Drama unfolded at the Scrabble World Championship in Warsaw, Poland this week as the world’s top Scrabble players battled for the the Scrabble crown and $20,000. With a reputation and 20 G’s to win, you can understand how things could turn vicious if one G goes missing. In a showdown between a Thai player and England’s Ed Martin, the Thai player demanded that Martin be taken to the bathroom and strip-searched because he was convinced that Mr. Martin had swiped a G letter tile from the table. Convinced that counting the tiles on the table would not be an adequate solution to his dilemma, the Thai player got the honorable Scrabble judges involved. To the Thai player’s dismay, the judges ruled that Martin was not to be strip searched and that there were no G tiles missing from the table.
The battle raged on, the Thai contestant fueled by rage and Ed Martin frazzled with embarrassment. Sweat poured down their brows as the wordsmiths were neck to neck in score until the final nail-biting minute, when Mr. Martin pulled ahead and won the game by a single point. Victory in the form of sweet revenge by Mr. Martin! However, all this brouhaha amounted to nothing as neither the Thai player (obviously) nor Mr. Martin won the much desired crown and $20,000 grand prize. Those went to Mr. Nigel Richards of new Zealand who beat Australia’s Andrew Fisher with a whopping 95-pointer, “omnified.” When asked about what secret there was to his most glorious win (and his most glorious beard), Richards replied “I’m not sure there is a secret, just a matter of learning the words.”
This incident will go down in Scrabble World Championship history as “Scrabble’s most controversial incident since one player accused another of eating a tile.” Hit the source link for a brief video of the tournament plus of Mr. Richards accepting his victory check.
Source: The Independent
Shouldn’t that be Mr. Richards getting the check, not Mr. Martin?
Whoops, thanks for the correction!
Who knew Scrabble was so cutthroat.
Triple letter scores must be a coveted prize.
Cheating is what has turned me off from Words With Friends. There are about five different apps available to help you make words from your available tiles, and when someone I know doesn’t know the meaning of a word like ‘omnified’ plays it, I know they’re using one of those apps.