Can you play Scrabble professionally?

As Williams puts it, professional Scrabble players are a friendly bunch but just as intense as any other athlete. By 2004, when the game reached its peak, over 800 players were participating in the National Scrabble Championship! You can expect some eccentricities with that kind of growth, such as champions practicing tai chi between matches and experts ridiculing those who “play up.”
A national winner will take home $10,000 and probably end up on a morning show. The game can be taken seriously outside of national and world championships. A prison inmate once wrote to the National Scrabble Association asking for an official SCRABBLE Players Dictionary. In a dispute over the admissibility of a word, an inmate was stabbed in the eyes with a pencil used to keep score!