Ten to 12 members of the 12-year-old Bangalore Scrabble Club meet every weekend at Century Club to play the popular word game.
The full strength of the club, founded by Rex D Souza, is 100.
“Scrabble is a fun and competitive game between two players. You pit your wits against the other’s. The downside is that it causes disputes between friends who turn professional players,” says the city’s number one player, marketing consultant and coffee roaster Sanjoy Gupta.
Earlier, the members followed a dictionary put together by World English Scrabble Player Association (WESPA), the governing body of scrabble clubs the world over. In 2015, after a gap of many years, this dictionary was updated using the Collin Scrabble Words dictionary.
For tournaments, the rating system is similar to the EMO system in chess. A software rates players based on their performance across all the games they have played until that point. The score starts at 1,000, and goes up depending on the number of wins to their credit. So the rating goes up or comes down with each tournament.
The game is played nationally and internationally. On the Indian circuit, six or seven major annual tournaments are organised, with the main one being held in the city – IGate International. This attracts world champions, including world number 1 Nigel Richards, a regular at the event.
The Indian nationals are held in Mumbai, Goa, Pune and Delhi. Twice a year, Mumbai plays host to a world scrabble meet.
Gupta’s current rating is 1,700. He is ranked 11 in the country. “It took me practice and preparation to achieve this. Scrabble is a competitive field. I have a decent scrabble vocabulary. I built my word list over the years,” he says. He has been playing the game for 12 years, ever since he stumbled upon Scrabble Association of India, the governing body in the country, on Google.
Bingos are long seven- or eight-letter words, he adds. “These earn you a 50-point bonus if you use all the tiles on your rack,” he explains.
The skill lies in knowing how to study jumbled anagrams. “AEINRRT can become retrain and trainer. We study around 10,000 such seven-letter words,” says Gupta. “Another trick includes adding D to LAIR, making it LAIRD (Scottish word for lord). You have to know your hooks and ways on the board.”
He spends a few hours every day playing Scrabble on the Internet. Only during the weekends does he get to play across a physical game board.
“I have a love for words and love to spend time with them,” he adds.
He tries not to learn too much, and to manage with a limited set. “Whatever I want to know, I want to know it well. I try to keep it to a restricted and manageable number,” he says.
Another strategic element is to study the threats you are up against. “There are aggressive and defensive threats, it’s important to know when to look at the threats and pay attention to the unseen,” he adds.
He ranked sixth up until last year. “Then I dropped five ranks to 11. Scrabble is a mind-sport, it’s difficult to predict the ranks. Top players are consistently good, and good players occasionally excellent,” Gupta says.