On Scrabble grandmasters and Scrabble growth
You know what I noticed at Word Cup this year? There was an extra little bit at stake this time, compared to past major championships. You could feel the extra tension in the air. Was there glory on the line? Sure, but that's nothing new. Prize money? Of course. Rating points? Absolutely. But this year, there was something more.
I'm referring, of course, to WESPA titles and norms, which arrived on the scene in 2026 and have given Scrabble players everywhere newfound incentive to step up their game. At select WESPA-rated tournaments, players can now take concrete steps toward putting official titles next to their names - Master. International Master. Grandmaster. These distinctions were on the line in Williamsburg, and it was definitively A Thing. People were buzzing about it. Everyone wanted a shot at getting that next norm and inching closer to that coveted "M," "IM," or "GM." It mattered.
I can understand why. Earning a title like this is clearly a monumental Scrabble achievement. In a way, it's even better than winning a tournament - it's arguably something that's more permanent. Who won the Word Cup title two years ago, five years ago, 10 years ago? You might not remember. But who's got that Grandmaster title? That one sticks with you for life, and no one can ever take it away from you. So it stands to reason that at a tournament like Word Cup, people are going to want those norms. Oftentimes, they want them bad.
In the end, three players at Word Cup achieved new titles. Will Anderson pulled off the double whammy - he captured the Word Cup championship and the GM distinction at the same time. Pretty incredible weekend of Scrabble! Ben Schoenbrun also reached grandmasterhood in dramatic fashion, winning the final game of the tournament to get to the 19-win threshold he needed. And Brian Bowman, who entered the tournament as a WESPA master, emerged as an international master after a solid Word Cup performance of his own.
It's a pretty cool achievement for all three players, to say the least. And more broadly, it's a pretty cool thing for Scrabble that we all now have these titles to play for. From a player perspective, it makes it so every major tournament has just a little bit more riding on it - it juices things up competitively. And then, to the outside world, identifying the top players in our game with official titles does something significant - it legitimizes them and legitimizes the game. As we strive to promote Scrabble and show the world that it's a serious mind sport, honoring our top players is an important step.
This is just one of several steps that WESPA has been undertaking this year to create a brighter future for the world of Scrabble. If you zoom out a little bit, you'll see a lot of interesting stuff happening! The Summit Cup event, an elite invitational tournament open to only the top two dozen performers of the year, is an exciting new development, and I can't wait to see the inaugural event get underway in December. The WESPA YouTube channel, which is quickly becoming the go-to place for live Scrabble broadcasts, will undoubtedly be a great tool for growing the game. And there are some other structural reforms happening within WESPA that I'm sure we'll talk about at a later date. All in all, these are interesting times.
A lot of the steps that WESPA is taking to grow Scrabble, we have good reason to believe in - there's proof of concept because we've seen it in other games. The obvious comparison here is to chess, where titles like Grandmaster are obviously a huge deal - the top tournaments are all crawling with GMs and super-GMs, and everyone in the chess world knows the level of respect that a title like that commands. Likewise, the chess community has also had a great deal of success with growing and promoting elite invitational tournaments (look up the Sinquefield Cup, for example). And as for YouTube, forget about it. Chess video content has seen an explosion like none other over the last decade. We've seen all of these things work wonders in chess - why can't they produce the same results for us?
Maybe they can. Actually, come to think of it, maybe they already are - at least a little bit. Thinking back at how much buzz I heard about Grandmaster norms and such in that Word Cup playing room earlier this month, it's clear to me that exciting times are afoot in worldwide Scrabble. The stakes are heightening; the competition is getting fierce. The level of play in this game, around North America and around the world, is crazy high. And with every new titled player, and every successful YouTube broadcast, I get an extra little jolt of hope for the game's future. We're seeing new little bits of growth for Scrabble all the time. I hope we keep seeing more of them, and I'm optimistic that we will.