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Married Gay Couple compete at Scrabble World Championship

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The World Scrabble Championships are taking place in Perth this week, from November 4th to 8th 450 avid Scrabble players will be in town to see who is a true master wordsmith.

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Among the contestants representing Israel will be Omri Rosenkrantz and Evan Cohen who will make history as the first married couple to represent the same country in the competition.

Rosenkrantz and Cohen will represent Israel alongside a third player, Naomi Landau. Landau ad Cohen has previously competed in the competition but this will be Rosenkrantz’s first trip to the World Championships.

Cohen’s been to the championships many times before, while Landau has had just one previous trip.

Rosenkrantz has got the goods though, he recently was awarded the Tel Aviv club’s ‘Word of the Week’ when he played the word ‘Entozoa’ – which is defined as a parasitic animal that lives inside another animal such as a tape worm or trematodes.

Last time Cohen ranked 15th in the competition, and while he’d love to win the championship he has said he’d be happy just to get a good ranking.

“If we finish higher than where we were ranked that would be good but I would really like us to finish in the top 50 percent,” Cohen told Israel21.C

The game as first created in America by architect Alfred Mosher Butts. It was originally called ‘Criss-crosswords’. The game didn’t take off though until more than a decade later when one of the creator’s business partners reworked the game and called it ‘Scrabble’. Since it’s creation over 150 million copies of the game have been sold.

To get ready for the championships Rosenkrantz and Cohen have been spending an hour a day learning new words and preparing for their trip to Perth.

The couple who live in Tel Aviv first met seventeen years ago. When their not lining up tiles on a Scrabble board Rozenkratz is a sociology lecturer while Cohen is a lecturer in Linguistics.

Last year the couple spoke to Huffington Post Live about gay life in Israel. Check out the video below. 

 

 

 

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