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CAMBRIDGE- Cambridge's Christopher Sykes finished seventh this past weekend at the 2016 Canadian National Scrabble Championship (CNSC)...

BUFFALO, NY - Cambridge's Christopher Sykes finished 20th in a field of 92 players in the top division last week of the U.S. National Scrabble Championship in Buffalo, N.Y.

The 47-year-old [Christopher Sykes] was 2-1 after Friday's schedule and was 8-3 after Saturday's play. He scored more than 500 points in three of his games.

[Christopher Sykes] finished with a 6-1 record to lead the 16-player Division 1 field. Among Sykes' six wins was a game in which he scored a tournament record 663 points. John Dungey, of Mitchell, finished second, also with a 6-1 record, but Sykes was awarded first place on the basis of having a superior point spread. It was Sykes fourth win at the tournament.

When the 2006 U.S. Open Scrabble Championship starts in Phoenix, Ariz. tomorrow, Christopher Sykes of Cambridge will be the 37th seed in a field of 76 expert players. He will be vying for a first prize of $25,000 U.S. Sykes is a longtime member of the Cambridge-based Golden Triangle Scrabble Club. The club meets every Friday in the lower-level recreation hall at Riverbend Place, 650 Coronation Boulevard.

[Christopher Sykes] said each Scrabble game takes about 50 minutes to play. Participants have a 25-minute time limit to play all the available tiles. With such a short time span, concentration is key. Don't ask him what they mean. Sykes is not one of the world class Scrabble players who learns each word's definition. Torstar News Service; Christopher Sykes poses with his custom made Scrabble board. He will be travelling to the World Scrabble Championships in Las Vegas tomorrow.

\"The hardest part is the dictionary is different for the world championship,\" [Christopher Sykes] explained. \"The British have an official Scrabble dictionary and North America has an official Scrabble dictionary. Both are different, and for the worlds they are combined.\" Which means Sykes is on a mission to learn as many as 30,000 new words before the big event. Armed with study tools such as a British dictionary, books and a computer, Sykes studies an hour or two a day. Sykes' success at Scrabble is not something he's spent years mastering. He's really only been playing the game since November 1996 when he joined the Golden Triangle Scrabble Club.

[Christopher Sykes] hopes his current prediction is just as poor. The field will be tough as he joins some familiar Canadian names on the Scrabble circuit, including reigning world champion Joel Wapnick, national champion Ron Hoekstra and the man who finished ahead of him at the qualifiers, Zev Kaufman. Sykes, 35, has been involved in tournament play for five years but hasn't competed in a competition of this magnitude, or with such a gruelling schedule. Twenty-four games will be played over three days against players from 42 countries, including Scotland, Australia, the U.S., Kuwait, Poland and Uganda. The two players with the best records will face off in a best three-of-five series for the title and a prize of $25,000 U.S.

The Cambridge Scrabble player, ranked in the top 15 in Canada, has been invited to a qualifying tournament in Toronto for a chance to compete in December at the 2001 World Scrabble Championships in Las Vegas. [Christopher Sykes], 35, is a member of the Golden Triangle Scrabble Club. He has won 81 per cent of his club games as well as several tournaments. He also holds every significant Scrabble record in the club. Sykes said the most difficult aspect of the tournament will be learning words from both the North American and British dictionaries. The combined dictionary will be the official word source of the tournament but until some recent studying, Sykes had never used the British dictionary - especially in competition.