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2018 North American SCRABBLE Championship spells its way into Buffalo

Posted at 5:52 PM, Aug 07, 2018
and last updated 2018-08-07 17:52:40-04

The 2018 North American SCRABBLE Championship made it's way to the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center. The event Wednesday where one king or queen will be crowned the champion and walk away with $10,000. 

“I thought I should find out about tournaments so I went to my first tournament and came home with three trophies and figured out I was hooked," Karen Richards said, Brisbane, Australia native who traveled to Buffalo for the second time to compete. “It keeps my alive, it keeps me excited and I meet fantastic people.” 

The tournament began on August eighth and has welcomed over 400 players from all corners of the world. Skill sets are separated by divisions and the staff does their best to match up players with similar win totals. 

"People say that you can describe a person’s character over a round of golf, it’s the same thing for a round of scrabble,” Michael Tang said, who lives in Singapore. 

The SCRABBLE dictionary is a combination of different dictionaries, which is the reason many people accuse certain words as being 'SCRABBLE words,' when in reality, they are just words of a different origin. Yes, 'xi' and 'qi' are words. 

“My favorite SCRABBLE word is probably 'miaoued,' M-I-A-O-U-E-D, 5 vowels in a row, you don’t get to play words like that very often," Brett Constantine said, who drove over six hours from Massachusetts to play. “I could go get my Merriam Webster word nerd pin, we’re all really in love with this game.”

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