SAN ANTONIO – A San Antonio Scrabble enthusiast recently won her division while competing at the national level for the board game this summer.
From just being interested to then a scrabble champ, Jennifer De Waelsche, the librarian at Burbank High School, won first place in Division Four at the Scrabble Players Championship in Las Vegas.
My mom liked Scrabble and my aunt, they were both wordsmiths,” De Waelsche, a Scrabble Champion said.
“They loved it, and that got me interested.”
It was her husband that got her into playing competitively, and it’s actually how they met.
“We played our first game on our second date, and I beat him,” De Waelsche said.
So technically, it was words at first sight.
“But he knew that I was a player, so I got his attention,” she said.
De Waelsche said her competitive career started out like a bag of jumbled letters, her first tournament in 2012 was a hot mess.
“I lost every game and I wasn’t sure if I was cut out for it because I was pretty competitive, and I didn’t like losing that much,” De Waelsche said. “But by my third tournament, I actually came in second and won like $25 at that tournament.”
She said she began teaching Scrabble at her then middle school as an after school club, that helped her become the queen of diction.
The highest scoring word that she has ever played? “enquired” for 203 points as a triple triple.
And the word that helped her win at nationals?
“Stocker---S-T-O-C-K-E-R,” De Waelsche said.
At the championship, De Waelsche went on a winning streak, winning 14 games in a row and said that particular word helped her comeback in a match that she thought she would for sure lose.
“I was losing by over 100 points in the middle of the game and I was almost giving up,” De Waelsche said.
“But I drew the blank, which was very helpful. I got a bingo down and then had the blank drew the “E” that I needed and I was able to put the word stocker down.”
The word helped her stock up on the points and win her division. Her advice to those who want to play like her or the king of Scrabble David Gibson (where the term “Gibsonized” came from), is read a lot, study your Scrabble cheat sheet and players dictionary and have board vision.
“Knowing when to open up the board or shut it down or finding those great plays,” she said. “It’s strategy, you know, it’s the art of competition and learning how to be a gracious winner and a gracious loser, you know? So there’s just so many things that you get out of Scrabble.”
De Waelsche plays at the Lions Field Adult and Senior Center on Broadway with a group of local competitive Scrabble enthusiasts every Thursday at 6 pm.
They say anyone is welcome, and the group is open to teaching Scrabble and how to play competitively, using timers and rules.