At the world’s largest Scrabble tournament, the King’s Cup in Bangkok, the favorite going in was Pichai Limprasert, who had won all six previous tournaments in Thailand this year. Scrabble powerhouse Nigel Richards, too, was down in seventh place, so after 24 rounds, Pichai’s chances were still looking good. But never bet against Nigel in Scrabble. He managed to claw his way back to a spot opposite Pichai in the final, where he won with scores of 445-403, 397-491, and 469-356.
Though leading the Grand Chess Tour, Magnus Carlsen has withdrawn to begin preparing for the World Chess Championship in November against Sergey Karjakin.
The winner of the 22nd World Computer Chess Championship was Komodo, a program out of the United States running on a 48-core Intel i7 platform. The previous champion was Jonny, a German program running on a 2,400-core AMD x86-64 platform. After Komodo and Jonny tyed for first at scores of 7.5/10 in the main part of the tournament, it took five drawn games of increasingly tighter time limits before Komodo won in the sixth.
Guillermo Rodriguez of Spain took home the trophy at WizKids Dice Masters World Championship by going with a Mask Ring team but substituting in a Half-Elf Bard from Dungeons & Dragons Dice Masters: Battle for Faerûn.
Feliks Zemdegs has set another Rubik’s Cube world record, a 6.45 second average in the standard 3×3.