A 29-year-old Montreal Scrabble player, Joshua Sokol pocketed the top $10,000 prize at a Las Vegas tournament after a “ferocious” best-of-five series.
The champion, who picked up the title in game five of the NASPA annual Scrabble Players Championship, said “I was somewhat in a state of shock. I just was trying to contain myself and to just finish the game.”
On the path to his eventual win, Sokol played a series of unusual words, including “patinaed,” which describes the corrosive green layer that forms on copper, like on the Statue of Liberty.
The coveted prize winner also played “veratrin,” a poisonous mixture of alkaloids formerly used in medicine, “alexia,” a neurological condition which renders patients unable to read, and “crostino,” which is a small piece of savoury toast.
Speaking with newsmen, Sokol said “It’s like solving a puzzle every turn,” explaining what it feels like to find complex and uncommon words during a game. “It feels like you found the missing piece.”
Records have it that Sokol has been playing high-level Scrabble for nearly two decades. According to him, he took to it as a child before he hit double digits, and that his newly-learned abilities made for quick, and frustrating, losses for his family members.
He said “It was my parents’ favourite board game,” adding he spent hours “word-surfing” to expand his arsenal on the board.
The history maker said “I didn’t care what the words meant. I didn’t care to use them in sentences. I just cared that they scored me points and got me closer to victory.”
He averred that when he was 10, his mother took him to the Montreal Scrabble Club to train with more advanced players. “The rest is history,” he said.
Walking in that room was a big step up from the kitchen-table games he had gotten used to at home.
Sokol, who described the community as being made up of “mostly retired” players, said “There were a few younger players, but not as young as me”. Long-time club manager and storied memoir-writer Bernard Gotlieb took him under his wing and showed him how to play for real. After that, Sokol started to win.
He recounted that “The first time I ever won in a challenge, which is when you call your opponents play off of the board, because it’s not a word,” adding that “my opponent played ‘HH’ as a two letter word. I knew my two letter words.”
He was right, and the challenge made for one of his first victories at the club. “I was just in a state of pure elation,” he said.
Sokol now describes himself as “Scrabble influencer,” with hundreds of gameplay videos posted on YouTube.
According to him, he plans to hold classes for new players and grow Montreal’s Scrabble community. He also wants to spend more time on his online videos.
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