9.24 AM Tuesday, 19 March 2024
  • City Fajr Shuruq Duhr Asr Magrib Isha
  • Dubai 05:07 06:20 12:29 15:54 18:33 19:47
19 March 2024

Dubai resident is Gulf Scrabble Champion

Dubai-based Akshay Bhandarkar raced to a record fifth tournament success at the 2015 Gulf Scrabble Championship (Supplied)

Published
By Staff

Dubai-based Akshay Bhandarkar raced to a record fifth tournament success at the 2015 Gulf Scrabble Championship (GSC) held at the Thuraya Hall in Dubai Internet City.

The investment advisor, who started playing at the age of 9 and captured his first Gulf title in 1996 as a teenager, won 15 out of his 16 games to finish 5 wins clear of his nearest competition, Bahraini ace Mohammed Irfan Siddiqui.

The victory entitled Bhandarkar to the first of two slots for UAE players at the World Championships (WSC) in Perth in November, where he will hope to emulate his 2007 fifth place finish for the UAE in a strong field of almost 130 players from over 40 countries. 


The global event is organised by the World English-Language Scrabble Players Association (WESPA), the international governing body for the mind sport. “As someone who’s grown up playing the game, I’ve always relished the chance to compete against some of the world’s finest competitors, and am looking forward to my first WSC since 2009,” said Bhandarkar.


The second UAE slot for Perth went to Eric Kinderman, who finished third at the GSC ahead of former champions Ronald Credo and Selwyn Lobo.  The American national, an English teacher at the Taaleem-run Uptown School in Mirdif, will make his World Championships debut.  He credits his success to an intense word study regimen conducted over the past year, “As a teacher, I’ve always been passionate about words and meanings, but for Scrabble, your conversational vocabulary has to be supplemented with many unusual words.  For the past 10 months, I’ve memorised a few thousand words daily with flashcards, and was ecstatic that I got to use many of them at the GSC.”


The Gulf tournament, which is in its 25th year and saw over 150 games played over the course of two days, also marked the local debut of the 2015 Collins Scrabble Words list (CSW2015), which was adopted as the international dictionary for competitive games by WESPA in September.  This latest edition features 6500 new playable words, including many entries taken from technology, like hashtag, emoji, selfie, and tweep, as well as internet slang such as ‘pwn’, ‘lolz’, ‘newb’and ‘thanx’.  “The new words seemed very unusual at first to me, but I was amazed that my students were already familiar with them!” said Kinderman.

GCC Top 7:

1. Akshay Bhandarkar (UAE)

2. Mohammed Irfan Siddiqui (Bahrain)

3. Eric Kinderman (UAE)

4. Ronald Credo (UAE)

5. Selwyn Lobo (UAE)

6. Rohaina Tanveer (Kuwait)

7. Megel Barker (UAE)

The highest game score in the tournament was 676 points by housewife Sabiha Zaidi, who also recorded the highest word score with 129 points for ‘request’.

The qualifiers for Perth will be accompanied by 15-year-old Sanchit Kapoor, a student at GEMS Modern Academy in Dubai, who is bidding to become the first World Youth Scrabble Champion from the UAE at the under-17 world cup which immediately precedes the senior tournament, after placing fifth at the previous edition in Colombo.