Two Scrabble Superstars Explain Their Unbelievable Championship Match

CEDAR RAPIDS, Iowa — In the quarter-century that I’ve been playing and writing about Scrabble—a game in which greatness requires that rare matrix of biological gift, yeoman preparation, preternatural vision, marathon endurance, and blind luck—I’ve never witnessed anything as shocking and painful as the end of the 2026 North American championship here in July. The moment was right up there with any agony-of-defeat ending in any sport: After 3,700 games, thousands of moves, and millions of points scored by more than 200 players, the title was decided by a word that wasn’t a word at all.

On one side of the board: No. 1 seed Mack Meller of Lexington, Ky., a 26-year-old onetime child prodigy and current Scrabble grandmaster, content creator, teacher, and puzzle constructor. On the other: No. 5 seed Orry Swift of Winnie, Texas, a 39-year-old accounting professor and five-tool gamer—he’s been a top player in World of Warcraft and Magic: The Gathering; he’s about halfway through a quest to play and review every Super Nintendo game (about 880 in all); and, under his username Sheex, he recently completed a charity speedrun of Ogre Battle: The March of the Black Queen. “Coming off a high like that into making the finals at Scrabble nationals was crazytown,” he told me.

Swift entered his first Scrabble tournament in 2004 and has been among the highest-rated players for more than 15 years. Meller began playing competitively at age 10. He became the youngest player to achieve an expert rating, at 11, and cracked the Top 10 at 13. At the Scrabble Players Championship, held over five days in a football field-sized convention-center ballroom here, they topped a field of 51 players in the top North American-lexicon division (out of 242 overall) with identical 20-8 records to qualify for a best-of-five finals and a shot at the $10,000 first prize. (An additional 38 players competed using an international-English word list; it’s complicated.)