We may only be a few days into the new year, but we've already hit the ground running on our plans for virtual Scrabble play in 2021. So far in January, we've already begun a virtual club and held four sessions, and we've announced the upcoming World Blitz Scrabble Championship as well.

I figured today was a good time to share a few words about how both those initiatives are going. Without further ado, here's the latest:

CoCo virtual club sessions

We're off to a rousing start with the CoCo virtual club! So far we've had four club sessions, two on Tuesdays and two on Saturdays. We've seen a total of 31 unique players join us for at least one game, and 128 games have been played in total.

Through two weeks, your overall club leader is... yours truly, though that's only through the sheer brute force of playing all 20 rounds. I've got a slightly-better-than-mediocre record of 12-8 with a negative spread; right behind me is David Whitley, who's also played all 20 and is 11-9. Trailing us in wins, but sporting strong winning percentages, are Tim Weiss (9-6) and Ben Schoenbrun (8-5).

We've had some crazy games already this year! Speaking just from my own experience, I've had a game with Bnjy where we traded triple-triples (my DROPWISE for 176, his TORMENTS for 131), a pair of close endgame battles with Arindam Basu, and a couple of hilarious games with Conrad Bassett-Bouchard that featured incessant phonying and trash-talking. Virtual club play might not offer the same social experience that an in-person club does, but it's pretty great. The Scrabble is highly competitive, and the Woogles chat room gives everyone a chance to hang out and "talk" almost like they're at a real club.

I want to say thanks to everyone who has made these club sessions possible. Woogles has been the perfect venue to hold club meetings, so cheers to everyone on the Woogsquad for making it. Thanks also to our team of directors (Becky Dyer, Peter Armstrong, Scott Jackson), and to Martin DeMello, whose back-end work on our club pairings and standings has made everything run smoothly. Teamwork makes the dream work! Everyone has played their roles beautifully.

Also, I should mention a key scheduling note regarding future club sessions. We got a lot of feedback that our Tuesday sessions, beginning at 6:30 Pacific time, were too late for many of our East Coast players. In light of this, we're going to change things up - we're now going to start at 7 p.m. Eastern time, 4 p.m. Pacific, and run 10 rounds of Scrabble instead of 5. This means if you're out East and want to start early, you have that option; if you're in the West and prefer playing later, you can do that too. Or, just go crazy and play all 10 games! The choice is yours.

World Blitz Scrabble Championship

We were pleased to see such a positive response when we announced BlitzChamps last week! We unveiled the tournament last Monday, and we saw around 35 players sign up on the first day. Things started to taper off a little bit after that, but there are definitely still people trickling in - as of this writing, we have a total of 53 players registered. I imagine we'll get at least a few more before all's said and done.

This is a good-sized field! It's big and exciting, but it's also pretty manageable for us in terms of tournament structure. If we get a final field of, say, 64 players, it's easy to envision how the event would unfold. We'd break into 8 groups of 8 and play a full round robin, so 7 weeks of pool play. From there, a quarter of the field would advance to the top 16, and there would be 4 weeks of single-elimination playoff matches. With an 11-week tournament, we'd be looking at a finals date of right around April 10.

Of course, we're not limiting the field to just 64 players. If more than that want to sign up, great! Whatever happens, we'll figure out a format that works.

At the moment, we're still 2 weeks away from the close of registration. During that time, we'll be working behind the scenes to prepare - responding to questions and feedback from players, figuring out scheduling and pairing logistics, and also preparing to stream the event on Twitch! If you liked what we did for the Virtual World Cup last year, bringing you live coverage from a diverse team of broadcasters, then you're in luck. We'll be working to recreate that same audience experience this time around.

But for now, let's keep building that field! We'd love to see a few more players throw their names in for the World Blitz Scrabble Championship, and that includes you. Get signed up today by following the link below.