

Finally, in the tradition of our club—not to mention the tradition of our webmaster, who has a proclivity to parrot last year's material and merely assign a new color to it, said color chosen from a short list of tones picked for their particularly revolting character—we held yet another summer tournament in 2004. The tournament ended in August 2004. Click here to view the final tournament statistics and rankings.

Upcoming events:

Our club has been featured in an article in The Washington Post by Andrea Rouda, who interviewed and quoted several of our club members for the article.

We were even more recently featured in yet another Post article that offers tips to the up-and-coming enthusiast for improving his or her SCRABBLE game.

Meet some of our members:

• Bob Linn, our coach and co-director, is a stockbroker from Potomac, Maryland. A devout student of the game, Bob was recently rated one of the top fifty players in the United States. For those brutally competitive folks, Bob runs "SCRABBLE® school." Whether your weakness is word knowledge, rack management, or clock management, see if Bob can't help you raise your rating by 200 points! Even if you're not quite so competitive, let Bob pair you up with someone suitable for your first game so you will neither win big nor get trashed by a SCRABBLE® fanatic. Bob and other long-time members of the club are delighted to offer new players "free" word challenges (i.e., no loss of turn); assistance with two-letter and three-letter words; and (sometimes unsolicited) SCRABBLE pointers.

• Ted Gest, co-director, heads Criminal Justice Journalists, a national group based at the University of Pennsylvania in Washington, D.C.

*

• Marcia Bowen is a retired restaurant owner from Kensington, Maryland.

• Doug Hoylman, six-time national crossword puzzle champion, lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

• Tunde Ogunyemi is a social worker from Hyattsville, Maryland. A SCRABBLE® terror in his native Nigeria, Tunde continues to play at the expert level stateside. Watch out, though! He plays phoneys!

• Randy Taylor, a former real estate agent who lives in Washington, DC, is part-time emperor of a remote galaxy.

• Ralph Moore, a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer, lives in Chevy Chase, Maryland.

• Italian—German—French—Spanish—Pernilla Neal has SCRABBLE sets in each of those languages (and yes, the tile distribution and point values differ from those of the English-language SCRABBLE game).

*

• Bruce Wilner, who owns a computer security consulting company in Bethesda, Maryland, maintains this Web site. Drop him an e-mail.

Call Bob Linn at (301)309-2629 [9-5 M-F],

Bruce Wilner at (202)236-1990 [9-9 M-F], or

Ted Gest at (202)966-5215 [before 10PM], for more info.