This year Fort Wayne hosted the North American SCRABBLE Championship on August 5-10.
Heather McCann traveled to Fort Wayne from Toronto and says she would love to see the North American SCRABBLE competition return to the Summit City.
“Here in Fort Wayne, they’ve made us feel very welcomed,” McCann said.
She’s in her 40s, but age doesn’t matter in SCRABBLE. She loses to younger players and wins against older players. Sixteen-year-old and third-place winner Mack Meller says he’s been playing since he was 4 years old.
“It’s always fun to make a really clever play or play a really cool word for a lot of points and I really enjoy that,” Meller said.
North American SCRABBLE grand champion David Gibson played the word “quinines” and earned more than 90 points for that one word.
Gibson won the championship for the second time in his life. He had won the North American SCRABBLE championship once before, in 1994. Gibson is also a math teacher and says the game is just as much about math as it is about vocabulary.
“And it’s all about probabilities, percentages, you’re constantly thinking about, if I do this what’s the chance my opponent can do this or do that and hurt me,” Gibson said.
A spokesman for Visit Fort Wayne says the more than 400 Scrabble competitors will bring in about $235,000 to the city.
