B.C. whiz emerges as Scrabble champ
Catherine Rolfsen, Vancouver Sun
After wiping out the competition and snagging the $12,000 grand prize at an
international Scrabble championship in Dayton, Ohio, James Leong insists his win
was a fluke.
“I’m still in shock,” said the 22-year-old Vancouver word whiz as he sat in an
Ohio airport, hours after his win today. “I don’t think I deserve it at all, but
I’m just happy.”
After playing 31 games over five days, Leong became the first Vancouverite to
win the annual tournament, which drew 453 of the top players in the world.
For his final game, Leong was up against Jerry Lerman, a Californian who’s been
playing for 20 or 30 years.
“It can be quite unnerving when you’ve just started out on it,” Leong said of
the competition. “It’s so silent and yet there’s so many people around and the
only thing you hear is little rattling of tiles on wood. It’s sort of eerie.”
With both players laying down some solid words — Leong made PAGURID for 72
points while Lerman scored 73 with QUIETUDE — the final game was close. Until
the last move. Lerman had the tiles to spell OTALGIC, and Leong knew it: he’d
been keeping track of every tile laid in the game.
But with time running out, the veteran player spelled CITOLA instead, missing
the bonus for playing all seven letters.
“He, I guess, got pretty rattled, and just whipped down the first word that came
to him,” Leong said.
The crucial error kept Leong firmly in the lead, and he lay down RAX to seal the
deal.
Leong, a second-year University of B.C. law student, may say he’s lucky, but his
Scrabble mentor, Judy McLean, disagrees.
“He has a lightning mind,” said McLean.
Speed is key to professional Scrabble championships in which, unlike your
average kitchen-table game, players have a total of 25 minutes each to make all
their moves.
McLean met Leong as his professor when he was studying biochemistry at UBC, a
degree he completed at 18. The Saskatoon native completed high school in two
years, McLean said, and is now well on his way to a career as a lawyer.
Leong started playing Scrabble online, but got involved in the Vancouver
Scrabble Club and loved the social aspect of the game.
“He’s truly an amazing young man,” said Valerie Gallant, a club director. “He
blows me away actually.”
Gallant said Leong started playing the game competitively four years ago.
“He just flew up the ranks,” she said. “He’s very, very good.”
Leong credits his success to the fact that he doesn’t take competitive Scrabble
that seriously.
“I just thought, ‘OK, I just want to go and make sure I play a good game and
that’s it,’” he said.
He does admit he has developed an addiction to memorizing lists of Scrabble
words, many of which he can’t define.
In fact, McLean said, some of the top players are non-English speakers. Leong
said he never thought he had a chance at the top prize, since the main reason he
competes is to meet those who share his passion — which he admits not all his
friends and family understand.
“Even though there’s a very competitive atmosphere when the tournament is on, as
soon as it’s off there’s a very close sense of kinship, of camaraderie, because
everybody’s involved in the same, quite nerdy, habit,” he laughed.
copyright Vancouver Sun 2007
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