The 45th National Scrabble Championship is being held in Hamilton this weekend. Photo: 123RF
Hamiltonians are preparing for the 45th National Scrabble Championship hosted in the city this weekend.
Top players from across New Zealand and Australia are flying in to battle it out, tile by tile.
Reigning champion Howard Warner has 12 national titles already under his belt.
He said he started playing board games and doing puzzles as a child.
"Naturally I would gravitate towards the king of all word games when I was a bit older."
He said he was pretty relaxed about this weekend's competition.
"I've been doing it a long time now and I'd like to get the first game under my belt and at that point then that settles the nerves, butterflies in the stomach and then I'm fine."
Warner thought about 100 players would be competing this weekend although said it could be a struggle against other 'brain sports' such as chess and bridge.
Anyone who wants to follow the national champs can do so via a livestream on YouTube.
A good scrabble player does not just need to be a good speller, he said.
"To be honest you have to have a very good mathematical mind, believe it or not, there are a lot of things like probability theory come into it."
But Warner described himself as useless at maths "except in the context of scrabble".
Strategy was also important which involved knowing where to play which tiles and what to keep on your rack, as well as always looking ahead rather than just focusing on your next turn, he said.
At this level players did not just learn words or their meanings, he said.
"We learn huge numbers of anagrams, so a combination of seven or eight random letters and what they make, so that when we're playing a game the words can just leap into our minds straight away and we don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about it."
High level scrabble players also need to be competitive and have a "killer instinct", he said.
"Also what I can hang-in-ability where even if you're losing you just hang in and hang in and hang in, hoping that by the end you can turn the game just so that you can just end one point ahead of your opponent."
Warner said the highest scoring word he had ever played was fiberize which got him 252 points.
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