Word Wide Web

Every word matters. But, in Scrabble, some matter more than others. One such is a ‘triple-triple’ or ‘nine-timer’, where a player manages to come up with a word that hits two triple word score (TWS) squares, leading to points that are multiplied nine times over. This might sound simple, but it is actually quite rare. A player will have to come up with a word that, working through the constraints and opportunities on the board, is long enough to land on two TWS squares spaced far apart on the board. It needs a lot of luck, but also skill and an excellent vocabulary.

Madhav Kamath hit one such triple-triple during a game on his way to winning the World Youth Scrabble Championship (WYSC) in Malaysia last week. It landed him 140 points, probably the highest achieved through a single move during this edition of the tournament. 

What was the word, I ask. 

“Somegate,” replies the 14-year-old over the phone from his Delhi home.

What does it mean? 

“It is an obscure word, and, I know, its origin is in Scottish,” Kamath says. “But I don’t actually know what it means.” And then with a “wait, let me check,” he disappears, away from the phone and possibly into a dictionary. ‘Somegate’, it turns out, is a word of Scottish origin that means ‘somehow’.

It might sound odd to the casual scrabble player, but in the world of competitive scrabble, while possessing a deep knowledge of the dictionary (in particular, the Collins Scrabble Words, if you are playing in English-language tournaments outside North America) is useful, knowing the actual meaning of words is unnecessary. “Otherwise, you will go mad,” says Mimi Hingorani, with a laugh. Hingorani, who knows Kamath well, is a member of a popular scrabble club in Mumbai and one of the individuals who runs a popular scrabble academy, Wordaholix Scrabble Academy, that trains both amateur and competitive scrabble players in India. “We get parents all the time who goad their kids into scrabble thinking it will improve their vocabulary, when really it is about strategy more than just vocabulary.”

Competitive scrabble in India, like in the rest of the world, remains a niche activity. It is not designated as a sport in India, and hence has none of the support that comes with it. But try saying it is lesser than established sports like chess to any of its players, who spend years honing their skills and travelling the world to compete in tense and nerve-racking games so they can rise up the rankings, and they’ll explain how competitive and skill-oriented the game is. 

There has always been a small and passionate community of competitive scrabble players in India. Now, it is witnessing a small explosion, with a number of clubs emerging in various cities, an increase in the number of tournaments, and a growing proficiency of its players. “Back in 2005, there used to be like five tournaments happening at most throughout the year. Now there’s one taking place almost every month across the country. And as players, we now have to pick and choose,” says Sherwin Rodrigues, one of the top scrabble players in the country. 

Last week, India’s competitive scrabble scene got a big boost when Kamath beat over 200 under-18 players from 18 countries to win the WYSC, the first time an Indian had claimed a major global scrabble title. (Akshay Bhandarkar, originally from Mumbai, had won the WESPA, or World English-Language Scrabble Players Association, Championship in 2017, but he had done so while playing for Bahrain.) Since his win, Kamath has shot up in the rankings for players across age categories maintained by WESPA, reaching fifth, the highest an Indian has ever ranked. “Madhav is a prodigy,” says Harvinderjit Bhatia, president of the Scrabble Association of India (SAI). “He began playing when he was just six years old. That’s an age when children are just about counting numbers on their fingers. And here he was doing multiplications, seeing situations on a board, and competing against adults.” Hingorani recalls the time when Kamath participated in his first WYSC in Malaysia in 2017. “He was all of six, and he had to stand while playing the game because he couldn’t see his opponent,” she says. “And to now be ranked No 5 in the world, when you are just 14 years old.”

Scrabble was invented by an out-of-work American architect named Alfred Mosher Butts during the Great Depression in 1931. Butts carried out an analysis of letters in the alphabet by tabulating which words recurred most frequently in the leading American newspapers of the time to determine the right value to assign to each letter (according to rarity). He then took inspiration from the standard newspaper crossword, finally coming out with the earliest version of scrabble. The game, however, picked up only a few decades later. But once it did, it became a massive sensation. 

In India, the competitive scrabble scene began to grow sometime in the 1990s when tournaments began to be held in large metro cities like Mumbai. “My husband [Dr Varisht Hingorani, who’s won the national scrabble championship a few times] started playing scrabble in 1997, when one of the first few tournaments was held in Mumbai,” Hingorani says. “He went thinking, ‘I’m good in English, I have a good vocabulary, so I’ll do well’. And of course, he fell flat on his face.”

The growth of the subculture, the need felt to promote the game and to coordinate the many tournaments that take place, led to the development of SAI, the premier scrabble body in the country. “We are now almost 25 years old,” Bhatia says. “And the idea was to structure the whole scene into a sport, so that it gets recognised by the Ministry [of Sports] as a sport.” Today, there are many clubs mushrooming across the country, state chapters that promote the game, and a ratings system that logs up the points of all the players competing in different tournaments across the country. There is even a league tournament, modelled on the Indian Premier League, where the top 48 players, divided into eight teams, compete against one another. “The Ministry [of Sports] has its own criteria for something to be recognised formally as a sport. They basically want to make sure that a game is not for a select group, but is quite widespread. Scrabble is still a niche sport, but in the last 10 years, we have begun to see a lot more people playing it competitively,” says Neeta Bhatia, who is a partner at the Wordaholix Scrabble Academy and a member of the World Youth Scrabble Committee, a WESPA body that oversees the promotion and development of youth scrabble around the world. According to her, the pool of competitive scrabble players in the country registered with SAI, who travel around the country and travel abroad to compete in tournaments has today swelled to around 400.

Most of us are familiar with the basics of the game. We will sigh when we draw the lone X or Q, pump our fists in the air when we draw a blank tile, and get astonished every time we think up a decently long word or one that hits one of the double or triple word squares. But a competitive scrabble player’s gameplay is far more evolved. He or she will have the ability to make more words with the same set of tiles than the casual player (even though the meanings of the words could evade him or her); will know there are, in every bag of 100 tiles, 12 Es, nine As and Is, eight Os, six Ns, Rs and Ts, four Ds, Ls, Ss and Us, three Gs, two Bs, Cs, Fs, Hs, Ms, Ps, Vs, Ws and Ys, and a single J, K, Q, X and Z, apart from two blank ones; will keep track of every single one of them while deducing what their opponent could possibly have; and, like in chess, will think many steps ahead. “By the second last or last move, you must know exactly what your opponent has, and, if there is anything in the bag, what possibilities are still available. So your tile tracking has to be spot on,” Hingorani says. Another aspect that will come as a surprise to most hobbyist-players is the importance of small words. We may feel a thrill every time we are able to place a large word on the board, but elite players will sometimes forego opportunities where they can score big points in favour of two-letter words that hardly fetch them anything, so that they can block the board and minimise scoring opportunities for their opponents. 

In the world of competitive scrabble, it is also more than just a game—it becomes an obsessive, lifelong commitment. Players will spend anywhere between an hour or more daily practising or simulating matches, learning new words, solving anagrams, perfecting pattern recognition skills, or using many of the new online tools to improve their skills. The Collins Scrabble Words has around 2.80 lakh words, and competitive players will memorise words whose letters have the most probability of appearing or leading to bingos (where you score a bonus 50 points for using all seven tiles in your rack in a single turn), with the very best trying to memorise right up to all seven- or eight-letter words. There is said to be around 34,000 seven-letter words and 42,000 eight-letter words in the Collins Scrabble Words, an enormous task to keep in one’s mind, let alone to be able to identify them when an actual opportunity arises during the game. Most players will also not go beyond memorising seven-letter or eight-letter words, because the opportunities for their use don’t come up frequently enough to justify the effort. “To be honest, it’s a lot of effort,” says Rodrigues. “You need to put in a lot of time, hard work and study. And it’s a lifelong process. Studying scrabble words, it never really ends.”

Rodrigues picked up the rules of the game watching his family members play when he was around nine years old. He has since won many tournaments, including the national championship in Oman when he lived there, and in India, and is today ranked 15, the second-highest ranked Indian on WESPA’s ratings. “It is not just about studying words. You should be able to spot it when the opportunity comes. So that’s where your retention abilities come,” he says. “There are a lot of strategic elements that come in the game actually. It can be almost like a puzzle.”

Competitive scrabble can also lend itself to obsessive personalities. And there are few individuals who personify this type better than the player currently ranked No 1 in the WESPA ratings, and who is widely held to be scrabble’s GOAT. Nigel Richards, the 58-year-old New Zealander living in Malaysia, who is known to speak very little and who was once described as “a computer with a ginger beard”, has won more scrabble world championships than anyone else, including the French world championship twice and the Spanish world championship once, even though he does not speak a word in these two languages. 

Last year, when Richards appeared in Bengaluru to play the Mu Sigma International Scrabble Tournament, which he won, he produced what many consider one of the most awe-inspiring moves in scrabble history, one which is still spoken about in reverential tones. Richards had already scored four bingos in the game against Indian player Rajiv Antao, with him leading the score 583-237, when he was left with the tiles ACENORT. All the top Scrabble players could make out that he had four options for another bingo (from the seven-letter word ‘ENACTOR’ to three eight-letter words using the tiles already on the board to form ‘COPARENT’, ‘SORTANCE’ and ‘SARCONET’). Richards instead found a fifth option. Recognising a pattern no one else seemed to have, he used his tiles and those already on the board to form an obscure 11-letter word called ‘PERNOCTATED’ (which means to ‘pass the night somewhere’) to win himself 92 points. He eventually ended up with his personal highest score of 748, en route to defeating his opponent by 447 points. According to writer Stefan Fatsis, writing in the portal Defector, “(P)ERNOCTA(TED) is a dizzying feat not only of anagramming and word knowledge but of spatial relations, visual awareness, imagination, creativity, and sangfroid. It is, in its own way, art.”

Someone like Richards however is a rare type. And for many, even in the competitive circuit, scrabble is a fun and sociable pursuit. In India, many competitive players tend to have been introduced to the game by, and continue to play with, their families. Both Harvinderjit and Neeta Bhatia, who are married, play with each other, and also with their two sons, who have both represented India at the WYSC. Mimi Hingorani also continues to play frequently with her husband Varisht, as with her daughter who has also taken up the game.

In recent years, Hingorani has however reduced the number of tournaments she participates in. She also often calls herself a scrabble widow, given her husband’s frequent travels to play in tournaments. But that does not reduce the pinch she feels when she messes up in the occasional game she turns up for. In the last tournament she participated in, she was leading in a game, right up till its final moment, when her opponent put down her last seven tiles to form the word ‘SNODDER’ on the board. It wasn’t just a bingo. With 99 points, her opponent was also going to win the game. In the confusion that followed, Hingorani challenged that word, which was unsuccessful since such a word exists in the Collins Scrabble Words, but failed to notice that another word it had landed up forming, ‘AZOICS’, did not exist.

“It was only after the game was over, and I was signing the results’ slip, when I realised what had happened. I should have won, but I got so rattled that I messed it up. If I had only challenged the other word,” Hingorani says. “It’s been a while since that game, but that moment still haunts me.” 

information societyMadhav KamathScrabble AssociationvocabularyWorld Youth Scrabble Championship