By Deanna Isaacs
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It wasn’t always like this, but that’s life: you get your rack of letters (some better than others) and make your moves. Kaminsky, a daydreamer with a creative bent, graduated from South Shore High School and went to Southern Illinois University, where he made his first big mistake by majoring in accounting. “No one tells you these things in college,” he says, but “as a CPA, it’s bad news having an imagination.” He joined the IRS as a revenue agent in San Francisco, started a family, and was happy for a while. “When I worked there they were all straight as arrows,” he says. The seed of another big mistake took root: spurred by “greed and ambition,” he quit the IRS and set up a private practice. “Little did I realize how much I’d hate it. I did become rich–the mansion, the big car. But I was absolutely miserable. Hated to wake up in the morning. It was a circle of everybody cheating everybody. I just couldn’t stand it.” At 45 he went through a midlife crisis that “killed the marriage and killed everything.” He quit accounting, came back to Chicago, and moved in with a woman who’s a writer and, like him, a Scrabble freak. Then, about four years ago, he got the idea for Ozzie–an aid to Scrabble players. Encouraged by the National Scrabble Association, he started to work it out–“not knowing how to program, not knowing a thing about computers, hardly. It was a nightmare for about two and a half years.”
Ozzie has similarities to the best word game ever. You get a certain number of letters–seven in the kid’s version; nine for adults–then race against a 20-minute clock to make words out of them. Each letter has a numerical value; the idea is to rack up as many points as possible. There are bonus points for using difficult letters and for word placement on the board, but if you make a spelling error, trade a letter, or take too long, you’re penalized. And then there’s what Kaminsky calls the game’s most unique feature: after you accumulate a certain number of points, you can go to the “casino” and either run your total through the ceiling or lose your shirt. “Ozzie makes your life miserable,” Kaminsky says. “There’s all sorts of limitations, but there’s also all sorts of bonuses.”
