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High score Scrabble is a variant of the board game Scrabble that was popular among tournament players in the United Kingdom in the 1970s and 1980s. The first National Scrabble Championship of the UK was played by high score rules in 1971, and was won by Steven Haskell.
In modern "match play Scrabble" tournaments, players dispute a fixed number of games. In most major tournaments, for example the World Scrabble Championship and the National Scrabble Championship the players are sorted by number of games won and to break ties between players with the same number of wins, the total of the player's scores minus the total of his opponent's score (known as the spread) is calculated. For example a game won 500 – 350 would give a spread of +150.
In high score Scrabble, wins are not counted. Instead only the total number of points is important. Whether the player wins or loses the game, or what his opponent's score is are not a factor. Thus a player could lose all of their games and still finish in the top half of a tournament with above average scores.
Phil Appleby scored 1049 in a British high score Scrabble game in 1989. [1] However the official Association of British Scrabble Players website does not list this score as the highest ever, rather 712 by David Webb in 2008, long after high score Scrabble had been replaced by match play Scrabble in the UK. [2]
Scrabble is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left to right in rows or downward in columns and are included in a standard dictionary or lexicon.
Squash, sometimes called squash rackets, is a racket-and-ball sport played by two (singles) or four players (doubles) in a four-walled court with a small, hollow, rubber ball. The players alternate in striking the ball with their rackets onto the playable surfaces of the four walls of the court. The objective of the game is to hit the ball in such a way that the opponent is not able to play a valid return. There are about 20 million people who play squash regularly world-wide in over 185 countries. The governing body of squash, the World Squash Federation (WSF), is recognized by the International Olympic Committee (IOC), and the sport will be included in the Olympic Games, starting with the 2028 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. The Professional Squash Association (PSA) organizes the pro tour.
A tournament is a competition involving at least three competitors, all participating in a sport or game. More specifically, the term may be used in either of two overlapping senses:
A Swiss-system tournament is a non-eliminating tournament format that features a fixed number of rounds of competition, but considerably fewer than for a round-robin tournament; thus each competitor does not play all the other competitors. Competitors meet one-on-one in each round and are paired using a set of rules designed to ensure that each competitor plays opponents with a similar running score, but does not play the same opponent more than once. The winner is the competitor with the highest aggregate points earned in all rounds. With an even number of participants, all competitors play in each round.
The World Scrabble Championship 2001 was the sixth World Scrabble Championship. The winner was Brian Cappelletto of the United States.
Stewart Holden is a competitive Scrabble player from the United Kingdom. Holden is originally from Oxford but has resided near Belfast, Northern Ireland since 2008. He represented England at the World Scrabble Championship 2003, where he finished in 62nd place, and represented Northern Ireland at the World Scrabble Championship 2011 where he finished in 28th place and achieved the highest game score of the tournament (694pts).
Scrabble variants are games created by changing the normal Scrabble rules or equipment.
Francophone Scrabble, or French-language Scrabble, is played by many thousands of amateurs throughout the world and the Fédération internationale de Scrabble francophone has more than 20,000 members. Just as in English, points are scored by playing valid words from the lettered tiles. In French there are 102 tiles - 100 lettered tiles and two blanks known as jokers. The official word list for Francophone Scrabble is L'Officiel du jeu Scrabble.
In the game of Scrabble, a challenge is the act of one player questioning the validity of one or more words formed by another player on the most recent turn. In double challenge, if one or more of the challenged words is not in the agreed-upon dictionary or word source, the challenged player loses her/his turn. If all challenged words are acceptable, the challenger loses his/her turn.
In a group tournament, unlike a knockout tournament, there is no scheduled decisive final match. Instead, all the competitors are ranked by examining the results of all the matches played in the tournament. Typically, points are awarded for each match, with competitors ranked based either on total number of points or average points per match. A special type of group tournament is the Round-robin tournament, in which each player plays against every other player.
Jim Kramer won the 2006 United States Scrabble Open in Phoenix, Arizona. Kramer has competed in 15 U.S. championship Scrabble tournaments and has represented the U.S. at the World Scrabble Championships six times. Before winning the 2006 USSO, he had top-ten finishes in the national championships three times, in 1998, 2000, and 2005. His fifth-place finish at the 2003 World Championship (WSC) was the highest by any North American player that year. He finished third in 2001.
Tile tracking is a technique most commonly associated with the game of Scrabble and similar word games. It refers to the practice of keeping track of letters played on the game board, typically by crossing letters off a score sheet or tracking grid as the tiles are played. Tracking tiles can be an important aid to strategy, especially during the endgame when there are no tiles left to draw, where careful tracking allows each player to deduce the remaining unseen letters on the opponent's final rack. The marking off of each letter from a pre-printed tracking grid as the tiles are played is a standard feature of tournament play.
The first World Youth Scrabble Championships were held in Wollongong, Australia 2006. Competitors from Australia, Bahrain, Canada, England, Hong Kong, India, Indonesia, Kenya, Kuwait, Malaysia, New Zealand, Nigeria, Oman, Pakistan, Philippines, Qatar, Singapore, South Africa, Sri Lanka, Thailand, Trinidad and Tobago, United Arab Emirates and United States have competed in the annual tournament so far. WYSC is open to anyone under the age of 18 on 1 January of the year of each tournament. The tournament used to be held at the start of December but was brought forward to August for 2014. So far the WYSC tournament has been held in Malaysia five times, Australia twice, Dubai twice and the Philippines, Sri Lanka, and the United Kingdom once each.
Duplicate Scrabble is a variant of the board game Scrabble where all the players are faced with the same board and letters at the same time and must play the highest scoring word they can find. Although duplicate is rarely played at competition level in the United States, it is the most popular form of the game in Europe, most notably in France, Romania and the Netherlands, and is also played in Canada. The largest European Scrabble festivals can attract over 2000 people and some individual tournaments can count over 1000 participants per game. Although not popular for competitions in the US, the computer game Scrabble 2005 contains a duplicate version allowing up to 16 players to play on the same board at once. It was also used on the UK TV game show TV Scrabble as one of the rounds.
English-language Scrabble is the original version of the popular word-based board game invented in 1938 by US architect Alfred Mosher Butts, who based the game on English letter distribution in The New York Times. The Scrabble variant most popular in English is standard match play, where two players compete over a series of games. Duplicate Scrabble is not popular in English, and High score Scrabble is no longer practised.
Nigel Richards is a New Zealand-Malaysian Scrabble player who is widely regarded as the greatest tournament-Scrabble player of all time. Born and raised in New Zealand, Richards became World Champion in 2007, and repeated the feat in 2011, 2013, 2018, and 2019. He also won the third World English-Language Scrabble Players’ Association Championship (WESPAC) in 2019.
The French World Scrabble Championships is an annual Scrabble tournament that takes place in a different French-speaking country every year. Created in 1972 by Hippolyte Wouters, it was the first of the three World Scrabble Championships to be created, with the English version being created in 1991 and the Spanish version being created in 1997.
The UK National Scrabble Championship (NSC) is a British national scrabble tournament, held annually since its inception in 1971. While it was formerly organised by Mattel, the copyright owner of Scrabble in the UK, since 2014 it has been organised by Association of British Scrabble Players (ABSP). It is one of five major scrabble tournaments in the UK. The other four comprise the UK Open, the British Isles Elimination Scrabble Tournament (BEST), the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship (BMSC) and the UK Masters. The current UK champion is Paul Allan.
The World English-Language Scrabble Players' Association (WESPA) is the overarching global body for English-language national Scrabble associations and similar entities.
Brett Smitheram is a British Scrabble Grand Master and one of the most successful players in the history of the game. Smitheram was 2022 UK National Scrabble Champion, defeating a high-calibre field in June that year. He won the 2016 World Scrabble Championship, and has been ranked in the World top 5, and as a UK Scrabble Grand Master for nearly 20 years. Originally from Camborne, Cornwall, he lives in London and works as Chief of Staff for high-growth tech startups.