There’s a Scrabble champion amongst us! UChicago fourth-year Cooper Komatsu recently competed in the 12th Annual Crescent City Cup, a 20-game Scrabble tournament hosted in New Orleans. The tournament took place over the course of three days. Despite a flight mishap resulting in two missed games, he ended the tournament placing second!
Komatsu started playing Scrabble at just five-years-old, and by eight, he was already playing competitively against adults. Starting at a young age allowed him to develop a strong grasp of two- and three-letter words, a very useful asset in the game. Komatsu cites multiple influences that developed his interest in Scrabble: his mother’s passion for the game, refrigerator letter magnets, and a general fascination with words.
This January, Komatsu competed at the Crescent City Cup for the first time. The tournament experience was a “whirlwind,” Komatsu told The Maroon. Due to a storm, there were no flights out of Midway or O’Hare International Airport, forcing Komatsu to fly out on the day of the tournament. Despite waking up at 2:45 a.m. and missing the first two games, Komatsu was unfazed, bouncing back to win five games that same day. Komatsu’s extensive word knowledge helped him win the first game after spelling “czarism.” Komatsu reflected upon his performance after the first day. “I hit a little bit of a bump on day two, but I rebounded toward the end of the day and carried that momentum into day three, and by the end of the day I had come in second place in the tournament,” he told The Maroon.
Despite his dominance, Scrabble is not as simple as Komatsu makes it look. Komatsu notes the importance of strategies such as understanding higher or lower frequency words. For example, a word like “erasion” with high frequency vowels and consonants appears more often than a word like “quizzed” with the double Zs. Along with accumulating an extensive bank of words over time, Komatsu also studies other players. “One of the things I do more casually is that there are a number of Scrabble Youtubers who play games and comment on what they’re doing, so that’s a really good way for me to learn strategy,” he said. He cites two Youtubers that he has found especially insightful: Will Anderson and Mack Meller. He also uses Aerolith, a site for practicing anagrams.
Komatsu enjoys playing Scrabble for many reasons, saying he could play for “hours on end.” Most of all, Komatsu likes words and finding patterns. “You get seven letters in the bag, but nobody tells you how they fit together or what words they form, so thinking about patterns and trying to find what words are on your rack is exhilarating,” he stated. As well as words, Komatsu finds the complexity of the strategies and gameplay interesting. “A lot of the endgame strategies are not completely well understood…. With around seven tiles left in the bag, the computer and the experts are all going to disagree on what the best move is.
When asked about what his favorite word is, Komatsu had an interesting answer: “Cacomixl.” He said, “The most common spelling is “cacomistle,” but I spelled it that way because you usually don’t study more than eight letter words in Scrabble, so I had just seen that and thought it was weird, and it stuck with me.”
In the future, Komatsu plans to keep playing and improving but not at the expense of school and social life. He said, “I don’t want Scrabble to come before having fun and being a person, but it’s important to me that I keep the community that I’ve made through Scrabble.”
