War of words at Falls Scrabble tournament
Chris Lipe was pretty pleased with ahuru.
While it didn’t earn him an enviable score, it did allow him to get rid of some low tiles at the North American Scrabble Players Association tournament held at Scotiabank Convention Centre. What is an ahuru? “I’m not sure what it means,” explained the computer programmer from St. Louis, Mo.
“But, it did help me because I got rid of a bunch of bad letters. Those lower plays are often the more difficult to figure out and the coolest words are not always the highest scoring words.”
(For the record, an ahuru is a small pink cod fish found of the eastern coast of New Zealand.)
Lipe, who finished second at the World Scrabble Champions Tournament in England in 2014, was among a diverse crowd of Scrabble players who competed in the Niagara Falls tournament.
“I played Scrabble at the kitchen table growing up and I always found it an interesting game,” Lipe said. “There’s a lot of math and patterns involved and each time you play, it’s a completely different game.”
The three-day tournament attracted 210 competitive Scrabble players from 10 countries as well as 20 children who competed in the youth division. It was the largest Scrabble tournament held in Canada.
“Scrabble has this reputation as an old granny’s game and it’s not,” Lipe said Sunday during a break in the competition. Tyler Lee agreed. While relatively new to the competition circuit, the 14-year-old Toronto resident said he’s hooked.
“My Grade 7 teacher introduced me to it last year,” he said. “I had heard of Scrabble but had never played it before. I began playing in a club and fell in love with the game.”
He hopes one day to be able to amaze his opponent by using the word oxyphenbutazone.
“I was studying for a divisional tournament and came across that word,” he said. “I’ve never been able to play it but it’s such an astounding word.”
Oxyphenbutazone, an anti-inflammatory medication used to treat arthritis, is theoretically the highest scoring word in Scrabble and, under the right circumstances, could earn a player 1,778 points.
Tournament director Sue Tromblay, from Caledon, said the North American Scrabble Association encourages children to take up the game.
“Children are the future of the game,” she said.
Tromblay began playing tournament Scrabble in 2002.
“I use to just for fun and then we found out there was a club and we checked it out and I got hooked,” she said.
U.S. architect Alfred Butts came up with the idea for the popular board game in the 1930s. He combined elements of anagrams and crossword puzzles into a scoring word game first called Lexiko. It later became known as Criss Cross Words before being renamed Scrabble in 1948.
Today, according to Hasbro, a Scrabble game can be found in three out of every five homes in the U.S.
This is the third year the North American Scrabble Association has held a competition in Niagara Falls.