An Ottawa mathematician has proven that strategic wordplay can lead to global dominance, becoming only the third person in history to win multiple World Scrabble Championship titles.
From Cottage Discovery to World Stage
Adam Logan, an Ottawa-based mathematician, recently claimed his second World Scrabble Championship victory at a tournament in Accra, Ghana. His journey to becoming a Scrabble juggernaut began unexpectedly at age nine when he discovered his first Scrabble strategy book in a dusty corner of a Quebec cottage.
Two decades after winning his first world championship in London, England at age 30, Logan has now joined an elite group of multiple title holders. His lifetime Scrabble earnings have surpassed $100,000, accumulated through numerous tournament victories, often built one $300 win at a time.
The Championship Comeback
The path to victory wasn't easy. Logan faced Nigel Richards, widely considered the greatest Scrabble player of all time with five world championship titles to his name. Richards has also won championships in French and Spanish despite not speaking either language.
During the critical third game of the best-of-seven final match, Logan executed a spectacular comeback. He played "diopters" for 149 points across two triple-word squares, followed by "infamies" for 103 points. These two moves alone added 252 points to his score, erasing his opponent's lead and shifting the momentum in his favor.
"I had to consciously tell myself to slow down. Look at it for a few seconds. Make sure that you're spelling correctly," Logan recalled about the tense final moments.
Joining Scrabble Royalty
Logan ultimately won the championship by a score of four games to two, securing his place in Scrabble history. Reflecting on his first championship win twenty years earlier, he expressed continued disbelief at his achievement.
"It was something that I really couldn't quite believe that I had done," Logan said. "I somehow felt that I knew that in a single game, I could beat anyone, but it's a long way from that to being able to be consistent, being able to even reasonably aspire to have enough luck to win that many games over a period of time. So it was really something exciting and wonderful for me."
With this victory, Logan has cemented his status as one of the world's top Scrabble masters, demonstrating that mathematical precision and vocabulary mastery can combine to create championship-winning performance on the global stage.
