Joel Wapnick

Joel Wapnick born in 1946 is a Scrabble player from Montreal, Canada. He is best known for winning the 1999 World Scrabble Championship (WSC). Since his career began in 1976, he has played in at least 1,971 tournament games, winning about 64%, and earning at least $70,000 in prize money. He has achieved enough fame for his enormous knowledge of seven and eight letter words. On a comparison basis, the total vocabulary of an average person is around twenty thousand words and Wapnick could recite in sequence approximately sixteen thousand of them. He has formulated a new strategy of learning words grouped in batches of twenty by the vowels and consonants they contain and is currently the only top player who uses this system.