Montreal Scrabble champion picks up $10,000 prize at Las Vegas tournament
CTV
A Montreal Scrabble player picked up the top $10,000 prize at a Las Vegas tournament after a 'ferocious' best-of-five series on Wednesday.'I was somewhat in a state of shock,' said 29-year-old Joshua Sokol, who picked up the title in game five. 'I just was trying to contain myself, and to just finish the game.'
A Montreal Scrabble player picked up the top $10,000 prize at a Las Vegas tournament after a “ferocious” best-of-five series on Wednesday.
“I was somewhat in a state of shock,” said 29-year-old Joshua Sokol, who picked up the title in game five of the NASPA annual Scrabble Players Championship. “I just was trying to contain myself and to just finish the game.”
On the path to his eventual win, Sokol played a series of unusual words, including “patinaed,” which describes the corrosive green layer that forms on copper, like on the Statue of Liberty.
Sokol also played “veratrin,” a poisonous mixture of alkaloids formerly used in medicine, “alexia,” a neurological condition which renders patients unable to read, and “crostino,” which is a small piece of savoury toast.
“It's like solving a puzzle every turn,” Sokol told CTV, explaining what it feels like to find complex and uncommon words during a game. “It feels like you found the missing piece.”
Sokol has been playing high-level Scrabble for nearly two decades. He says he took to it as a child before he hit double digits, and that his newly-learned abilities made for quick, and frustrating, losses for his family members.
“It was my parents’ favourite board game,” he said, adding he spent hours “word-surfing” to expand his arsenal on the board.
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