Weird But True

Cheating Scandal Rocks National Scrabble Championships, And America Is Officially Dead

Steroids in baseball. Doping in the Olympics. Adderall in NASCAR. Now, cheating has found its way into sport’s last bastion of moral chastity: the Scrabble national championships.

I know, I know. This is shocking to me too, people. According to John D. Williams, Jr., executive director of the National Scrabble Association (no word on whether their logo is a silhouette of a dude playing Scrabble, although I really hope it is) one of the best young players in the country was ejected from Scrabble’s national tournament. The name of the cheater has not been released, because he’s a minor.

How was he cheating? He was hiding blank tiles, of course.

The AP breaks down how a surplus of blank tiles is an advantage:

In Scrabble matches, players accumulate points during one-on-one matches by pulling random letter tiles from a bag of 100 and trying to create words.

A total of 98 tiles have letters on them and two are blank. Blank tiles can be used as wild card letters to complete words.

The player in question never re-inserted the blank tiles from a previous game back in the bag, which meant he could hold on to them for use in the next game. He was reportedly hiding them under the table, and when tournament officials spotted them and confronted him about it, he immediately ‘fessed up.

Like most cheating scandals in sports, ScrabbleGate 2012 has uncovered a darker side to a game that most Americans considered pristine:

Even before Tuesday’s cheating ejection it was well-known that some players take minerals known as “alleged brain boosters.”

“But no steroids so far,” Williams quipped.

Yeah. No steroids. So far. But just wait until ‘roided up 12-year-olds start piecing together “Quixotry” combos for 830 points without batting an eyelash. I can see the Outside the Lines special already.

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