RD201904

The

NORTH

AMERICAN

SCRABBLE

CHAMPIONSHIP

joel sherman, age 57,

New York, New York

Were you always good

at Scrabble? Well, I was

beating my mother reg-

ularly when I was eight.

Your older brother,

Larry Sherman, also

plays. Are you the Ser-

ena and Venus Williams

of the Scrabble world?

He’s not as close to me

as Venus is to Serena.

We’re more like the

McEnroe brothers.

We’re usually in the

same division, but

he’s on the lower end.

When did you realize

you were going to

Do you have a favorite

letter? The C. A lot of

starting-out players are

afraid of C’s b e c a u s e

they don’t make any

two-letter words. But I

did a survey of the dic-

tionary and found that

the C starts more words

than any other letter in

the alphabet except S.

It also combines well

with H, L, R, and S and

ends a lot of adjectival

words. So it’s massively

powerful.

Wait, you did a “survey”

of the dictionary? How

many words do you

know? Probably around

120,000.

win the championship?

Not until the very last

draw. I had four tiles

left, and I took the last

three tiles out of the

bag: two blanks and an

S. It allowed me to

bingo out—play all

seven tiles and earn a

50-point bonus.

What was your

winning word?

Strings!

The North American

Scrabble Championship

will take place this July

in Reno, Nevada.

14 april 2019 | rd.com illustration by John Cuneo

Reader’s Digest

I WON!