Causeway 2026 was not only a majestic Scrabble tournament bringing 440 players together from 30 countries, but also the culmination of several components of our founding vision from 2020.
Tournament Broadcasts
In 2020, with the world in the throes of the pandemic, we invested great effort into online tournaments so that we could keep playing the game we love with our friends. We also wanted to broaden the world’s access to high-level competitive play, and bridge the gap between in-person and online play, potentially even with “hybrid” tournaments that mix in-person and online competitors.
In the following years, mind sports streaming has seen a massive boom, with games such as chess and Geoguessr organizing major events that were well-commentated and beautiful to watch, drawing millions of viewers:
We realized that a healthy ecosystem depended not only on hosting high-level competition, but also on making these matches accessible to and interpretable by the viewing public. In the Scrabble community, we’ve benefited from the rise of an excellent generation of commentators and high-production quality streams, but we felt that the tools for following live events had not kept up.
When we met with Michael a year ago, we determined together that Causeway 2026 would be the first tournament where every game in the premier division would be viewable in real-time, with viewers able to select which game to click into at any moment. From that lofty initial goal, we eventually settled on live-annotating the top 10 boards.
When the Rubber Meets the Road
Aside from César’s hard work on the technical front, this vision required significant human commitment: the buy-in of tournament directors, OBS streamers, and the human annotators. This would be the first implementation of a broadcast in a real-world tournament setting, and it would be the biggest event of the year. Would we collectively be up to the challenge?!
On the streaming side, we had the good fortune of working with the premier and most experienced duo in the business, Andrew and Christian Kay. The brothers made it very clear exactly what they needed, and were able to use OBS to plug into live game annotation, without having to run Quackle - a technological leap that we hope can be reused for many tournaments to come. We also had the good fortune of working with Josh Greenway from letsplayscrabble.com, who has the experience of running and broadcasting the world’s biggest events.
As for the annotators, I quickly discovered that Ravee and Manop, tournament organizers, had assembled an all-star local Thai crew, with thousands of games of Woogles experience between them. We met the night before the tournament at the venue for training, before the AC had been turned on - it must have been above 30 degrees C. The annotators nonetheless listened to my demo of annotation mode and asked good questions. When the tournament started the next day, they took to the new system quickly and rapidly unearthed a couple of irritating but nonfatal issues (occasionally not registering the correct player as going first, no means of entering overtime penalties), which they ably worked around. The extra layer of coverage also meant that when the live broadcast briefly dropped due to a big local storm, over 50 people swapped over to Woogles annotation to follow the remarkable final round matchup between Ben Schoenbrun and Nigel Richards!
The Aftermath
The Causeway 2026 broadcast is available in perpetuity here . At the end of the day, there were 306 games between top experts that were broadcast in real-time and available in annotation. This is a treasure trove that has only been available a few times in Scrabble history, and that is already being dissected on our Discord , allowing us all to learn from expert-caliber play.
Another cool feature that may have gone unnoticed is that observers can share the result of simmed, Montecarlo analysis from the Macondo engine, as opposed to our fast, static Hasty-bot style analysis. Start by clicking Analyze on your game of interest :
Once the analyzer panel is visible, click on the little ambivalent computer face to access Montecarlo analysis. Anyone can request analysis for free! It takes about 2-10 minutes depending on site traffic. Additionally, if someone else has already requested the analysis, it is shared with everyone on Woogles and they can access instantaneously - no need to re-analyze!
You’ll know you’re looking at BestBot analysis (provided by the Macondo engine) when you look at the analyzer panel. it also shows the number of iterations used for simulation and a small summary at the bottom of overall performance, although this should always be taken with a grain of salt.
In future we intend to make Montecarlo simulation available on the fly during annotation!
The Next Generation of Champions
Another dream of ours back in 2020 was that we would some day produce a world champion who had grown up on Woogles. That was always a simplistic interpretation, because in reality it takes a village to nurture a champion - both local and digital community. Nevertheless, it was hugely satisfying to root in this tournament for young players like Madhav, Chaiyottha, Suyash and many more who are already competing at the top ranks of expertdom, and are also active in the Woogles community.
During this event, we also had User Research expert Edward De Guzman run a Woogles booth where we sought out feedback from players on what we should build next, as well as selling awesome merch and giving out sets of limited-edition Woogles tiles. Our youngest contributor was 7 years old! To my knowledge, this was the first ever user research study conducted on the Scrabble community, and we look forward to running similar sessions at future tournaments.
What’s next
In conjunction with Causeway 2026, we also saw an all-time record of active users on Woogles in May 2026 of over 13.3k, which was a 10% surge from April 2026, when we set the previous record! We look forward to continuing to build momentum on the road to Causeway 2028 , which will feature 1,000 players!