Faizan Zaki, Last Year's Runner-Up, Is a Favorite to Win This Year's Spelling Bee

New York Times

3 days ago

For the past year, Faizan Zaki, 13, had a schedule that would rival that of professional athletes. He trained five to six hours a day on weekdays and seven to eight hours on weekends.
His reps were words. Lots and lots of words.
As last year's runner-up, he is a favorite to win this year's Scripps National Spelling Bee. And he has never studied harder, he said confidently hours before he was set to take the stage Thursday evening.
The seasoned speller from Plano, Texas, was the only 2024 finalist who advanced to the 2025 finals.
'A lot of people are looking to me to beat what I got last year,' he said over the phone.
He took a bit of a different approach in preparing this year, to increase his speed and improve his vocabulary. Once he got home from school, he would open the dictionary and look for words he hadn't seen before. He'd keep track of them in a document, focusing on the definition and spelling of each word.
This year, Faizan also studied specifically for the spell-off, the final tiebreaking round that cost him a win last year. In the spell-off, finalists have 90 seconds to spell as many words from a shared list of 30 as possible. Bruhat Soma defeated Faizan last year, spelling 29 words correctly to Faizan's 20 words.
The spell-off was required to end the contest last year. This year, the rules have been amended so that the spell-off is optional if judges deem the contest has gone on for too long.
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