A Canadian mathematician says hours of practice to master the dictionary helped him defeat who many consider to be the greatest Scrabble player of all time.
Ottawa’s Adam Logan was crowned world champion for a second time after he defeated Nigel Richards of New Zealand at the World Scrabble Championships in Ghana in November. Logan, who was also named world champion in 2005, said that winning his second title by beating Richards was an honour.
“It was a really wonderful feeling,” Logan told CTV’s Your Morning on Wednesday.
“Nigel Richards is such a legend in the game that any time that you beat him, even in a single game, you feel that you’ve done something a little bit special, and to beat him in a best of seven matches is even more than that.”
Richards, dubbed the Tiger Woods of Scrabble, first became a world champion two years after Logan in 2007, and achieved the feat again in 2011, 2013, 2018 and 2019.
Richards also shocked the Scrabble world by winning the French language world championship in 2015 and 2018, as well as the Spanish speaking world championship in 2024 – despite not speaking either language.
Logan said in preparation, he attempted to master the dictionary as much as possible and practised choosing the right plays to make rather than looking for any weaknesses in Richards’ game, since it’s hard to find any.
To train, Logan said he uses a computer program that provides him with letters of a word in alphabetical order, and then he is tasked with replying with the correctly spelled word.
“I also play games against other strong players and analyze them by discussing with those players and with the help of a computer for that, as well,” he said.
Alongside Richards, Logan is one of three people to have won a world Scrabble championship twice, and his 2025 win is the latest in an illustrious Scrabble career of his own.
He entered his first competitive tournament at the age of 10 and his lifetime tournament earnings are estimated to be around US$110,000. An Ottawa native, Logan studied mathematics at Princeton University and earned a PhD from Harvard University in 1999.
Logan said that anyone can improve their Scrabble skills by simply practising and being watched by someone better, who can offer advice on how they would do things differently.
“But the first step, regardless, has to be to choose a dictionary and to learn some of the basic words, the two letter words, which allow you to place your words on the board with the help of what is already there,” he said.
Of those two letter words, he said his favourite to play is “qi,” the life force described in Chinese philosophy. As for the word he’s played for the most points, he said that was “antiques” for 275 points, “many years ago.”
