You might enjoy playing Scrabble with your family and friends, but when you get outside your social bubble and run into a serious or even tournament-grade Scrabble player, well, that’s a whole different world.
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When the top players gathered in Torquay, England, last year for the World Scrabble Tournament (this year’s contest should have been this week, but has been cancelled thanks to you-know-what), it was to use ‘words’ like these in their games: dzo, ch, foyned, ghi…
Yep, that’s right; a whole lot of words that, let’s be frank about this, are not words. That’s why my spell-checker underlines them in red. The top players, you see, don’t win tournaments by being cleverer than the rest of us. They do it by memorizing a long list of non-words so they can avoid the problems ordinary players encounter.
Those words can be handy, but they’re fairly incomprehensible. World-class Scrabble players don’t have to know what they mean; they just have to know they are in the Scrabble dictionary. But that’s not the only way elite Scrabble culture is different from that of us everyday players. Read more about top-level Scrabble culture in an article from The Spectator. Here’s a non-paywalled link. -Thanks, WTM!
(Image credit: Finemann)
Source: neatorama