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.
The National Scrabble Association (NSA) was created in 1978 by Selchow & Righter, then the makers of Scrabble, to promote their game. It coordinated local clubs and Scrabble tournaments in North America, including the National Scrabble Championship, until 2009. The last director was John D. Williams, who is co-author of the book Everything Scrabble.
Mark Nyman is an English professional Scrabble player originally from London, England and now a resident in Cheshire. At the end of 2002, he was rated 205 and was top-rated in the ABSP ratings. As at 7 September 2015 he is rated 200. His 27 consecutive tournament game wins is an ABSP record. He is most widely known as the first British player to win the World Scrabble Championship, which he accomplished in 1993. He married in 2004 and has two children, Max and Kizzy.
Joel Wapnick is a Scrabble player from Montreal, Quebec, Canada, best known for winning the 1999 World Scrabble Championship (WSC).
The Scrabble Players Championship is the largest Scrabble competition in North America. The event is currently held every year, and from 2004 through 2006 the finals were aired on ESPN and ESPN2. The 2023 event was held in Las Vegas from July 15–19, 2023, with Joshua Sokol emerging as champion.
Adam Logan is a research mathematician and a top Canadian Scrabble player. He won the World Scrabble Championship in 2005, beating Pakorn Nemitrmansuk of Thailand 3–0 in the final. He is the only player to have won the Canadian Scrabble Championship five times. He was also the winner of the 1996 National Scrabble Championship, North America's top rated player in 1997, and the winner of the Collins division of the 2014 North American Scrabble Championship.
Pakorn Nemitrmansuk is one of Thailand's top Scrabble players and the 2009 World Scrabble Champion. An architect and resident of Bangkok, Thailand, Nemitrmansuk has competed at World Scrabble Championship six times between 1999–2011 and was the runner-up in 2003 and 2005.
Panupol Sujjayakorn is a Thai Scrabble player, an economics graduate at Chulalongkorn University and manager at ExxonMobil. He won the Thailand Matchplay Championship 2002, World Scrabble Championship 2003, Thailand King's Cup 2005 and was runner-up in the American National Scrabble Championship 2005 to Dave Wiegand. He is known for his encyclopedic knowledge of words despite having only conversational English.
Joseph Edley is a professional Scrabble player and author, and the first player to win the National Scrabble Championship three times.
The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary or OSPD is a dictionary developed for use in the game Scrabble, by speakers of American and Canadian English.
Joel Sherman, nicknamed GI Joel, is an American professional English-language Scrabble player and former world champion. He is featured in Stefan Fatsis's book Word Freak, in Eric Chaikin's film Word Wars, and in Scott Petersen's film Scrabylon. He is also mentioned in Collins Gem's reference book.
Brian Cappelletto is a Scrabble player who represents the United States in international competition. He was the runner-up at the inaugural World Scrabble Championship in 1991 and won the event in 2001. He also won the American National Scrabble Championship in 1998, and was the runner-up in 2008 and 2010.
Dave Wiegand is an American Scrabble player who won the National Scrabble Championship in 2005 and 2009.
Tile tracking is a technique most commonly associated with 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.
David Lawrence Gibson was an American professional Scrabble player and mathematics professor. Ranked the top player in North America and widely regarded as one of the greatest Scrabble players, Gibson won the North American Scrabble Championship twice.
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.
NASPA Games, formerly known as North American Scrabble Players Association (NASPA), is a nonprofit organization founded in 2009 to administer competitive Scrabble tournaments and clubs in North America. It officially took over these activities from the National Scrabble Association (NSA) on July 1, 2009. As of July 31, 2021, the organization is no longer associated with the North American owner of the SCRABBLE® trademarks, Hasbro, Inc.
