Craig Beevers is an English professional

Scrabble ''Scrabble'' is a word game in which two to four players score points by placing tiles, each bearing a single letter, onto a game board divided into a 15×15 grid of squares. The tiles must form words that, in crossword fashion, read left t ...

player and former World Scrabble Champion.

Professional career

2014

In the World Championship, or Scrabble Champions Tournament (SCT) as it was dubbed that year and in 2013, Beevers defeated Alastair Richards 2-1 in a best-of-three quarter-finals. He went on to beat Dave Wiegand 3-2 in a best-of-five semi-finals. After securing a 3-1 win against Chris Lipe in a best-of-five finals, Beevers became the 2014 World Scrabble Champion, and only the second Englishman to do so after

Mark Nyman Mark Nyman (born 14 October 1966) is an English professional Scrabble player originally from London, England and now a resident in Cheshire. At the end of 2002, he was rated 205 and was top-rated in the ABSP ratings. As at 7 September 2015 he i ...

(1993).

2015

Beevers won the UK National Championship, and hit a peak rating of 2161 (World No. 7), but failed to defend his title at the 2015 World Scrabble Championship, at which he finished 9th.

2016

Beevers finished in 57th place (amongst a field of 72) at the

MSI World Scrabble Championship 2016 The MSI World Scrabble Championship 2016 was a Scrabble tournament organised by Mattel and Mindsports International (MSI) to determine the world champion in English Scrabble. It was held from 31 August to 4 September 2016 in Lille, France. The e ...

. He also lost his title of National Champion to Phil Robertshaw at the 2016 National Scrabble Championship in October, ending up in 14th place.

Other endeavours

Beevers is a former contestant of the television programme. ''

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 ...

''. He won series 57 of this game show, which involves finding anagrams up to 9 letters and calculated mathematical problems. He is also the

webmaster A webmaster is a person responsible for maintaining one or more websites. The title may refer to web architects, web developers, site authors, website administrators, website owners, website coordinators, or website publishers. The duties of ...

for the websites of both the World English-Language Scrabble Players' Association (WESPA) and the

Association of British Scrabble Players The Association of British Scrabble Players oversees competitive Scrabble in the UK. It was formed in 1987 by agreement with J W Spear & Sons, the game's trademark owner, who were subsequently bought out by Mattel in 1993. It currently has around ...

(ABSP). He and fellow Scrabble player Ray Tate attempted to break the world record for most points scored in 24 hours of Scrabble in 2012, but the effort had to be shelved after Tate "keeled over with dehydration after 15 hours of play". The duo "unofficially" broke the record a year later, according to ''GazetteLive''. In May 2015, Beevers guest-wrote an

oped An op-ed, short for "opposite the editorial page", is a written prose piece, typically published by a North-American newspaper or magazine, which expresses the opinion of an author usually not affiliated with the publication's editorial board. O ...

for ''

The Guardian ''The Guardian'' is a British daily newspaper. It was founded in 1821 as ''The Manchester Guardian'', and changed its name in 1959. Along with its sister papers ''The Observer'' and ''The Guardian Weekly'', ''The Guardian'' is part of the Gu ...

'' titled "As world Scrabble champion, I think new words are obvs lolz", in response to the addition of some 6,500 new words to the official lexicon used in competitive Scrabble, Collins Official Scrabble Words published by

HarperCollins HarperCollins Publishers LLC is one of the Big Five English-language publishing companies, alongside Penguin Random House, Simon & Schuster, Hachette, and Macmillan. The company is headquartered in New York City and is a subsidiary of News ...

. Beevers authored a book on how to "(p)lay like a Scrabble world champion" titled ''Word Addict''; it was published by

in 2015. The same year, as part of World Scrabble Day celebrations, Beevers took part in a 24-hour Scrabble marathon that was streamed online.

Personal life

Craig Beevers was born and raised in

Norton Norton may refer to: Places Norton, meaning 'north settlement' in Old English, is a common place name. Places named Norton include: Canada * Rural Municipality of Norton No. 69, Saskatchewan *Norton Parish, New Brunswick **Norton, New Brunswick, a ...

, County Durham, England. He attended the

University of Sheffield , mottoeng = To discover the causes of things , established = – University of SheffieldPredecessor institutions: – Sheffield Medical School – Firth College – Sheffield Technical School – University College of Sheffield , type = Pu ...

References

Bibliography

External links

Official website
{{DEFAULTSORT:Beevers, Craig British Scrabble players Living people World Scrabble Championship winners Year of birth missing (living people)