Introduction: Welcome to the Quillette podcast. I’m your host, Jonathan Kay.

And this week, I’ll be turning to some lighter fare, this being summer and all. Specifically, I’ll be talking about the fascinating world of elite Scrabble with a true expert in the field—Toronto-based mathematician, linguist, and Scrabble tournament organiser John Chew.

He’s a guy who happens to live in my neighbourhood, which is how I originally met him, but he spends much of his life circling the globe, overseeing Scrabble tournaments in such places as Bangkok, Malta, and—this month—Baltimore, Maryland, where John was overseeing the 2025 Scrabble Players Championship.

In our interview, John and I discuss Scrabble in the context of various other classic board games, including chess, which, by the way, is going to be the subject of a coming Quillette podcast in September, when I interview Danny Rensch of Chess.com, who’s got a new book out called Dark Squares. But this week, the focus is on Scrabble. So please enjoy my interview with international Scrabble Master John Chew.

Transcript

Jonathan Kay: John Chew, thanks so much for appearing on the Quillette podcast.

John Chew: It’s a pleasure to be here. Thank you, John.

JK: Okay, so I was complimenting you on being probably my only guest since COVID to wear a tie. And I’ve learned it’s a Scrabble tie. This podcast appears in both audio and video, so the visual impact will be lost on audio listeners—but it is striking.

JC: I should say, then, that it’s a dark blue tie with images of wooden Scrabble tiles at regular intervals, spelling “TIE” in a pleasing, symmetric repeating pattern.

JK: Yeah, it’s extremely pleasing. And I also learned that you’re required to wear a tie?

JC: Totally. I require it of myself, actually. One has to maintain standards.

JK: Was that a joke, or is it because of your position as a vigilator or...?

JC: I was totally yanking your chain. However, we do in fact require all our officials—this is no joke—to wear striped referee shirts. Black and white vertical stripes, like zebras. There was some pushback at first, but it’s necessary. Otherwise it’s too hard to tell who’s an official and who’s just a random helpful player.

JK: Well, as someone familiar with the uneven dress standards at board game tournaments, I’m just impressed everyone’s wearing a shirt.

JC: That is part of board game strategy—especially in mixed-gender crowds, as we often are. Some people wear intentionally revealing clothing to throw off their opponents by distracting them.

JK: Okay, I’ll keep that in mind for my next tournament.

JC: Well, you can edit that out too if you like. If you’re planning to apply that strategy yourself, you probably shouldn’t reveal it in advance. But yes, I’ve had to make official rulings about people’s clothing being too unintentionally revealing—had to send them back to their hotel rooms to change or seat them where their clothing wouldn’t distract.

JK: Sorry, I can’t leave that as a parenthetical. Without naming names—what kind of outfits are we talking about?

JC: We’re talking older men who’ve had a wardrobe failure in the elastic holding up their sweatpants.

JK: Okay, I’m totally losing interest. I thought that was going in a different direction.

JC: No, no. There’s also the opposite direction. But the whole unsettling nature of that was why I had to step in. If someone wears something attractively revealing, it rarely leads to formal complaints—just distraction.

JK: That was unsettling. Let’s proceed more toward the world of Scrabble that people don’t see on TV, because it’s swept to the margins. We’ve been talking in an offhand way about you making rulings. I just know from past conversations with you—aside from issues like what counts as a valid word—you’re sometimes called upon to make more nuanced rulings.

JC: Clearly, yeah.

JK: Aside from “valid” or “invalid” words—which, let’s be honest, you’ve got a computer console to verify—what kinds of rulings do you have to make in your capacity as an authority at these tournaments?

JC: First of all, if I end up having to intervene, it means something has gone terribly wrong. We have officials on the floor to make rulings. And someone oversees those officials. If someone wants to appeal further, they can appeal to me—or to whoever happens to be around in a senior capacity.

JK: So you’re like the general manager. When someone says, “I need to speak to your boss,” you’re the boss. But what exactly constitutes a ruling in the context of Scrabble?

JC: The Scrabble rulebook is more than forty pages long. But you can describe how to play tournament-level Scrabble in about six pages. The other 34 pages are all about what to do when things go off the rails. The ways in which people get themselves into trouble generally relate to the sequence of gameplay.

With chess, for example, you move a piece and hit the clock—ideally with the same hand. But it’s relatively simple. It’s a memorisation-based game.

With Scrabble, you’re moving pieces—tiles—from one place to another. You could drop them. You could flip the board by accident. You’ve got to line everything up into a valid play, calculate the score yourself, make a written record of that score, and then hit the clock. Your opponent then has the opportunity to challenge the play—but only within a fixed time.

JK: Mm-hmm.

JC: So at each step, something can go wrong. A player might put tiles down in one location, then change their mind and move them elsewhere—accidentally leaving a tile behind. That doesn’t really happen in chess. You can’t leave behind half a bishop. Although, interestingly, in Thailand some people play with tiles made of three pieces: a paper inset and two plastic shells that sandwich it.

JK: That’s very strange.

JC: They do that so they can swap alphabets. But it also means the tiles can fall apart. And then you get someone saying, “I only placed two-thirds of the tile—what do I do with the remaining third?” Or, “I’ve overdrawn by two-thirds of a tile.” It gets absurd.

So because we’re physically moving tiles around in specific ways, following specific rules, there’s a lot of room for error. When can I challenge? How should I challenge? That’s part of it too.

I had a conversation once with a guy who directed professional poker tournaments. He looked at our forty-page rulebook and said, “Why on earth would you need this for Scrabble?” Then he started flipping through it and laughing.

I asked what was so funny. He said, “You let the players draw their own tiles? Can you imagine a professional Texas Hold ’Em tournament where the players get to draw their own cards?”

JK: But hold on a sec—because I know from talking to you casually, it’s not just sticking your hand into a bag. You have to do it in a specific way, right?

JC: Oh, absolutely. I wish I had a prop here.

The tiles are in a drawstring bag—not a box lid or something. The top of the bag has to be at or above eye level, but your eyes must be averted. The mouth of the bag must be visible to your opponent. And your hand must be visibly empty as it enters the bag—so no hiding a Q up your sleeve.

Then you draw tiles. If you put them straight onto your rack, you risk overdrawing and mixing them with your existing tiles. So it’s safer to place them face-down on the table and then transfer them to the rack.

JK: And as we both know, tabletop gaming is wonderful—but you do get dexterity-challenged enthusiasts. What you’re describing isn’t rocket science, but you can see how misunderstandings might occur. So you’re sometimes brought in and… things get ugly. I mean, the money involved isn’t at Texas Hold ’Em levels. It’s not even chess levels. But people fly across the world for these tournaments. Tempers must get pretty hot, right?

JC: I find Scrabble players in general to be fairly even-tempered. I think it’s partly the nature of the game, and partly the type of people it attracts.

There’s just the right amount of luck in Scrabble. In chess, if you lose, it’s because your opponent is better—and you have to admit that. Or you convince yourself they were sending psychic waves at your brain. But it’s fundamentally about who’s better.

In bridge, if something goes wrong, it’s probably your partner’s fault.

With games like poker or backgammon, which are more luck-driven, you think, “I’ll take a bigger risk next time.”

JK: That’s interesting, because I’ve always said chess is a terrible game for couples. There’s no external factor to blame the loss on. Even if one person is clearly better, it’s nice to have that ego-salve—“I drew bad letters” or “the dice were against me.”

JC: Exactly.

JK: So, about your point that Scrabble players are even-tempered. As I mentioned in the intro, we’ll be having Danny Rensch from chess.com on the podcast soon. He’s written a fantastic book called Dark Squares: How Chess Saved My Life. In the world of chess, he’s a celebrity—almost as famous as you.

In his book, he describes some crazy behaviour. There was a guy—now deceased—named Igor. He was Danny’s childhood chess coach. He was Russian and Jewish. One time, after losing a game, he stood up and screamed abuse. Then he went to the front of the room, wrote “F*** chess and f*** the Jews” on the whiteboard, and stormed out. He was sanctioned for it, obviously.

JC: You need rules to cover that sort of thing too. We do have a Code of Conduct. It clearly outlines what behaviour is permissible and under what circumstances.

JK: Yes, I can imagine. So that behaviour would obviously be seen as problematic. But what’s interesting—as Rensch notes in his book—is that chess attracts a broad spectrum of personalities. Some people are extremely calm, almost non-verbal. Others are firecrackers—people with clear personality disorders, substance issues, you name it.

To what do you attribute the fact that chess seems to attract more of those extremes? Because both games—Scrabble and chess—require extremely high intelligence, as a necessary but not sufficient condition. Why does Scrabble tend to attract, let’s say, a more uniform or placid personality type?

JC: We attract similar types of players. In fact, a lot of expert Scrabble players have also reached chess master level. There’s a lot of crossover. Both games involve similar skills: thinking quickly under time pressure, managing geometric reasoning, memorising large quantities of otherwise useless information.

JK: And there’s that two-dimensional geometric element to both.

JC: Yes. There’s also the willingness—and the ability—to spend large amounts of time on a board game, rather than engaging with people outside a structured context. People who prefer less structured interaction tend not to end up at Scrabble or chess tournaments.

JK: So we’re interacting outside of gaming, which makes us normal?

JC: Well, sort of. We’re talking about gaming, after all. And I think you and I have probably spent more time playing board games together than having actual conversations. This is pushing the boundaries of our relationship.

Anyway, to continue—yes, Scrabble and chess players can both have quite intense personalities. I don’t want to say “personality disorders,” but nobody playing competitive Scrabble is what you’d call neurotypical.

JK: I wanted to ask about that—go deeper into the personality side. I was surprised to learn that it’s common for people to be good at both chess and Scrabble, but—

JC: Okay, but to answer your earlier question—why don’t Scrabble players lose their tempers as often? It’s because every serious Scrabble player has to accept that they won’t win most of their games. No matter how good they are, they’re probably only going to win about 75 percent at best. They have to live with that.

JK: Right. And in chess, if you’re among the world’s best, you can win 95 percent of your games.

JC: Exactly. This past week, at the North American Scrabble Championships, we had the defending champion play a best-of-five match. His opponent wasn’t necessarily a weaker player, but in the final game, the opponent drew all the good tiles. He still needed to know the entire dictionary to use them well, but luck was a factor.

The champion failed to defend his title. It went to the full five games—he lost 2–3. I asked him immediately afterwards how he felt, because that’s what you do with athletes. You get in their face and ask how they feel when they lose.

He was completely relaxed. He said, “Well, if I had to lose a game, I’m glad it was one where my opponent drew all the tiles. There was really nothing I could have done.” He was very Zen about it. He said, “I played well to make it to that fifth game. But sometimes the tile gods give, and sometimes they take away.”

Not every Scrabble player reaches that level of equanimity, but those who stick with the game have to learn to cope with frequent loss. It’s just part of the game—and part of life.

JK: That’s interesting. In this chess book I mentioned, Danny Rensch writes that Magnus Carlsen—arguably the greatest chess player ever—once went dozens of elite-level matches without losing a single game while playing White. So in chess, you can be completely in control of your fate. You might not win them all, but you don’t lose. You draw.

JC: Right.

JK: So you’re in control of your destiny 100 percent of the time.

JC: In Scrabble, we have a player named Nigel Richards. He played in this event. He’s widely regarded as the greatest of all time. Multi-time world champion. He’s won the North American Championship five times. Not only in English—he’s also won the French and Spanish language championships.

There’s nothing he can’t do in Scrabble. And yet, he finished third at this event. He didn’t make the finals. Just had a bad run of luck on the final day.

JK: When you say “drawing bad tiles,” what does that mean? There aren’t any inherently bad tiles in the bag—are there?

JC: Oh, yes. There are good tiles and bad tiles.

The best tiles are the blanks. Then the four S tiles. After that, it’s debated. People have different algorithms that rank tile value.

It used to be that Q was the worst tile, but once we added “QI” to the dictionary, it became powerful.

Personally, I hate the tiles I, U, V, and W. If you have any of those on your rack and don’t play them, your next turn will average about four points less than if you didn’t have them. Those are just bad tiles—they hurt your equity on the next turn.

JK: Okay, this is a question I was saving for the end. According to a completely authoritative website I just checked, what are the three-letter words containing Q that don’t have a U?

JC: “QIS,” “QAT”—and some would include “SUQ,” though it has a U, it doesn’t follow the Q. There’s also “QIN,” but that’s only accepted in international play.

At this tournament, we had about 300 players. About three-quarters were playing under a dictionary where “QIN” isn’t acceptable.

JK: You got all three. I thought I was going to expose you as a fraud, but I didn’t.

JC: Well, I edit our word list. It doesn’t mean I know them all—but I know my twos and threes.

JK: Which makes it all the more scandalous if you don’t know them. So, I want to ask you more about the word list. I assume that to be a top-level Scrabble player, you basically have to memorise all the playable words.

You mentioned Nigel Richards—he won the French Scrabble Championship without actually speaking French. Then did the same in Spanish. Apparently, he can barely order coffee in either language.

JC: Yes. But to be fair, there are Thai players who don’t speak English and have won English-language championships by memorising the entire word list.

JK: Why is Scrabble so popular in Thailand? I know you’ve flown to Bangkok for tournaments. Why Thailand more than other countries?

JC: In Thailand’s case, it’s largely because of a late friend of mine, Amnoy Ploy Sangnam. He got hooked on Scrabble as a university student, and he built his life around it. He organised university-versus-university competitions, got his whole university on board, and eventually persuaded the Thai Ministry of Education that Scrabble was a good way to learn English. He even secured royal family support.

JK: That was a much more comprehensive response than I expected—and fascinating that one person could be such an effective promoter of a game.

JC: He was a force of nature. A lot of the good things in the world can be traced back to the actions of one person.

JK: I think I read that on a cocktail napkin once. And we should be that person, right?

JC: Fortune cookie? Yes. But you’ve got to remember that someone out there is writing all those fortune cookie messages—devoting their life to making the world a better place, one vague platitude at a time.

JK: Well, he’s making a difference too. Let me go back to something you said earlier: your friend convinced the Ministry of Education that Scrabble was a great way to learn English.

JC: No, no. I said my friend persuaded them—it was part of his strategy.

JK: Right, okay. I’d say your friend was a fraud, because—and this is what I wanted to ask—you don’t actually need to know the meaning of any words to play Scrabble. You can memorise the word list without knowing the definitions.

JC: Correct. Though it is helpful to know the part of speech—so you know whether a word takes an S, an -ED, or an -ING.

JK: Right, that’s true. And that’s why the S is so powerful. “Cat” becomes “cats,” for instance.

JC: Exactly. That’s due to the inflectional nature of English. If we were playing in Finnish, where root vowels change with inflection, the S would be useless.

JK: Yes, the inflectional thing. But here’s what I wanted to ask: you personally have a deep engagement with language. You speak multiple languages. Your LinkedIn profile says you can even translate into Classical Greek. I’ve known you for a long time, and I didn’t know that.

Your father—who’s passed away—spoke dozens of languages, right?

JC: At least forty. I tried to speak a few languages better than he did. I knew I could go deeper, but not broader.

JK: And these weren’t just closely related languages—like the guy who says he speaks five and then lists Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian. He spoke, like, Uzbek, didn’t he?

JC: Yes. He had native or near-native fluency in English, French, German, Spanish, Swedish, Russian, and Japanese.

JK: Very different languages. Russian in particular—that’s a tough one. My family’s from Russia, and I can barely manage a few words. But back to you. You obviously have a deep passion for language. What about elite Scrabble players generally?

Do they come to the game out of a love of language? Or is it more about the technical and geometric aspects—the memorisation, the tactics? Are there players who genuinely love language, or are most just treating it as a system to optimise?

JC: I think there was a time—maybe until the 1970s or ’80s—when the best players did have a passion for language. Then came the people who were passionate about mathematics and gaming. It predates me, but in the ’70s and ’80s, the game evolved.

People were obsessed with Scrabble in the 1950s. But by the 1970s, serious players realised you could play it like chess—you could play to win, not just to show off your vocabulary.

At that point, a bit of a schism occurred.

JK: That’s interesting.

JC: What I think is Scrabble’s greatest strength is that, while experts have developed a version of the game that’s largely inaccessible to the average person, it hasn’t resulted in what some people call a “grognard capture”—where a game dies because it becomes exclusively for experts.

Scrabble remains accessible at all levels. You can use it to teach spelling to children in primary school. Parents and grandparents can play it with their kids. You can even play it on dates, as a neutral way of engaging with someone.

JK: Okay, John, come on. That’s pathetic. You had me until the date thing.

By the way, we’re both Canadian. You must know the animated short film from the National Film Board of Canada—possibly from the 1970s or ’80s. It features a middle-aged couple playing Scrabble while nuclear war erupts around them. It’s very dark, but very Canadian.

JC: Yes, I know it well.

JK: It becomes this apocalyptic metaphor. Their entire relationship’s dysfunction is played out through Scrabble. It’s hardly a great date-night endorsement.

JC: It’s a good first date game. I wouldn’t recommend it as a marriage-sustaining game—unless both people play the same type of Scrabble. Either they’re both literary Scrabble players, or they’re both competitive players. You can’t mix the two in a relationship and expect peace.

JK: But isn’t the literary Scrabble player arguably more insufferable than the competitive one? They’ll go on about the etymology after they play a word.

JC: Well, if you’re married to someone like that, you’ve either got to accept it—or avoid playing Scrabble with them.

Now, speaking of mixed environments—the events where I do have to watch out for serious conflict are the most international ones. Because Scrabble-playing cultures vary dramatically around the world. What’s normal behaviour in one culture may seem suspicious or even like cheating in another.

JK: Can you give an example? Without naming countries—just say, “In Country X, it’s considered impolite to…”

JC: Sure. Let’s talk about personal space.

In some cultures, it’s perfectly normal for your friends to stand right next to you—touching you—while you’re playing Scrabble. In others, civilised people are expected to stand at least two metres apart.

JK: I once watched a high-level Canadian Scrabble final with you in a hotel. I was excited to see it, but had to leave the room because you said no spectators allowed. Why’s that?

JC: It’s because Scrabble isn’t an open-information game. Each player has private information—their rack. If a spectator inadvertently gasps or claps when they see a strong rack, it could interfere with gameplay.

JK: Right. So someone could look at the player’s rack, bang their chair three times to indicate an S, and signal covertly. I thought you were worried about people giving actual advice.

JC: That happens too. Especially in international events, where groups of players speak in languages others don’t understand. There are accusations—“You’re talking to your friends!”—and the concern is they might be revealing information, even unintentionally.

JK: So do you ever have to step in and say, “Everyone, clear out until the match ends”?

JC: Absolutely. I had to do that just this past week at the North American Championship.

We have some boards roped off with stanchions for live-streaming. But there was a critical match happening just outside that area that would determine who made the finals. A crowd started gathering, and you could see the players getting uncomfortable.

So I had to get our biggest, beefiest division leader to help move people back and set up another barrier. It’s not a contact sport, but sometimes it feels like crowd control at a concert.

JK: Let me ask you a little about the gender issue. We had a Harvard scholar write a great piece for Quillette about gender dynamics in chess. One of the fascinating points she made—which I hadn’t realised—is that a lot of women, perhaps more than men, are drawn to word games.

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When I try to introduce tabletop games to my wife and daughters, I tend to have more success with games involving words—Codenames, for example.

But the pattern this scholar described is that, at the recreational level, you’ll often see Scrabble clubs or meetups dominated by women. Yet, the higher you go—into elite competition, where people are spending thirty hours a week on the game—the gender ratio flips, and it’s mostly men.

Is this something that you and other tournament organisers talk about? Gender balance? The atmosphere in the community? It’s a big conversation in chess now. Is it also a live topic in Scrabble?

JC: Yes, it’s something we’ve always been aware of.

In our top expert division, I’d say at least 95 percent of players identify as male. That’s not necessarily the case across the board. In the lower divisions, the balance is much closer to 50/50.

JK: But just the fact that they’re at a tournament at all suggests they’ve passed a certain recreational threshold, right?

JC: Yes, exactly. And if I mention what I do to someone I’ve just met, people often say, “Oh, I love playing Scrabble!” Based on that very anecdotal evidence, more women than men tend to say it. Though to be fair, I may simply be having those conversations more often with women.

JK: That tracks with my own experience. When people mention tabletop games to me unprompted, word games are usually the most popular.

JC: Yes. I also think that to immerse yourself in tabletop gaming—to make it a major focus of your life—you have to be neurodivergent in some way. Neurotypical people don’t usually think that playing board games all the time is a proper adult activity. They infantilise it.

JK: Which is weird—but it does happen.

JC: Right. I mean, if playing games were such a bad thing, why would you encourage your kids to do it? Clearly, it’s not grooming them for something illicit.

Just this past week, in talking with female players at our event, I was reminded that…

JK: …maybe it’s more socially stigmatised for girls who are neurodivergent?

JC: Exactly. I don’t know what the situation is now, but even when my kids were in kindergarten—so, not that long ago—if a boy was acting out or poorly socialised, people would often chalk it up to “boys being boys.” It wasn’t seen as pathological, just typical male behaviour.

Whereas girls were already expected to be well-behaved. So if they were wired differently, they had a harder time adapting, socially and emotionally.

JK: That makes sense. Let me ask a related question about brain wiring.

I remember a few years ago, there were two great Scrabble players competing against each other. I asked you who you thought would win. You said—this stuck with me—“Well, Player A is brilliant, but Player B has something wrong with their brain.”

JC: Yes.

JK: You laughed at your own quote! But it’s such a perfect description. It applies across a lot of highly specialised fields. Like, with Nigel Richards—who we’ve mentioned—he’s won Scrabble world championships in at least three languages. Who knows? Maybe he’s won others in secret.

I don’t want to say there’s something wrong with his brain, but it’s clear that his cognitive profile is very different from the average person you meet at a supermarket.

JC: Right. I should say, when I say “there’s something wrong with someone’s brain,” I mean it in a specific way. It may come from my Japanese upbringing.

In Japanese, the word chigau can mean either “wrong” or “different.” Chigaimasu—“that’s different”—is used where in English you might say “that’s incorrect.” The two concepts are linguistically intertwined.

So when I say someone’s brain is “wrong,” I partly mean “different.” It’s not a value judgement. It’s a recognition that they’re wired differently.

JK: See, in Japanese class, I was taught that if you want to correct someone, you say chigaimasu because it’s more polite. Like, instead of saying, “You’re wrong,” you say, “There’s a difference in our realities.”

JC: Yes. Japanese is a language designed to help you avoid decapitation by accidental rudeness. The more polite you get, the less precise your language becomes.

My favourite example is the polite forms of the verbs “to go,” “to come,” and “to be present.” When you’re extremely polite, all three verbs become irasshaimasu. So you literally can’t tell whether someone is coming, going, or staying.

There was probably some poor guy, 500 years ago, who used the wrong form—said he was going when the master expected him to say he was coming—and he got his head chopped off. So, yes: ambiguity can be a survival strategy.

JK: That’s a great excuse. Maybe not for him—but in general.

JC: So, when I say a Scrabble player has something “wrong” with their brain, I mean they’re neurodivergent. Differently wired.

And that’s one of the reasons we run the North American Scrabble Players Association—it’s a therapeutic or rescue service for people whose brains are wired to play Scrabble. They may do well at other things, but they thrive once they find this community of like-minded people.

JK: Let me ask you about that. I remember you once told me about a brilliant Scrabble player—I'll leave the name out—who was also a professional cryptographer.

JC: Are we talking about the same person? I thought he was only allowed to say he worked for the Ministry of Defence.

JK: Well, does he still work there?

JC: Actually, he doesn’t.

JK: Right. So cryptography—it’s not something that would have occurred to me as a natural crossover, but it makes total sense.

JC: Mm-hmm.

JK: You and I both know that tabletop gaming isn’t a single hobby—it’s a constellation of hobbies. Personally, I enjoy wargaming. And when you play complex wargames, you meet lots of systems engineers and database managers. People who have to assimilate a lot of rules and data.

We have a mutual friend who works for a currency exchange company—he’s got to keep loads of information organised in his head.

Meanwhile, if you play role-playing games like Dungeons & Dragons, you tend to meet more artistic people—more into storytelling or fantasy.

So with Scrabble, what’s the profile? Putting aside neurotypical vs. neurodivergent for the moment, is there a typical profession or personality type that dominates?

Because with elite chess players, as Danny Rensch points out in his book, many of them end up teaching chess or running chess websites. It’s a whole ecosystem.

Does Scrabble have that kind of structure, or is there a professional pattern among high-level players?

JC: There’s not a lot of money to be made adjacent to Scrabble. The winner of our national championship took home $10,000—from a total prize pool of $50,000.

JK: I bet that’s higher than it was twenty years ago, though?

JC: Actually, it’s about the same as it was twenty years ago.

JK: Really? Why hasn’t it grown? In chess, you’ve got things like chess.com and live-streaming, which exploded during COVID. Suddenly there was a lot more money in the game.

JC: Yes, and there’s been a bit of that in Scrabble as well. We’ve had live-streaming for years, but it was very primitive. It wasn’t monetised. Now there are YouTubers making some money. It’s a growing side of the community.

And yes, the pandemic helped. It hurt the in-person scene, of course—but curiously, it helped in Canada.

JK: How so?

JC: There was a post-pandemic exodus from big cities. People moved to the East Coast. A lot of Scrabble players relocated there, and previously, there hadn’t been enough population density to support clubs.

Now we’ve got three clubs in provinces where we had none before.

JK: Interesting.

JC: So, going back to your original question—what do Scrabble players do outside of Scrabble?

The strange thing is that every Scrabble player thinks they’ve found their tribe when they enter the community. They assume everyone else is wired exactly the same way and has the same interests.

But they don’t.

There is a decent overlap with baseball fans. Baseball has stats and memorisation, so there’s affinity. But maybe only ten percent of Scrabble players are into baseball.

Then you’ve got the chess overlap. Again, maybe 5–10 percent. Some people are musical. Some are mathematically gifted.

So when we organise big events, we try to offer a range of after-hours activities to keep people engaged. We usually have an open mic music night, for example.

JK: That tracks. I’ve noticed there’s a weird overlap between computer programming and musical ability. A lot of coders play instruments.

JC: Yes. And if there’s a baseball stadium nearby—even minor league—we’ll often organise a group outing.

JK: That’s fascinating. Let’s talk about age. In chess, you get these incredible prodigies—thirteen or fourteen years old—who peak early. Some of them start to decline in their twenties.

Sure, the truly elite stay at the top into their thirties or even forties, but many burn out young. Is it the same in Scrabble? Are there teenage phenoms?

JC: We’ve had world champions as young as nineteen. More typically, players in their twenties pose the greatest threat to us older players.

But it’s not uncommon for someone in their forties, fifties, or sixties to win a major tournament. Scrabble isn’t just about memorising the word list. Younger players may have an easier time memorising words, but older players know more tricks. They’ve acquired experience that helps them navigate unusual board positions.

That said, the pandemic changed things.

JK: How?

JC: It resulted in too much knowledge transfer from older to younger players. Before the pandemic, younger players would have to attend a lot of in-person events to reach a top level. Now, they can play thousands of games online and study expert tactics.

So the advantage older players had—due to sheer volume of gameplay—is eroding.

JK: You should find out who the snitch is.

Let me ask you something related: where do players plateau?

There’s this idea from Malcolm Gladwell about the “10,000-hour rule”—that you need to put in that much time to become world class.

JC: That’s a reasonable estimate for Scrabble as well.

JK: See, I find that idea kind of useless. I’ve learned lots of games and I know when I’ve hit a ceiling. I was the lowest board on my college chess team, and I could just tell I wasn’t going to get better.

I’d be on a plane, and some ten-year-old from Russia would destroy me. That’s when I gave up chess. I knew my brain just wasn’t built for it. I could spend 100,000 hours and not improve.

JC: I gave up chess in high school for similar reasons. I had a classmate from Hungary whose father was the correspondence chess champion of the world. He’d been playing with his dad since he was three.

JK: Well, he saved you time, didn’t he? He showed you what a chump you were.

But is Scrabble the same? Do people plateau?

JC: Absolutely. If you don’t have a Scrabble-shaped brain, you’re probably never going to make it to a tournament, let alone win one.

We had a slogan a few years ago: “If you can beat all your friends at Scrabble, you need new friends.”

JK: That’s oddly cultish. Encouraging people to abandon their peer group!

JC: They just haven’t found the right friends yet.

But yes, people plateau.

We roughly divide players into novice, intermediate, expert, and world-class. Some people stay at the same rating their whole lives—they never leave a 100-point Elo range.

It’s not always about ability. Sometimes it’s about time and commitment.

Unless you’re at the very top, you always know that, with more time and study, you could improve. If you devoted yourself to it—learned all the two- and three-letter words, the high-probability sevens and eights—you could raise your rating.

Right now, my rating is probably a pathetic 1600. But if I dropped everything else and studied full-time for three months, I could get to 1800, maybe even 1900 with a lucky streak.

JK: And memory fades, right? Especially with age.

JC: Exactly. You’re constantly forgetting. If you want to maintain a certain level, you need to keep retraining. You’ll forget the words otherwise.

So if you train at a certain level, you can hold your rating. Train harder, and it will go up.

Will you become world champion? Maybe not. But…

JC: I had a friend who asked how she could get from expert to world champion. What words should she learn? In what order? What method?

I told her, if you want to be world champion, you need to learn all the words. Use whatever memorisation method works for you—alphabetical, frequency, whatever. Just create a schedule.

You can learn all the words in a year. Just divide the list by day.

JK: How many words are in the North American Scrabble Dictionary?

JC: You’d think I’d have that number memorised. It’s around 200,000.

JK: That, in itself, is a self-selection filter. The kind of person willing to memorise 200,000 words—without even learning the definitions—is probably one percent of the population.

JC: Yes.

JK: I stopped playing chess because memorising the openings was too much work. What you’re describing sounds like even more work.

JC: It’s comparable. And you can try to justify it by saying you’re learning useful words—but you’re probably not.

Still, it’s an argument people make to Ministries of Education—not just in Thailand, but in Pakistan, Nigeria, and other African countries. Scrabble is seen as a gamified form of English education.

I don’t think it’s a terrible idea. But it’s not as effective as its proponents claim.

JK: Is there a variation of Scrabble where you have to know the definition of a word? Because that would be a cool variant—and one where I might actually be competitive.

JC: I’m willing to give that a try with you, if you’d like to play it that way.

JK: No, you’d still beat me. But it might raise my level slightly above its usual terribleness.

JC: Some people do play informally with that rule. Actually, I once organised a tournament for the American Translators Association where you could play words in any language you liked—but you had to identify the language, and ideally define the word.

JK: You told me about that.

JC: I also let them score the word as if it were played using the Scrabble set for that language. For instance, if you played the word whisky—which is valid in both English and French—you’d score more if you declared it as French. That’s because the W is worth 10 points in French, but only 4 in English.

JK: Isn’t K a curiously rare consonant in French?

JC: Yes. K is worth either 8 or 10 points in French Scrabble.

JK: Does Scrabble discriminate against languages that use ideographs or syllabaries, like Japanese or Chinese?

JC: Yes. There are Japanese games that resemble Scrabble, but they’re not taken as seriously. The issue is design.

If your language has, say, 47 syllables—like Japanese kana—then a Scrabble set for that language would need far more tiles. A standard English set has 100 tiles. You’d need a much bigger set—and a bigger bag.

JK: And getting that bag over your head could be physically dangerous.

JC: Exactly. We do offer accommodations for players with disabilities who can’t raise the bag that high. But even so, a Japanese Scrabble set would require a larger board as well.

So most Japanese word games use fewer tiles and involve forming anagrams or manipulating tiles in other ways—like moving them between words so you don’t need multiple copies of the same syllable. It’s a different dynamic.

JK: Okay, last question—because I’ve had you on for at least an hour.

JC: A good hour.

JK: The Queen’s Gambit—did you ever watch that series?

JC: I’ve had it recommended to me many, many times. It’s on my watch list, but I haven’t seen it yet.

JK: That’s how I feel about most TV shows. I did watch a little of it.

Back to chess—as a reference point for serious tabletop games. Rensch, in his book, says there were two big factors in the rise of chess.com: COVID, and The Queen’s Gambit. That show had a quantum effect on the chess world. It drove huge growth—among both boys and girls.

Now, this is a serious question—and I’m saying that mostly to our listeners, because I can already hear them sniggering.

JC: Are they in the room with you right now?

JK: Yes. So—do you think it’s theoretically possible to make a serious, high-quality film or TV series about the world of competitive Scrabble?

Not a novelty documentary—“Let’s meet the weirdos who play Parcheesi”—but an actual drama, taken at face value, with characters who happen to be elite Scrabble players.

Could that work?

JC: There was a book, about twenty years ago, called Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis. That had the biggest impact we’ve seen—comparable, in a way, to The Queen’s Gambit effect.

JK: Word Freak—okay. That title sounds a bit derogatory.

JC: Yes. But Stefan is a very entertaining journalist. And I’ll give him a plug—his latest book is an exposé about the Merriam-Webster Dictionary Company. It’s called Unabridged.

He was heavily promoting it at our recent event. The first national championship after Word Freak came out drew 800 players—more than double the usual number. Most of them came because they’d read the book, which was a New York Times bestseller.

We thought, great—now we’ll have twice as many players forever. But that’s not what happened.

JK: Word Freak, heal thyself.

JC: Yes. We’ve got about 2,000 regular tournament players in North America. We estimate there are maybe 10,000 people out there with the skills and interest—but they haven’t found us yet.

So we need something like a film or book to reach their friends and families—someone who can say, “Hey, this sounds like you.” Then they find their way to a club or tournament.

It does happen. There are occasional projects that break out, and that’s part of why we run national championships—to generate visibility. That’s also why we support YouTubers—to get the word out.

JK: Okay, so if someone’s listening to this, and they love Scrabble, but they’ve outgrown their friends, their spouse, their local flunkies—what should they do?

Let’s say they’re in North America. Where do they go next?

JC: First, they can go to our website: ScrabblePlayers.org. Or just search for NASPA—the North American Scrabble Players Association.

But not the other NASPA, or the other other NASPA. It’s a mess of acronyms.

JK: John, I’m trying to promote your product and you’re making it so complicated.

JC: Even Scrabble players tend to dislike change.

And look, going to a club or a tournament can be a big step. It took me three months to get up the courage.

I started playing online—just as a distraction while I was working on my thesis. Then the people I was playing with said, “You know you can do this in real life, right?”

And I thought, “Why would I want to do that?”

Eventually they persuaded me. And yes—it was a life-changing experience. But it does take time to get used to the idea.

As an intermediate step, there’s a pandemic project that some friends of mine started. It gives you a tournament-like experience online. I’d like to promote that as well.

The site is wugles.io. Don’t ask why it’s called that—W-U-G-L-E-S dot I-O.

It’s basically the chess.com of Scrabble.

JK: Say that again?

JC: Wugles dot I-O.

JK: Okay.

JC: The reason it’s not called anything Scrabble-related is because “Scrabble” is a registered trademark of Hasbro in the US and Canada, and of Mattel elsewhere.

And nothing I’m saying should be construed as being endorsed or affiliated with Hasbro or Mattel.

JK: That’s good to clarify. Because I was definitely construing that.

JC: Right. And that, by the way, is why there hasn’t been a Scrabble movie—and why there likely won’t be one.

You’d need the approval of both Hasbro and Mattel. In the past, they’ve been bitter rivals.

And in the global film industry, if you can’t get worldwide rights, the project likely won’t happen. There has to be the potential for global release.

But—if someone did acquire the rights? Or if the trademark lapsed? Yes, you could absolutely make an entertaining Scrabble film.

You just need to attend a tournament—see what people get up to between games and after hours. It’s all there.

JK: Well, I’ll leave that to our listeners. Maybe one of them works in film development and will pick up the idea.

John Chew, thank you so much for doing this. You’ve been extremely generous with your time, and I appreciate your sense of humour and the depth of your knowledge. I always learn something new when I speak with you.

JC: Thank you, Jonathan. I really enjoyed the conversation. It’s always a pleasure.

JK: And good luck at your next tournament—or adjudication, or panel-light adjustment. Whatever you end up doing next.

JC: Thank you. And best of luck to you as well—with your chess, your Scrabble, and your Canadian short films about the end of the world.