Yesterday, we directed our second virtual tournament, the Computer Users’ Remote Event #2, or CURE2. The tournament featured strong plays from many players, including Ben Schoenbrun, who played an incredible three 9-letter words in one game. In the end, Ryan Fischer snagged the title with his final round victory against Dave Wiegand. Congratulations to Ryan for becoming the CURE2 champion! 

Our other winner was Ben Schoenbrun, who submitted the most popular entry in the Best Word competition. In honor of CURE1 champion Josh Castellano, players submitted their best words to describe Josh, or alternatively, their best insult word. Strong contenders included SINFUL, SATANIC, and BESTIAL, but Ben’s “NO!” earned the most votes. You can check out the full results from the CURE1, CURE2, and our future tournaments linked from our Results page.

A notable aspect of the CURE2 was the diversity of the field. We had 24 players from a wide geographic range, spanning from the West Coast to the United Kingdom and all the way to India. Thanks to Sridhar for staying awake until 4 a.m. to play with us from India! As we pledged when we launched, being citizens of the world and promoting international play is one of the CoCo’s core priorities, so it means a lot to us to have international players join these tournaments and to provide North American players with the chance to match against people from other countries. 

If you live overseas and the time difference makes it hard for you to participate, please drop us a line. If there’s enough interest, we can try to run a tournament with an early or night owl start time in North America to accommodate overseas players. (We’ve seen you checking out our website - Nigeria, Singapore, and Malaysia!) 

In addition to the geographic diversity at this tournament, we had robust participation from some traditionally underrepresented groups. Women made up a solid third of the field, a few adventurous players tried the Collins dictionary for the first time, and many players had non-expert ratings. As we continue to seek a broad spectrum of players from all backgrounds and abilities, this tournament showed that you don’t have to be an 1800-rated expert to play Collins and have a great time.

The diversity of this field was present in the Live Players’ Lounge, which we ran as a Google Meet. Between games and at the start and end of the day, players convened in the Live Lounge to discuss their plays and connect with one another over video chat. Players commented that during this isolated time, it lifted their spirits to connect face-to-virtual-face with others who shared a common love for Scrabble. We’re so glad that we could bring people together in this way and look forward to doing it again. 

We continue to refine our online tournament format based on player feedback (such as by reducing game times from 20 minutes to 15 minutes), so please keep your comments coming. On the tech side, I’ve automated the entrants list and results submission, which makes it possible for us to run a completely digital tournament in real time. There are more advanced features that I haven’t yet figured out how to implement, though; if you have skills with Google Sheets or writing scripts and are willing to help, please get in touch and perhaps we’ll be able to roll out those features for a future tournament. 

On that note, several players asked when we will direct the next CURE online. We do plan to direct another tournament soon. Stay tuned to this website or our official social media channels for an announcement of the next CURE. We hope to see you there!