Joel Wapnick

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Joel Wapnick (1946-) is a Scrabble player from Montreal, Canada. He is best known for winning the 1999 World Scrabble Championship (WSC).

Wapnick has reached more WSC finals than any other player to date, finishing runner up in 1993 and 2001. Besides winning that competition, Wapnick also won the US National Scrabble Championship in 1983 and the Canadian National Scrabble Championship in 1998(1), along with a string of other events. Wapnick and Adam Logan (WSC 2005, USNSC 1996, CNSC 1996, 2006) are the only players so far to have won the WSC, the US NSC and the CNSC. He also placed second in the National Scrabble Championship in 1992 and third in 1988. Since his career began in 1976, he has played in at least 1,971 tournament games, winning about 64%, and earning at least $63,000 in prize money.

Wapnick is famous within the Scrabble world for his enormous knowledge of seven- and eight-letter words; he estimates that, at his peak, he could recite in sequence approximately sixteen thousand of them. For comparison, the total vocabulary of an average person is around twenty thousand words. He learns these words with a method he calls the "atomic bomb of Scrabble study," which involves learning words grouped in batches of twenty by the vowels and consonants they contain. Despite his faith in the power of this system, he is currently the only top player who uses it.

Outside of Scrabble, Wapnick is an associate professor of music at McGill University, Montreal, and his hobbies include tennis.