He's played Scrabble since he was 5. How he became a national champ

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Mack Meller strolled into the Sedona Taphouse with a brown leather briefcase.

It had been a while since the 25-year-old joined the weekly gathering of the Lexington Scrabble club. Travel had taken up most of his time recently, but on a recent Sunday, Meller walked right into the restaurant, sat down, and began playing like he had never missed a meeting.

Others in attendance didn’t forget him either.

“He’s the national champion,” people whispered at the other end of the table where Meller sat, alerting newcomers to the club that the nation’s best Scrabble player was there.

Meller opened his briefcase and passed to the duo of players to his left an $80 Scrabble board, a timer and a bag printed with an American flag and full of professional-grade Scrabble tiles. Meller didn’t need his own board, because a tournament-grade mahogany one was already waiting in front of him.

Across from it was Larry Branstetter, a 68-year-old who said he’d been playing Scrabble since he was a kid. But even his decades of experience couldn’t save him.

Why ‘it’s horrible’ playing Scrabble against Meller

Meller took the lead early. A hot start that included word plays of Jete (a French ballet term; 11 points), Agee (meaning to one’s side; 8 points including a double letter score on the G and second E) and Haj (an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca; 21 points with a triple word score on H).

After two bingos, plays that use all the letter tiles in the deck, of alienee (someone to whom the title of property is transferred; 7 points) and smooching (affectionate play; 17 points) by Meller, Branstetter found himself down 100 points. When asked if that lead was insurmountable, Branstetter said no.

Fellow Scrabble club member Jan Hatton disagreed.

“Against him (Meller), yes,” Hatton said, without even looking away from her own board.

It became insurmountable after Meller place oology (the study of bird eggs; 10 points) and unais (the plural for unau, which is a two-toed sloth; 5 points). Meller beat Branstetter 471-274.

Sitting in front of a board full of words, Branstetter could only come up with two on what it’s like to play Meller.

“It’s horrible,” Branstetter said.

A Scrabble Grandmaster at 17

Meller started playing Scrabble at around 5 years old with his dad. Out of anger at losing to his dad, he said he started taking the game seriously, reading a dictionary to increase his word arsenal.

Meller, who moved to Lexington to be more centralized three years ago, started playing in a Scrabble club in his hometown of Bedford, New York, and got his first Scrabble tournament experience at 10 years old.

From there, it was a fast rise to Scrabble stardom.

At age 11, Meller became the youngest Scrabble player to achieve a 1600 player rating, which is expert status. At 13, Meller’s player rating eclipsed 2000, which he said made him one of the top players in the world.

To be considered a Scrabble Grandmaster, a player has to hold a top 1% ranking for five years in a row. Meller was a Grandmaster at 17.

He said some people were frustrated when they lost to a pre-teen Meller rising the ranks, but he said most in the Scrabble community were welcoming of Meller’s success at such a young age.

“I was a pretty well-known entity within the community pretty quickly,” Meller said. “Everyone was super welcoming and eager to see a new kid who was doing well.”

Last year, Meller reached the top of the Scrabble ranks in the country, winning the Scrabble player’s championship. He said the national championship is nice, helping his branding as a part-time Scrabble professional, but he said nothing else has really changed.

“I am not really a better player one day because I win this tournament than I was before, right?” Meller said. “In terms of who I am as a player, it doesn’t actually change that much… with the title I’m just as driven to keep improving.”

The key to success is memorization

Meller’s journey to the top of the Scrabble world was fast, but he said it was a long process to get to his level. Meller said the key to his success is memorization.

Meller had to look up definitions for most of the unusual words he played in his games at the Scrabble club. He said you don’t have to know what words mean, or how to say them, you just have to know that they’re words.

Meller also said Scrabble isn’t just words. It’s understanding the board and calculating point values for different words in different spot or the odds that your opponent has a certain tile.

“It gets very complex from a strategical standpoint, which I think a lot of people don’t realize,” Meller said. “That’s what I spend most of my time trying to work on as I try to stay in shape and keep improving.”

Even as the returning champion, Meller said he won’t be the favorite at this year’s national championship. That honor, he said, goes to perhaps the greatest Scrabble player of all time, Nigel Richards.

The greatest Scrabble player of all time?

Richards, a native of New Zealand who lives in Malaysia, has won five National Scrabble Championships, winning four consecutively from 2010-2013 — but that’s not what makes him special. He’s also won French and Spanish Scrabble championships, Meller said, without speaking the languages.

“He basically just sits and memorizes all the words from different languages,” Meller said. “He’s believed to have a photographic memory… he has an uncanny ability to just look at the page and just ingrain it and know whether something is a word or not.”

Meller acknowledged that Richards is a better player than he is, saying that in one game against Richards, he would have a 45% chance of winning. However, Meller has played Richards before.

In what Meller emphasized as a minuscule sample size in terms of Scrabble, he is 2-1 against Richards.

“That mean’s nothing from a statiscal standpoint,” a humble Meller said about his winning record against the greatest to ever touch the tiles. “I’m a strong enough player that if I can get a tiny bit of luck, or maybe he makes a rare mistake, that I can certainly beat him.”

Aside from Richards, Meller said there are “10 or 20” people he thinks could dethrone him at this year’s nationals. The Scrabble Players Championship will run Aug. 9-13 in Baltimore.

“It’s going to come down to who can preform better over those five days,” Meller said. “Maybe a little bit of luck, definitely a lot of skill.”