> Tournament winners often don’t know any of the language the symbols are borrowed from This might be true in less than 0.1% of tournaments so I think "often"

> Tournament winners often don’t know any of the language the symbols are borrowed from This might be true in less than 0.1% of tournaments so I think "often" is overstating it. You've got Nigel winning in French Scrabble which is 1 example. You've also got Thai people playing English Scrabble, but nearly all of them have at least some working knowledge of English. Beyond that though the humongous majority of tournament scrabble games are played in English and won by native English speakers.