Two-time national Scrabble champion, Dave Wiegand, will be in Warsaw, Poland to compete for the world Scrabble championship in October. So is this guy any good? Here are the facts:

Dave Wiegand - wscgames.com

-Dave Wiegand once opened with QI and announced “checkmate in seven.” His opponent resigned.

-Dave Wiegand plays Icelandic speed Clabbers to warm up for tourneys.

-Dave Wiegand once played a 24-letter word. The board is only 15×15, but Dave Wiegand made it fit.

-If you rearrange the letters in DAVEWIEGAND… you can’t, only Dave Wiegand can rearrange the letters in DAVEWIEGAND.

-Before going to sleep at night, former world champ Nigel Richards checks under his bed for Dave Wiegand.

-Dave Wiegand doesn’t lose. He hustles.

-Dave Wiegand doesn’t play phonies. If his play is deemed invalid, Merriam-Webster immediately adds it to their dictionary. Zyzzyva automatically updates itself before Dave Wiegand gets to the challenge computer.

-The English alphabet actually has 31 letters. Only Dave Wiegand knows the other 5.

-Dave Wiegand once made the blank a bilabial click. He wrote ʘ on the designation slip.

-Dave Wiegand doesn’t believe in the J.

-Dave Wiegand once sat through Nationals without moving; only giving each opponent a grim stare for 25 minutes. He went undefeated.

-Whenever Dave Wiegand plays the X, he sinks your battleship.

-Dave Wiegand has a bowl of SamTiles every morning for breakfast.

-Dave Wiegand solves the Jumbletime quizzes with his eyes closed.

-Dave Wiegand once sneezed during a game. Every sound that came out was added to a separate dictionary. This dictionary is known as “Collins.”

-Just to keep things fair, every time Dave Wiegand bingos, his opponent gets the 50-point bonus.

-Dave Wiegand routinely makes plays across an invisible premium square called “Triple Game Score.”

-Someone once coffeehoused against Dave Wiegand. Key word: once.

-”Mr. 771″ Ed De Guzman didn’t earn his nickname by scoring 771 points in a game. He earned it by holding Dave Wiegand to only 771 points, his lowest score ever.

-The longest word in English is a 189,819-letter chemical name for the protein connectin. Dave Wiegand once played this word twice in the same game.

-Dave Wiegand doesn’t track tiles or cumulative score. He already has these decided before the game starts.

-Dave Wiegand once started with 25:00 minutes on his clock and finished with 48:18.

-Dave Wiegand once hooked up with Robin Pollock Daniel. Nine months later, she gave birth to the Oxford English Dictionary.

-Scrabble ranks between downhill skiing and auto racing in number of participant fatalities, all due to Dave Wiegand.

-Dave Wiegand once stuck his opponent with a blank. He then proceeded to play off CCQVVWW one tile at a time.

-Dave Wiegand always blocks your plays, even when he’s not your opponent. He once blocked a play at the Dallas Open while playing at the Oregon TILE.

-Dave Wiegand got his rating to 1900 before learning the twos.

-If you challenge Dave Wiegand, you lose your turn, even if the word comes back phony.

-The 2000 Baltimore Ravens, led by Ray Lewis, once tried to block a Dave Wiegand bingo at the goal line. Of course, they failed.

-Just by force of habit, Dave Wiegand plays bingos during games of Chinese checkers.

-Dave Wiegand has altered his speech so that he now talks only in five-vowel-eights.

-In 6th grade, Dave Wiegand was in the National Spelling Bee. When the moderator informed him that he spelled his first word correctly, Dave Wiegand said “I’ll be the judge of that,” and proceeded to spell every other word in the English language. The moderator stood in awe while Dave accomplished this feat over the next 19 days.

-Dave Wiegand refuses to eat alphabet soup that doesn’t have proper letter distribution. To him, it tastes bitter, and he pushes it away in disgust.

-Nobody bingos against Dave Wiegand. If you lay down 7 tiles, he’ll pick them up, throw them back at you, and then lay down 7 of his own.

-Someone once asked Dave Wiegand: “What do you do when you don’t have a bingo?” This question was met with dead silence and a blank stare for 5 minutes.

-Dave Wiegand once made a play that scored -9. It simmed best.

-In his high school yearbook, Dave Wiegand was voted “Most Likely to Kill a Man with a Scrabble Board”… and “Best Smile.”

-Dave Wiegand doesn’t like to start playing right away. After his clock is started, Dave takes a leisurely stroll around the room, observes other games, sits down to read a copy of the Wall Street Journal, has a bagel, gets online to update his Netflix queue, and then hits the gym for a quick workout and shower before returning to the table with about 14 seconds left on his clock. He has never gone over.

-If you have 100 points, and Dave Wiegand has 100 points, Dave Wiegand has more points than you do.

-Scientists have often wondered what would happen when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. This question was answered when Dave Wiegand played a game of Scrabble against himself.

-When playing against Quackle, Dave Wiegand removes the “Ctrl” button from his keyboard. Dave Wiegand is always in control.

-The last player who blocked a Dave Wiegand bingo got 30 years to life in a Colorado Supermax# for “obstruction of justice.”

-If you count from 1 to 10, that’s how long it would take Dave Wiegand to beat you at Scrabble. Thirty-eight times.

-Dave Wiegand doesn’t need to look at your tracking sheet. He can see your letters in your soul.

-If you sim a game that you played against Dave Wiegand, you’ll find that passing your turn is always the best play.

-Instead of playing a bingo, Dave Wiegand once used a turn to remove a bingo from the board and toss it back into the bag. On his next turn, he drew that bingo back and played it again.

-Dave Wiegand doesn’t use a tile rack. He simply draws one tile at a time and lays it on the board right where it belongs.

-In college, whenever Dave Wiegand felt like getting lucky, he would simply invite a girl over for a Scrabble date.

-Dave Wiegand once went 13-6 +1162 for 7th place at the Dallas Open. Not bad, considering he never even registered or showed up.

-Dave Wiegand’s NASPA profile says his hobbies include “hot sauce.” Nobody really knows what his hobbies are, but this is what he’s been observed drinking at tournaments, straight from the bottle.

-Dave Wiegand once lost a game of Scrabble to 2004 Nat’l champion Trey Wright. After this, Dave fell into a deep depression and vowed to “return to the basics.” He relearned the alphabet, starting with penmanship and Sesame Street, and then started flashcarding the twos. Out of sheer terror for what may come, Trey hasn’t been to a tournament since.

-Dave once finished a tournament with a negative spread. This is only because he reached infinity halfway through and had to start counting backwards.

-After the first game of Scrabble that Dave ever lost, Selchow and Righter deemed the game fundamentally flawed and recalled every set. They released a whole new version two years later. All traces of the old game have been purged from existence.

-Dave Wiegand once registered his dog into a tournament, just to see what would happen. As it turned out, the dog bingoed five times in a first round victory over David Gibson, and then left the tournament early to go sniff some garbage.

-They say a million monkeys at a million typewriters will eventually type the works of Shakepseare, but Dave Wiegand can pull the Magna Carta straight from the bag.

-Dave Wiegand once invented a variation of Scrabble that incorporates mixed martial arts. So if he sits on your chest, beats your face in, and then chokes you unconscious, don’t be alarmed. That’s just his way of telling you he’s exchanging 4.

-The opening scene of Saving Private Ryan is loosely based on the one time Dave Wiegand played down into Division 2.

-Dave Wiegand does not study Scrabble. Scrabble is the study of Dave Wiegand.

-Despite not playing at the BAT, Dave Wiegand selected himself in the roto seven times. His prize check is already in the mail.

-Dave Wiegand can divide by zero. This is the only way he can determine his opponents’ average score per turn.

-When Dave Wiegand feels the outside of the tile bag to “count” the tiles that are left, don’t be fooled. He can actually braille the letters that way, even if the tiles are facedown.

-It’s always a bad idea to grant Dave Wiegand a recount. He can recount the game 20 times and find 12 new points every time. He once recounted a game against Kenji Matsumoto for an entire week and found 26,381 extra points. Kenji, on the other hand, lost over two thousand points, 13 wins, 4 Reno early birds, and a National championship he hasn’t even won yet, all in that same week of recounts.

-Dave Wiegand and Chuck Norris once played a game of Scrabble. There were broken bones, teeth knocked out, and internal injuries. And those were just the people watching at home on TV.

-Opening plays beginning with J and Q limit the expansion of play in two directions. Dave Wiegand can expand his play in five dimensions.

-Dave Wiegand loses Scrabble games for the same reason Chuck Norris gets his ass kicked. He doesn’t.