When was the last time you challenged (not played, but challenged) yourself with a game of Scrabble?

On Wednesday (August 13), 24-year-old Conrad Bassett-Bouchard of Portland, Oregon was crowned national champion of the 25th National Scrabble Championship in Buffalo, New York.

The Scrabble Championship had 525 players from 11 countries competing for the top prize of $10,000.

Now, if you ever wondered if you could ever compete with the best players in the world, here are some tips on playing Scrabble:

— There are 100 letter tiles in a Scrabble game, ranging in value from 1 point (A, E, I, O, U, L, N, S, T, R) and 10 points (Q, Z).

— Groups of six letters that combine with another letter for a valuable seven-letter word are called bingo stems. SATINE, SATIRE AND RETINA are considered the best bingo stems.

— "The Official Scrabble Players Dictionary," released Monday from Merriam-Webster, was the first update in a decade and added 5,000 words including bromance, selfie and two-letter words like po, da and gi.

— Playable Scrabble words must be found in a standard dictionary, can't require capitalization, can't have hyphens or apostrophes and can't be an abbreviation.

About the game Scrabble, here’s some trivia that you might not know:

— Architect Alfred Butts devised the game during the Great Depression. Scrabble was first called Lexiko, then Criss Cross Words.

— Scrabble was inducted into the National Toy Hall of Fame in 2004.

— Hasbro Inc. sells 2 million copies annually in the United States.

— The North American Scrabble Players Association counts 151 active sanctioned clubs in North America.

— The highest word score recorded in a sanctioned NASPA tournament was braziers, which earned T.A. Sanders 311 points in 1997 in Tyler, Texas.

— The association has a code of conduct that prohibits audible obscenities, visible obscenities, physical abuse, intimidation, threats, cheating and suspicious behavior.

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