Before I continue on with my post, I'll share an article about that:
From AZCentral: World Scrabble record set in Ahwatukee tournament
Laurie Cohen, a Tempe resident and founder of Tempe Scrabble Club, called her mother in New York at the close of the 25th Annual Phoenix Scrabble Tournament held at Grace Inn in Ahwatukee last weekend .
"I told her, 'I've got good news and bad news. The bad news is I did really crappy in the tournament; the good news is I might have gotten in the Guinness Book of World Records,'" said Cohen, who became the newest member of the Competitive Scrabble 700 Club by scoring 725 points in one game.
Cohen and her opponent, Arizona State University sophomore Nigel Peltier, scored a total 1,127 points, surpassing the previous Guinness record of 1,108.
The record requires the tournament game be without "phonies": words not found in the dictionary but sometimes successfully played without challenge. This match had none.
The world-record setting game Monday, the last day of competition, was the 19th of the 20-game tournament.
Cohen, director of institutional research at Scottsdale Community College, also became only the 13th tournament player to top 700 since 1981.
"It was just one game," said Cohen. "I'm playing in the top division where everybody is really, really good and I won only 9 of 20 games. But that one was exciting."
Though Peltier is a member of the Tempe Scrabble Club that Cohen founded five years ago, they've faced off only a handful of times.
The high score and Cohen's high point one-game tally crowned the 25th anniversary of the Phoenix Scrabble Tournament founded by Chandler resident Barbara Van Alen. Van Alen, a high-ranking national Scrabble competitor, won the National Scrabble Association's Co-Director of the Year Award in 2004 and is co-director of the Phoenix Scrabble Club, which hosted the Ahwatukee hosted the tournament and attracted players from Canada and throughout the U.S. including Hawaii.
Her co-director and husband Larry Rand said the Cohen-Peltier world record (Peltier scored 402) and Cohen's high score were extraordinary.
"Very few people ever attain a 700-point game - even a 600 game is rare. And then to have a new world record set - well, everything just fell into place."
To prepare for tournament competition, Cohen - who began playing the game at age 10 and competitively at 16 - says she melds the old with the new.
"After reading 'Word Freak' (a 2001 book on competitive Scrabble by Stefan Fatsis, I made flashcards starting with the highest probability words, then I put all the words I didn't know on cards," she said, estimating her word cards now number 20,000 to 30,000. "I'm at my computer a lot at work so I get up and go for a walk and go through my cards. It's kind of an old-school way to study."
Like many other modern-day Scrabble players, she also makes use of specialized study software like Zyzzyva.
In my own quest to become a Scrabble tournament champion master, I'm not messing with Zyzzyva, but I have my own plans..
And I have my own obsessions.
One of which is to spell every word in the Scrabble dictionary.
I've been keeping track for the last 2 weeks - which is when I got the idea.
I've been playing on the Internet Scrabble Club (Wordbiz) - 3 games a day.
And yes...I do use a dictionary to find words - but I justify that because I am in training. Scrabble played on the internet doesn't count, only Scrabble played against live people - like at a tournament.
I've worked out that it will take me a minimum of 3 years to play every word...
We'll see how it goes.
