Who among us hasn't cheated at Scrabble at some point?
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Over the weekend I decided to go to a session called "Understanding Blockchains with Scrabble" at the 2018 Our Networks conference in Toronto, Ontario.
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When I first arrived over a decade ago, I was shocked to see men playing cards, dominos, and Scrabble at the steel tables, or holding quiet conversations while they smoked.
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Richards started playing competitive Scrabble at New Zealand's Christchurch Scrabble Club. Since beginning his competitive career in 1997, he has won about 75% of his tournament games, collecting an estimated USD200,000 in prize money. In 2000 Richards moved to Malaysia.
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In some markets in the Eastern time zone, the show was preempted by local news due to its 12:00 PM time slot. NBC stations in the Central and Pacific time zones usually preempted Scrabble at 11:30 for local news and aired Super Password at 11:00.
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Each of these communities has its own nakamal in Melsisi, and many of these nakamals have commercial kava bars alongside. In the local Apma language, the village's name is really Melsisii, with a long and stressed final vowel. Apma siisii means to scrabble at or disturb, and locals claim that the site got this name because inhabitants from upland villages were historically harassed when they came down to the sea.
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Gibson was introduced to Scrabble at age 6. He began playing tournament Scrabble in 1983 and won the North American Scrabble Championship (NASC) in August 1994; although he had kept a relatively low profile in the Scrabble community, the win propelled him to No. 1 in the North American rankings. In 1995, Gibson won the "Scrabble Superstars" tournament and its top prize of $50,000. Gibson finished second in the 2012 NASC; only needing to lose by fewer than 169 points to win the title, he ended up losing 298-475 in the final round against Nigel Richards.
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Games manufacturers Selchow and Righter, the owners of Scrabble at the time, approached Merriam-Webster Inc. to assist with the compilation of an official Scrabble dictionary. They proposed that words should be included in the new dictionary if they appeared in the five in-print collegiate dictionaries, namely The Random House College Dictionary (1968), The American Heritage Dictionary of the English Language (1969), Webster's New World Dictionary (1970), Merriam-Webster's Collegiate Dictionary (1973) and Funk & Wagnalls (1973). Main entries in the OSPD contain from two to eight letters since those are considered to be the most useful.
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Wright began playing Scrabble at 17 and has competed in U.S. national tournaments (under his nickname, Trey Wright) since 1992."Music Student is S-E-R-I-O-U-S About Scrabble" by David Kaplan, Rice News, 25 February 1999 (link ), retrieved 11/30/2007 He won the $25,000 first prize in the National Scrabble Championship of the United States in 2004, defeating former champion David Gibson by winning the first three games in a best-of-five final.2004 National SCRABBLE Championship (link ), retrieved 11/30/2007 During the 2004 finals a controversy arose as the result of a Scrabble play by Wright. He placed the word "LEZ" (slang for lesbian) on the board but was compelled by tournament officials to retract the move and play a different word, because the finals were being run with a list of over a hundred forbidden words (allowed during the preliminary rounds), instituted as a precondition to ESPN's plan to televise the finals at a later date. The incident was widely reported in the media, including on the BBC"TV Scrabble ruling lost for words," BBC News, 6 August 2004 (link ), retrieved 11/28/2007 and in Slate.
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