Scrabble As Sport

The champs make an almost full-time job of memorising tricky and useful words. Players at this level take their game seriously; in 2011, at the World Scrabble Championships in Poland, two entrants nearly came to blows when one accused his opponent of stealing a ‘G’ tile and asked the judges to strip-search him. They did not.

Top players are often computer programmers or mathematicians. They look at the board and the tiles and consider the probability that the symbols will come together in a way that will allow them to create highscoring combinations, preferably over the coveted ‘triple word’ spots.