An Ottawa mathematician is a two-time Scrabble World Champion.
Adam Logan won the 2025 championship in Ghana, defeating Nigel Richards, a five-time champion and regarded as the best Scrabble player of all time.
Speaking to CTV Your Morning Ottawa on Tuesday, Logan, who won his first championship in 2005, said this latest title means a lot to him.
“It’s a wonderful feeling. I won the title 20 years ago and it’s taken me a long time to get back to the level that I was at then. And to play in the final against the legendary Nigel Richards made it perhaps even more special than it would have been otherwise,” he said.
Adam won the best-of-seven final 4 games to 2 and said beating Richards was no easy feat.
“No one can beat him without a certain amount of luck, but I think that, in most of the games in the final, I found most of the plays that I made and mostly made correct choices,” he said. “The third game was really quite miraculous, that I was able to come back from a long way behind. Then, in the last game, things just went my way. I had some high-scoring plays in the beginning of the game, and I was able to restrict his opportunities toward the end.”
Adam pointed out the word “infamies” in his third match, which gained him more than 100 points, “just when things were seeming completely hopeless,” he said.
“It got me right back into the game.”
Becoming a Scrabble master
Adam says there are two parts to becoming an expert Scrabble player.
“One part is mastering the dictionary, the list of acceptable words,” he said.
In the lead-up to the championship, Logan said he studied for about an hour a day and was constantly learning new words.
The other part is knowing how to make the right moves.
“You learn to do that by playing games against strong opponents and then by analyzing them afterward with a computer to find what you might have done, what you should have done,” he said.
“I study words at home and pretty much every week when I’m in Ottawa, I go to the Ottawa Scrabble Club, which has a remarkable number of strong players.”
His knowledge of advanced mathematics isn’t used in the actual playing of the game, he says, but it does come in handy.
“Having some basic idea of probability, so that you know what you’re likely to draw out of the bag, is helpful, and I think that there is some overlap in the mindset of making a logical, systematic, step-by-step analysis of things,” he said. “And also, I think being willing to absorb some of the apparently arbitrary contents of the dictionary.”
While “infamies” was a literal game-changer for him, he said his most recent favourite word is “blit.”
“(It) was the word I played toward the end of the last game in the final when I knew I was going to win,” he said. “It’s an operation in computer graphics when you’re transferring an image from one part of memory to another.”
