Upcoming Words with Friends World Championships?

I stumbled across the email dated 8th May 2014 from Elie Dangoor, Chairman of WESPA (World English-language Scrabble Players Association) forwarding the email of Henry Stern, Executive Producer of Zynga. Here is the content:

Elie-

Hi, my name is Henry Stern, and I am the executive producer for Words with Friends here at Zynga.  We have an upcoming event that I think will be of interest to you and to all WESPA members.

We will be hosting our first (hopefully annual!) Words with Friends World Championships this December 5-7 here in San Francisco.  This tournament will have a $250,000 prize pool with $100k guaranteed for first place.  We expect a lot of press and media coverage.

I expect the field to be close to 128 competitors but I would like to reserve some slots for the very best WESPA rated players.  I would like to get word out to anyone with a WESPA rating > 2100 as of the May 03 standings.  What’s more, since I know the cost of getting out to San Francisco might be prohibitive for some players, I will authorize a $500 travel voucher for any of these players that makes it here to help defer the cost.

For players not rated >2100 we are looking begin open registration on June 1, and we will also have last chance qualifiers the day before for anyone who is unable to register in advance but would still like a shot at competing.

I have already reached out to Nigel Richards and Komol Panyasoponlert, and both of them responded enthusiastically J

Do you know how I can get in contact with the other top rated players to let them know of this great opportunity, and in fact to let all of the WESPA players know about this upcoming tournament?

Regards,

Henry A Stern

Executive Producer

(206) 612-6814

As I read this, I started to google an d found out this website: http://wordswithfriends.com/tournaments/, asking interested enthusiasts to signup for updates as registration will start soon. However, full details about rules of the WWF World Championship will be announced soon, so stay tuned.

About the Word List, Zinga provided this website (http://www.litscape.com/word_tools_enable_censored/enable_censored_word_searches.html) for reference. There are 172,335 WWF words which was originally taken from ENABLE lexicon, although some words were added like ZEN and also deleted other words. So, this WWF word list is a modified version of ENABLE.

Looking forward to seeing this tournament a success!