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OttawaCitizen.com: Three-time Scrabble champ unfazed by defeat in finals

Perhaps it was Joel Wapnick the Montrealer's multiple seven-letter dumps in the first round of the 2011 Canadian National Scrabble Championship finals that sealed Ottawan Adam Logan's fate. Or perhaps it was the obscure word "feijoas," the plural form of the South American evergreen shrub, that Wapnick laid down on his first turn of the second round.

Whatever the case may be, after losing 0-3 in the best-offive final match in Toronto at the Bond Place Hotel on Monday, the 36-year-old Logan said he's nowhere near ready to give up playing Scrabble at the championship level -which he said he's been doing for the last 25 years.

Logan went into Monday's finals as Canada's defending champion, a title he had earned three times (in 1996, 2005 and 2008). But even with big-scoring plays such as "semioval" and "ruderals," Logan wasn't able to hang on to the honour. He made second place out of 52 competitors.

Speaking by phone early Wednesday, Logan said he's lost at the finals before, and he doesn't blame bad sets of tiles for the loss this time around.

"Luck is certainly involved, but skill makes a lot of difference, too," he said. "In the last game, if I would have thought of the right plays I would have won it, even though my letters weren't necessarily ideal."

Logan's Scrabble tournament scoring average is about 420 points per game, he said. And his favourite Scrabble tile? The blank, of course.

By day, Logan works as a mathematician on federal government contracts.

To keep in board game shape in the off-season, as it were, Logan plays Scrabble every Wednesday night at the Gloucester Public Library on Ogilvie Road with the Ottawa Scrabble Club, which was officially sanctioned by the National Scrabble Association -club No. 495 -in 1997.

Logan also studies the dictionary using a program that shows him the letters of a word in alphabetical order and then asks him to type the right word out.

He also just plays games, then looks back over the results with the help of a computer program that shows him the plays he missed. "And if I notice I'm missing the same sort of thing too often, I have some idea of what I can do to improve."

The national championships are held roughly every two years.

"As in a lot of things, the better you are at something, the more likely you are to be lucky. And Joel is very good at Scrabble," Logan said of Wapnick, a professor at McGill University. "If I'd been playing someone else, maybe that person wouldn't have thought of the words that Joel thought of."

Any hard feelings?

"No. He knows I would have done the same thing to him, and I know that, too."