COLONIE — A soft clacking of tiles filled the ballroom at the Marriott hotel Saturday, as hundreds gathered to try their wordsmithing and strategy skills in the 2023 Scrabble “Word Cup.”
The all-ages championship started Friday and continues through Tuesday at the hotel on Wolf Road. This isn’t your typical game played around the kitchen table. Games are one-on-one within four divisions, using a timer and standard rules for playable words.
“People get a little better at Scrabble, and then their friends and family don’t want to play them anymore,” event director Josh Greenway said. “And that’s when they find us.”
The Albany area has hosted Scrabble championships for decades, but this is the first national championship it’s hosted, Greenway, 50, of Toronto, said. Around 250 people from across the globe signed up to play in the four-day tournament, some competitors from as far away as Ireland and Nigeria. Each day averages about eight games per player, with 31 games in total.
There are also shorter “warm-up” introductory rounds for new players. Greenway also encourages amateur players to find local clubs near them.
Vaasu Taneja, a 27-year-old graduate student at the University at Albany, found a local club through a posting at Colonie’s William K. Sanford Town Library. Sessions were held at an area church, where they learned basic rules and strategies, such as memorizing all usable two-letter words, though a favorite of theirs is building larger words. (Some words you might not know that Scrabble players do? Here are just a few: xylyl, qi, caziques. Look ’em up.)
“For the more experienced players it seems like they can bingo whenever they want,” they said, referring to when a player uses all seven tiles on a word.
For mother and daughter Katya Lezin, 58, and Hannah Lieberman, 27, who have been playing since Lieberman was a child, the championship is less…
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