Odorizes. The word means ‘to give an odour or scent to' and is rarely used in the daily vocabulary of an average Kiwi. The spelling might also be a little jarring.

But at the NZ Scrabble Masters' Tournament in Tauranga this uncommon transitive verb was the top scoring play over Easter.

The tournament was held at the Tauranga Bridge Club at the weekend.

Blue Thorogood from Christchurch scored a massive 171 points with the impressive use of his lexicon. However, it still wasn't enough to secure the all-time record highest game score with 721 points.

This is the 37th tournament in New Zealand and players from as far away as Nelson, Christchurch and Dunedin embarked on the city to test their rack management skills against the best 24 top rated tilers in the nation over the three day weekend.

The players play a round-robin system to find a winner.

All players are rated and expectancies, the number of games each needs to win to maintain their current rating, are calculated.

Top seed, Alastair Richards from Auckland had an expectancy of 19 games to win and the lowest seed, Delcie Macbeth from Coromandel was expected to win 6.1. Alastair missed by one as did Delcie.

Just over half the players reached their expectancy with Cicely Bruce from Whangarei winning a prize for the most wins over expectancy by 3.7 games.

However, the overall winner of the tournament was the second rated player, Dylan Early from Wellington, who won 19 games with an average of 468 after 23 games.

The full results are available on the NZ Scrabble Players Association website.