Panupol Sujjayakorn

Who is Panupol Sujjayakorn?

Panupol Sujjayakorn is a Thai Scrabble player, an economics student at university and anlyst at Exxon Mobile. He won the Thailand Matchplay Championship 2002, World Scrabble Championship 2003, Thailand King's Cup 2005 and was runner-up in the American National Scrabble Championship 2005 to David Wiegand. He is known for his encyclopedic knowledge of words despite having only conversational English.

In the World Scrabble Championship 2003, Sujjayakorn won his first 8 games and 18 of his first 21 before losing the final three games to finish with 18 wins, 6 losses, first place. He then played fellow countryman Pakorn Nemitrmansuk in the best-of-five final. The final was tied at two wins each before Sujjayakorn won the final game 444-387 to be crowned World Scrabble champion in his first appearance at the tournament. In the 2005 National Scrabble Championship Sujjayakorn won his first 9 consecutive games and 14 of his first 15, but won just 7 of his final 13 games. He qualified in second place for the final where he played David Wiegand, and led 2-0 in the final before Wiegand won all of the final three games to win the tournament.