Hi David,
as far as I can tell smart groups ignores empty spaces and some other special characters. How about adding a “-” instead of an empty space to the titles? This works fine with smart groups.
However, I also just tried the “begins with” rule and it acted like “contains”. This seems to be a bug, unfortunately.
So far it’s not possible to order by title in smart groups but it has already been requested:
Regards, Kristian