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No spectators laughed after he placed his tiles.
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But he still managed to do something he'd never done before: he played the word "felch," a sexual bit of slang that only became acceptable in competitive Scrabble in 2012. This year, Lipe finished a disappointing eighteenth at the King's Cup, dropping from within the top five on the tournament's final day. After earning runner-up honors at the world championships last year, interest in his accomplishment back home amounted to a write-up in a local paperĀ and a "certificate of recognition" from his "slightly surprised" co-workers. He has played competitive Scrabble in Warsaw, Prague, Oslo, Las Vegas, and Cleveland, but never before encountered such fanfare. "I think ours was the best intro," Lipe said. Jay Z's "Empire State of Mind" blared from the speakers and images of the Statue of Liberty flashed on a screen beside the stage as thousands of Thai schoolchildren cheered. Lipe strode toward the stage alongside one of the two other Americans who'd flown eight thousand miles, paying their own way, to play Scrabble in a windowless room. "For the Canadians," Lipe said, "they had some music nobody recognized and a tourist video of Japanese businessmen skiing." The player representing Scotland walked in accompanied by bagpipe music and images of kilted dancers in the highlands. During the opening ceremony last month in Bangkok, Lipe watched the other sixty-four players from fifteen countriesĀ enter a giant convention hall surrounded by boxes of a poultry-based health tonic called " Essence of Chicken," which was the tournament's official sponsor.
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Among the competitors this year was Chris Lipe, a thirty-four-year-old computer programmer from Clinton, New York, who last year finished second in the World Scrabble Championship, in London. The King's Cup Scrabble tournament, which is held over four days each July in Bangkok, is basically the board game's Wimbledon, with a ten-thousand-dollar prize and trophy awarded by the Thai royal family to the winner.