Gulf Scrabble champion 2015, Akshay Bhandarkar (left), took the title from two-time champion Mohammad Sulaiman on Saturday.
Dubai - The winners of this Gulf Scrabble Championship - in its 25th year - will be the UAE's qualifiers for the World Championship in Perth, Australia, in November.
Published: Sun 4 Oct 2015, 12:00 AM
Updated: Mon 5 Oct 2015, 9:25 AM
Over the first weekend of October, a group of Scrabble enthusiasts of varying ages (teenagers to septuagenarians) and professions (businessmen, academics, students, virologists and consultants) sat across their opponents in a hall in building number 3 of Dubai's Internet City. There were no voices to be heard. The only sound from the hall was the clack and shuffle of tiles.
Eighteen payers on nine tables - two players per table - were competing for the title of Gulf Scrabble Champion 2015. The people in the room were the best scrabble players of the region, having won rounds of matches, slaying opponents and emerging triumphant with massive scoring words.
The winners of this Gulf Scrabble Championship - in its 25th year - will be the UAE's qualifiers for the World Championship in Perth, Australia, in November.
And the winners are...
Top 6 at the 25th Gulf Scrabble Championship
> Akshay Bhandarkar (UAE)
> Mohd Irfan Siddiqui (Bahrain)
> Eric Kinderman (UAE)
> Ronald Credo (UAE)
> Selwyn Lobo (UAE)
> Rohaina Tanveer (Kuwait)
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Fun fact: Scrabble, according to former champ Selwyn Lobo is still the highest selling boardgame; it beat even Monopoly.
Madhu Soneja, one of the three female players at the championship and mother of Nikhil Soneja, UAE Scrabble Club chairman, said her best word of the days was 'Woxen' - she got 55 points off it. "Don't ask me what it means," she said. "I just had a feeling it was a word."
Walking around the tables of the players - the boards placed on a spinning lazy-Susan base - you see words you wish you'd come up with: Koa, zupa, aroid. Another fun fact: According to rules, while picking letters from the bag, players have to hold the bag over their heads/eyes, so as to eliminate any accidental peeking of tiles.
Robert Rosenthal, a teacher of English, History and Math in the UAE, who's been playing Scrabble for 13 years now, came up with the word 'cojones'. He got 65 points for it.
'Ixnay' was the best word of businessman Chidambaram K.V., who picked up scrabble back in Bahrain in 1993.
But the highest scoring word of the day - 'Request' that got 129 points - belonged to Sabiha Aisha Zaidi, a jewellery designer and housewife, who runs the group GlobalScrabble on Facebook. She got 129 points off it. Her gamescore till Saturday afternoon had been the highest: 676.
There was no dearth of interesting background stories of the players who play, why they play and when they started playing.
Did you know?
A novel addition to this year's word face-off is that it marked the debut of a new list of words.
The 2015 Collins Scrabble Words dictionary contains 6,500 new playable words, including several from the Internet and social media usage, such as emoji, facetime and hacktivist.
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Take virologist Rohaina Tanveer from Kuwait for instance. "It's not just a man's game," she said, when asked why there aren't more women around, shuffling tiles, contributing to the delightful clacking sound. Tanveer said there are quite a few women players, even if not evident in this particular championship. She, for one, is a bona fide scrabble champ, trotting over the world to play matches. Malaysia and London are mentioned. Her highly marketable words: "I travel for Scrabble."
Two-time former Gulf champion, 73-year-old Canadian national Mohammad Sulaiman, stepped outside the building. He needed some sun. "It's too cold."
He said good-naturedly he would be the reigning champion for only a few hours more - till Akshay Bhandarkar, the highest ranked Gulf player and former world number 5, takes over.
"I'm not in my peak anymore," he said. "It's true. I threw away one or two games. Now I lack the concentration." He's been playing for 25 years. A businessman, he goes back to Pakistan sometimes. He's lived in Sri Lanka and likes the UAE. "To every place and everything in life, one has to adjust."
nivriti@khaleejtimes.com
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