After 20 years of competitive playing, Adam Logan '95 has finally clinched first place at the World Scrabble Championship, held this weekend in London.
To claim the title of world champion, Logan had to out maneuver 101 opponents from around the world in three grueling days of competition. He took home a $15,000 check for the win.
Words like qanat and euripi spelled victory for Logan, who shut out his Thai opponent in the playoff.
"Just to be competitive, you need to memorize tens of thousands of words," said Logan, who had entered the competition five times previously.
After graduating from Princeton, Logan obtained a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley. He is currently studying number theory at the University of Montreal on a research grant.
He estimates that he has familiarity with some 86,000 words — of which he can define at least 64,000. That makes him something of an anomaly in the world of competitive Scrabble in that he can actually define most of the words in his playing arsenal.
Many of the world's best contestants come from countries where English is not the native language. The previous champion, Panupol Sujjayakorn, hailed from Thailand and is said to have had only a basic grasp of spoken English when he won.
"The top players have math or science careers," Logan said. "I suppose [to win] you have to be able to absorb more or less arbitrary information."
Learning words for Scrabble is like processing math theorems, said Logan, who specializes in algebraic number theory. Players must first read the work of a theorist and then, only much later, start to process and understand what they have read.
In addition, Logan suggested that knowledge of basic probability is helpful.
To those who do not follow competitive Scrabble, it might seem natural to compare the World Scrabble Championship to the World Series of Poker — a tournament routinely watched by University students.
But Logan said the analogy to poker was not particularly close.
"In poker, as I understand it, the largest part of the game is to out-psyche the opponents, to get them to think you're bluffing when you're not," he said. "But, in Scrabble, psychology plays a much smaller role."
The world championship for Scrabble also lacks the table chatter that is so prevalent throughout the World Series of Poker. Contestants may only speak to announce point values; otherwise, a strict rule of table silence is enforced. The insults, jokes and gestures seen during the World Series on ESPN are not allowed.
The subdued nature of Scrabble seems to suit Logan, however. He is a soft-spoken mathematician who recounts his successes in Scrabble and mathematics with modesty.
Logan's love for the game dates back to his childhood. He learned Scrabble from his parents and entered his first competitive tournament at age 10.
"Once, I was staying with my parents at a friend's cottage in the woods, when my mom stumbled across a book on Scrabble," he said. "Then, I first learned about competitive Scrabble. My mom called them, and for some reason the tournament let me compete."
Since then, Logan has competed in innumerable tournaments in the United States and Canada.
At the University, Logan routinely faced off against a resident math professor in Scrabble.
Logan, who has taught at the University of Liverpool, will soon take a post at the University of Waterloo in Canada.
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