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During the Worlds, competitors play eight games a day for three days. On day two Wiegand meets his first opponent with less ceremony than yesterday and approximately two hours later has won his first two games.
Then things start going downhill. The score is uncomfortably close in his third game against a player from Japan. The letters on Wiegand’s rack tantalize him with the potential play AGAMOID (Wiegand has no idea what it means, but he thinks he’s studied it; after the game is over, he looks it up: resembling a lizard). If he plays it, he will win, but he can’t remember if it’s legitimate and shies from opening himself up to another challenge. He plays AGON instead, and it isn’t enough.
The Worlds follow the Official Scrabble Words International Edition—a word source that combines the dictionaries used by American and British Scrabble players. The British allow 25,000 additional words not played in U.S. tournaments. Americans are at a decided disadvantage in international competitions because everyone else plays the expanded word list regularly. American players have to memorize this new vocabulary strategically. Wiegand didn’t start practicing the OSWI lists until after the Scrabble All Stars tournament ended in August: “I didn’t want to learn a bunch of British words that I might accidentally use.”
In his next game, he leads with a British-only bingo, TRIDARN (a Welsh dresser having three tiers), but he’s been rattled by uncertainty.
He loses the following two games, and although he makes it as high as Table Six at one point, his wins and losses offset each other until the finish. He ends the tournament at Table 25, placing 55th.
“I just never made any progress,” says Wiegand. “Sometimes when I think I could have done better, it’ll affect the next game. You need to be able to shake it off and concentrate, but it’s tough.” A Thai player has become the 2003 Scrabble World Champion. “A guy from Thailand won . . . . they don’t even speak English,” marvels Wiegand.
