There is a subculture for whom Scrabble is a great deal more than a family board-game you pull down at Christmas when everyone's tired of conversation. Indeed, South Africa has just crowned its latest national Scrabble champion: Cape Town's Llewellin Jegels. REBECCA DAVIS peeked into the world of drama, skullduggery and triple word-scores that is competitive Scrabble.

Last year was a bad year for competitive Scrabble. The 2012 USA National Scrabble Championship, which took part in Orlando, Florida, was hit by scandal. One player, a wunderkind of 13 years old, was exposed after a suspicious opponent noticed that he kept appearing to draw the prized blank tiles from the tile bag. It emerged that the little sneak was palming the blanks before each game and then pretending to draw them from the bag when it suited him. Max Karten, a former champion, complained to The Atlantic that cheating of this kind was degrading competitive Scrabble.

Nonetheless, the outcome - a judge was called, the tiles were counted, and the cheat expelled - was less dramatic than the way scenes might have unfolded at the World Scrabble Championships in 2011. There a Thai player demanded that his British opponent be strip-searched in the toilet, accused of hiding the letter "G". The judges ruled that such a search would be undignified, and replaced the missing G tile with a new one. The Brit went on to win the game by just one point.

"Scrabble is a game of personal honour; opponents police themselves and each other," a compelling Sports Illustrated feature stated in 1995. "As a result it is rife with feuds and imagined slights and muttered complaints. Players are as sensitive as flowers to any sign of 'coffeehousing' – the practice of trying to throw off an opponent by slurping a drink."

South Africa's newly-crowned Scrabble champion, Llewellin Jegels, says that these kinds of intimidation attempts are routine. "Absolutely, it happens all the time," Jegels told the Daily Maverick. Competitive Scrabble sounds… intense. "Social players are quite shocked to see how we play," Jegels agrees. "There's a chess clock, it's one-on-one, the game has to be finished in 50 minutes."...