This Toronto student just became an international Scrabble champion

Lane Harrison · CBC News

· Posted: Apr 15, 2023 5:00 AM EDT | Last Updated: April 15

Words like fogey, fices or dinar rarely surface in regular conversation, and that makes them as valuable as gold in the world of competitive Scrabble.

Ruth Li, a high school senior in Toronto, knows a lot of words like that — words that can be devastating to any opponent sitting across the board from her. 

And those kinds of strings of letters helped her win the high school division of the 2023 North American School Scrabble Championship in Washington, D.C., earlier this month.

“I don’t usually spend that much time playing Scrabble,” Li said. “It’s not something that I do every day. It’s more so, like, when I feel like it and when I have the time.”

WATCH | Scrabble champion Ruth Li shares her top three tips of the game: 

Ruth Li, a high school senior in Toronto, won the high school division of the 2023 North American School Scrabble Championship in Washington, D.C. She knows a lot of words that rarely surface in normal conversation but are devastating to any opponent sitting across the board from her. Reporter Lane Harrison found that out the hard way.

But when she feels like it, Li can do things with seven letters that few others can.

She went undefeated on her way to the championship title — and when she claimed the top spot, she became the first girl to ever do so in the high school division, according to Marisa Pedatella, manager of brand communications for Hasbro Canada Corporation. 

It was a moment in the competition’s history that she didn’t expect to capture. 

“I think there are a lot of very talented women who play Scrabble. So I was surprised to learn that no other [girl] had won before,” she said.

Li’s first taste of the game was in a competitive setting. Scrabble isn’t a family pastime in the Li household. When they tried to play it as a family once, it “ended really badly” after her sister made a couple of bad moves, she said.

“I pointed out that she had better moves that she could have done, and she got really upset,” Li said.

‘You learn to see things’

Playing Li can become frustrating, and awe-inspiring, pretty quickly. 

“Once you play the game a lot, you learn to see things that people wouldn’t ordinarily see,” she said.

For a champion, her attitude defies convention. 

“I have a kind of approach to it that’s like, ‘If I lose, I lose. If I win, I win.'”

She’s most competitive about her grades. Unsurprisingly, she comes among the top in that regard, too.

After graduation, she’ll pursue a degree in biomedical engineering at one of the country’s top universities — she just has to decide which one.