After five days of consecutive play, Conrad Bassett-Bouchard of Portland, OR was named winner of the 2014 National Scrabble Championship. Basset-Bouchard defeated several top Scrabble players, including defending four-time consecutive champion Nigel Richards, and receive a cash prize of $10,000. In the final round, he beat runner-up Jason Li with a final score of 478-350. Over 25 words were played, including “mar,” “annexe,” “naiad,” “florigen,” “aa,” and “barf.”
More than 500 Scrabble players played the tournament at the Buffalo Niagara Convention Center. Competitors played in 31 one-on-one games, and were ranked based on their victories and the number of points by which they outscored their opponents.
Also, for the first time, competitors were able to play “geocache,” a word chosen by fans in the Scrabble Word Showdown, along with “hashtag,” “frenemy,” and “selfie,” which had been added to the fifth edition of the Merriam-Webster’s Official Scrabble Players Dictionary released earlier this month.
