Letter Perfect: A conversation with 2024 North American Scrabble champion Mack Meller

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Late last month, the 2024 Scrabble Players Championship took place in South Bend, Indiana over a period of four days. Top contestants from across the country came to participate in a four-day series of games, culminating in a best-of-five final between the top two players. This year’s final was played by Ian Weinstein, a longtime Scrabble expert and physician by day, and Mack Meller , a prodigy who’s been winning tournaments since his preteens, and has experience in word games outside Scrabble, collaborating with Pete Muller on the Muller Monthly Music Meta crossword series. Weinstein came out to an early 2-0 lead, but Meller rallied through the final three games to emerge victorious. I was lucky enough to talk to Meller after his victory to talk about his experience at the tournament, and what it takes to be a top Scrabble player.?

Paolo: The first question: How are you feeling?

Mack: It certainly feels great and rewarding to finally win the Nationals. I’ve been playing tournament Scrabble for 14 years now, since I was ten years old, so I’ve been at it for quite a while. I was one of the top players in the country since 2013, so I’ve been close to winning for a while. I’ve finished second and third prior to this year, but I was never really in contention until the very end, because both of those years, a different player ran away with the victory. So, this is the first opportunity I feel like I had to actually win, and it was a little bit of a blur, if I’m being honest, just because of how intense it was.?

Starting down 2-0, I felt like I was on my back foot the whole way, and couldn’t make it happen. I was having to come back and tell myself, look, I’m playing good Scrabble, and either the tile draws will turn around, or they won’t and, you know, Ian is a great player and a very deserving winner. I tried not to put too much pressure on myself because that always leads to too much stress, and not making the best decisions. I made a couple great plays, and also got a couple of very fortuitous draws at the exact time I needed them. Everything came together, and I was in a state of shock afterwards. But once I processed what happened, I realized it was a pretty awesome accomplishment.

Paolo: How do you keep a cool head through all that, especially after so many games of Scrabble?

Mack: I think the more experience you get at Scrabble tournaments, the more you understand that no matter how good a player you are, you’re going to have ups and downs, and there are going to be certain games where you might play a perfect game but not win because of the way the tiles shake out. You have to think, okay, I gotta take it one game at a time. Not even that — one play, one rack at a time. Focus on, what tiles do I have? What did he just do? What does the game board look like? What is my best play?

Paolo: The tournament commentators noted that Scrabble involves a lot of optimizing for different factors, like you just mentioned. How do you juggle all that in your head every move?

Mack: I’d say the most important thing to think about, that a lot of newer players might not realize, is it’s important not to just focus on “how many points am I scoring on this turn,” right? That’s the most basic thing — at the end of the day, the goal of Scrabble is to score points. But you have to keep in mind, the goal is actually not technically just to score points. It’s to score more points than your opponent, and those are two similar but very different things, because you have to make sure that whatever you do, you’re not giving your opponent a lot more counterplay than you need to. I see people will just take a lot of points and keep, say, two U’s and a W on their rack; there aren’t many words that have two U’s and a W, so you’re going to be in very poor shape on your next turn.?

Towards the end of the game, things get interesting. The end game is where it actually starts to feel more like chess, because you know exactly what your opponent has, or very close to what your opponent has. Let’s say there are still one or two tiles left. You know your opponent has seven tiles out of eight or nine, and you’re trying to figure out the odds that they have this set of tiles, you know? Think about, what did they just do? Does that tell me about anything they might be holding? There’s a lot of different factors to keep in mind on every turn, and they change from turn to turn. It’s tough, but it is really fascinating.

Paolo: I’d love to talk about another thing the commentators mentioned, which is your immense word knowledge. How much prep did you have to do to get to such an expansive level?

Mack: It’s definitely a process that takes a lot of time and years — I’ve been studying words since I was ten, and for me at this point, the process is almost all done using computer software. In the older days, people would read through the dictionary and memorize words that way, which is not particularly efficient. What you want to do is study words as you’re rising in the ranks based on a notion called probability, which has to do with how likely words are to come up during a game based on the distribution of tiles in the bag. Words with a lot of A’s, E’s, I’s, R’s, N’s, and T’s are going to come up a lot more than words with a lot of J’s, Z’s, and other tiles that don’t occur very often. When I was starting, I would study words with high-frequency tiles. As I got more advanced, I would keep inching my way lower in the probability range until eventually, by the time I was about fifteen, I had seen all the two- through eight-letter words in the dictionary at some point.?

Now, there’s a difference between having studied all these words and being able to find them. So, when I was studying the words, I would always present them to myself in scrambled fashion. Let’s use one of the most high probability words there is: RETAINS. It wouldn’t show as RETAINS — it would show, in alphabetical order, AEINRST, and I would have to figure out that it’s RETAINS (there’s actually eight other seven-letter words in that rack as well). Every once or twice a year, I would try to go through all those words — just do a quiz, and if I wasn’t sure of a word, I would note it and try to quiz myself on it again. I would iteratively try to ensure I was solid on the words, because it’s not just knowing the words, and finding the words. You also have to have the confidence. Let’s say somebody plays something that’s not a word, or a “phony,” as we like to call it. You have to have the confidence that it’s not a word, to challenge it off.

Paolo: Were there specific things you did in your preparation for this tournament?

Mack: You’re probably aware that the Scrabble dictionary has a lot of inconsistencies. One example would be words ending in -LIKE. One famous example is AUNTLIKE is a word, but UNCLELIKE is not a word. There are a lot of things that don’t really make sense, and the only way to get around it is to memorize it.?

I did a lot of prep playing against the computer, both in the sense of playing through tons of games to keep my board vision and play-finding sharper. Also, analyzing the games after using computer simulation tools — like, when I was making mistakes or misjudgments, were there any common patterns I could learn from? There’s this new AI-powered Scrabble bot called BestBot, on the site woogles.io, designed by top Scrabble players. They’re hoping to launch it to the public soon, and I’ve been fortunate enough to play it, both for myself and for my YouTube channel. I’m doing a series where I play 100 games against the bot right now, and commentate during the game to try and explain my thought process. There were a couple of times during the tournament I made a move I felt like I wouldn’t have made if I weren’t influenced by that AI bot, so that was cool to see.?

Paolo: You’re also a content creator, and a Scrabble coach. How did you get into those two lines of Scrabble-adjacent life? Do you feel like any aspects of that helped you in your game this weekend?

Mack: I’ll start with the content creation. I was inspired by a couple friends who are also top players, Will Anderson and Josh Sokol, who have YouTube channels as well as Twitch channels. I felt, especially after the pandemic, Scrabble took a pretty big hit in terms of its audience, both in terms of tournament play and casual players. I wanted to try to do something to help grow more enthusiasm, and I decided that joining the YouTube party would be an exciting way to do that. I think it’s been great — it’s very rewarding, and it’s definitely helped grow the game. It’s also been great for me, too, in my confidence; I didn’t experience any stress whatsoever about playing on the live stream, whereas I had in past years. Part of that, I think, is just getting older and more experienced, but part of that is I’m so used to playing in front of a huge audience on YouTube anyway, where I more or less record my games live and, for better or worse, I upload them.?

The coaching really took off once I started my YouTube channel, and that’s also been super rewarding. I have a couple folks I’ve been working with who started as beginner or intermediate tournament players, and — I can’t take all the credit, since to get better at scale you have to study a lot of words and put in a lot of time yourself, but they’ve quickly risen in the ranks and gotten to the expert division, so that’s been awesome to see. I work with a lot of younger kids too, which is cool because I started when I was ten years old, so it always makes me happy to see people around that age who are excited about Scrabble and looking to take their game to the next level.

Paolo: You started at a very young age, and it’s been a long journey to get here. Are there any people you’d specifically like to thank? Are there experiences you feel were formative in that journey?

Mack: I want to obviously thank the entire community and all my friends, because part of what makes Scrabble so great isn’t just a game. It’s also about the community, and I always felt it’s a bit unusual for somebody who’s so young to enter into a game and accelerate very quickly. I definitely wouldn’t have had the motivation or ability to keep going if the whole community wasn’t so supportive — and also excited, honestly — to see me rising so quickly, so that was really nice.

In terms of specific people, I’d say when I started, I started at a youth Scrabble club in Connecticut run by Cornelia Guest. She was a tournament director, but was super involved in the school Scrabble movement. I went there, and I think she saw how interested in the game I was. I remember distinctly she gave me these flash cards of bingos to study. They were a specialized list of bingos: all the seven- and eight-letter words with five or more vowels. Within a week or so, I memorized all of them, and she was like, Okay, you’re actually pretty good at this, you should try a tournament. It sort of took off from there; I played my tournament, I had a great experience, and I said, “I want to keep doing this.”

Another person was Joe Edley, who I played several times at the Nationals this year. He’s definitely Scrabble legend status-worthy; he’s a three-time national champion. Cornelia actually referred me to Joe once I was moving up so quickly. We became great friends over the years — I consider him one of my closest friends in Scrabble to this day.

I would be remiss, of course, not to thank my parents. Not just for driving me to tournaments when I was twelve and couldn’t get there myself, but you know, pursuing Scrabble seriously isn’t exactly the most traditional thing. So, the fact that they were super encouraging and supportive of that was super appreciated, and I wouldn’t have had the opportunity or the motivation to do this, and to reach the level I did without their support.?

?? Pinpoint: The Friday, July 26 puzzle (things that are associated with the Olympics, with clues “Parade,” “Torch,” “Events,” “Medals,” “Opening ceremony”) was the easiest puzzle of the week, likely helped by the Olympics opening ceremony happening that day. This was followed by the hardest of the week, the Saturday, July 27 puzzle (words that come before “screen”, with clues “Silver,” “Green,” “Split,” “Smoke,” and “Touch”). The “words that precede/follow [x]” genre of Pinpoint always seems to play hard, and this one was no exception. I saw some discussion of creative guesses, including “first names of superhero enemies,” probably prompted by the Silver Surfer and the Green Goblin.?

For full transparency, I played Pinpoint that Saturday and got this score:

So, if you got it in three or fewer, congratulations on beating the person who wrote the puzzle!

The Monday, July 29 puzzle (parts of a camera, with clues “Iris”, “Lens,” “Shutter,” “Aperture,” “Viewfinder”) led to some interesting guesses. Over 500 people said a variant of “goo goo dolls,” in reference to the song “Iris.” I’m glad there’s still a sizable contingent of people whose first association with “Iris” is the 90’s song (that, in fact, I’m listening to as I write this). My favorite group of guesses, though, was the 2,000 people who submitted “rainbow” or “god” as their first guess, possibly having learned from a previous Pinpoint that also started with Iris. Very sweet to remember, but you don’t think we’d repeat a puzzle like that, do you?

Play today’s Pinpoint?

?? Crossclimb: The Tuesday, July 30 puzzle ending in two body parts (BACK/NOSE) was the easiest of the week, though by a pretty small margin.?

The Sunday, July 28 puzzle ending in two different things with cutting edges (SWORD/BLADE) was the hardest, with the average solve time creeping into just over 3 minutes, though the percentage of successful solvers was over 88%. A few commenters weren’t familiar with the band Slade, so hopefully the “anagram of DEALS” hint was helpful.?

Play today’s Crossclimb?

?? Queens: The hardest puzzle of the week was the Saturday, July 27 puzzle, which was also the largest of the week (10x10, compared to the 8x8 and 9x9 puzzles on the other days of the week). I enjoyed a lot about how this puzzle was designed — the puzzle used every tetromino (arrangement of four squares), not counting reflections. Plus, the large sections in the “background” seem to divide the puzzle into three distinct vertical pieces, though the actual solve of the puzzle requires the solver to work back and forth between those pieces. Take a look at our playthrough:

Play today’s Queens

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This week’s topic: Can you anagram like a Scrabble expert?

The following are all real bingos (plays using all seven tiles) played in the five-game finals of this year’s Scrabble Players Championship, arranged in alphabetical order. Can you unscramble the words, and find what the experts played?

1. EILPRSUU (Ian)
2. ADEELNOR (Mack)
3. CGIINPR (Mack)
4. DDELOST (Ian)
5. AFGINOT (Mack)
6. BDGINOTU (Ian)

Answers will be posted in the comments on Monday.

How many did you get? Did you find any alternative answers?

Share your thoughts in the comments below??

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