Brett Smitheram is a British Scrabble Grand Master and one of the most successful players in the history of the game. Smitheram was 2022 UK National Scrabble Champion, defeating a high-calibre field in June that year. He won the 2016 World

Scrabble ''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a Board game, game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, re ...

Championship, and has been ranked in the World top 5, and as a UK Scrabble Grand Master for nearly 20 years. Originally from

Camborne Camborne (from Cornish language, Cornish ''Cambron'', "crooked hill") is a town in Cornwall, England. The population at the 2011 Census was 20,845. The northern edge of the parish includes a section of the South West Coast Path, Hell's Mouth, C ...

Cornwall Cornwall (; or ) is a Ceremonial counties of England, ceremonial county in South West England. It is also one of the Celtic nations and the homeland of the Cornish people. The county is bordered by the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, ...

, and a former pupil of

Truro School Truro School is a coeducational private boarding and day school located in the city of Truro, Cornwall, England. It is the largest coeducational independent school in Cornwall with over 1050 pupils from pre-prep to sixth form. It is a member s ...

, he lives in

London London is the Capital city, capital and List of urban areas in the United Kingdom, largest city of both England and the United Kingdom, with a population of in . London metropolitan area, Its wider metropolitan area is the largest in Wester ...

and is HR Director for the Pozitive Energy group, including PE Dot Solutions, Pozitive Water, Pozitive Payments and Pozitive Telecoms. Smitheram won the UK National Scrabble Championship in 2000 and 2022, the ABSP Masters invitational event in 2005 and the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship in 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2010. He is three-times Northern Ireland Champion, having won in 2011, 2017 and 2018. Entering only 2 UK majors in 2019 (SIMPLE, which replaced the Spring Matchplay for that year, and the British Elimination Scrabble Tournament/BEST) Smitheram won both ahead of large and high-calibre fields. Smitheram has won the award for UK highest rated player a record 5 times (most recently, the last time it was awarded in 2019) and is current UK number 1. In

2016 2016 was designated as: * International Year of Pulses by the sixty-eighth session of the United Nations General Assembly. * International Year of Global Understanding (IYGU) by the International Council for Science (ICSU), the Internationa ...

he defeated Mark Nyman at the MSI World Scrabble Championship 2016 3 games to 0 to become the World Scrabble Champion for the first time, in the process playing the word BRACONID for 176 (+5 for a failed challenge) which was reported on widely by global media. Following his World Championship win, Smitheram has continued to compete locally and globally, winning multiple tournaments, and narrowly missing out on his second World Championship Final in 2018, losing to Nigel Richards, the eventual winner, in the semi-final. He remains an active contributor and spokesperson to the global media on Scrabble and gaming topics. In 1997, Smitheram won six episodes of the gameshow ''

Countdown A countdown is a sequence of backward counting to indicate the time remaining before an event is scheduled to occur. NASA commonly employs the terms "L-minus" and "T-minus" during the preparation for and anticipation of a rocket launch, and eve ...

'', qualifying him for the finals stage of Series 37.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Smitheram, Brett British Scrabble players World Scrabble Championship winners Living people 1979 births