Email
Print
ShareMumbai: The 'Awakener' *
To the 'must-dos' those magazines and websites ask us to try before we are 40/are married/are dead, here's another you may want to add: Walk into the Juhu-Vile Parle Gymkhana on a Saturday.
Go there just to get baffled. Watch a Scrabble champion pick alphabets that seem like gibberish when put on the rack (say, K, Z, S, I, U, M, J). Then try to catch the whirring in his head as he makes sense of them. When he coolly makes a word -- in this case, muzjiks -- that sounds like balderdash to you, yet earns him a whopping 79 points, consider your world-view expanded.
Not that I bought muzjiks is a word"It is. You may check it here," insists Nakul Prabhu,24,national champion, handing over the official Scrabble dictionary. I ask him whether he is always this courteous when his opponent challenges his move. "Scrabble rules take care of that just fine," he winks at his opponent Puneet Sharana. "If you challenge a word, and lose, it means 5 points and a turn gone down the drain. And given that the best Scrabble games are won and lost by 2-3 points, you have a lot at stake."
Not just vocabulary
It is these subtle, make-or-break techniques that the Mumbai Scrabble Club teaches the young, the old and the earnest. Of course, being a member of the club also means your vocabulary goes stratospheric and it can be a challenge to get back down to earth.
Not everyday, for instance, can you tell someone that you've seen all the odea -- concert halls --in town. And, take our word for this, you don't want to risk pronouncing zyzzyva -- a snouted African beetle -- at a party, unless you want to be labelled just that.
Almost every member of the club has an I-had-no-idea-Scrabble-had-this-in-store-for-me sort of a story. Dr Varishth Hingorani, one of the founder members of the club from 1997, used to be quite pleased with his expertise at word games and puzzles. Confident of acing a Scrabble tournament, he remembers how he sauntered in for one held in 1996.
Only when his opponent made "odd 2-letter words like aa, xi, ut and mm", did Hingorani realise there was more to the game than just being proficient in English. "Obviously, I didn't qualify for the next round and was stung. That was when I went back and researched all about Scrabble," he remembers with fascination.
As Hingorani realised what Scrabble is really all about, he was fascinated. "Scrabble is not about picking up tiles, hoping luck will favour you, and then making a word that'll earn you a few odd points. To excel, you have to make the game a part of your routine, just like you would do for, say tennis. It is about learning new words everyday, revising old ones, mastering the techniques involved, and the most important thing, in fact, is using the correct strategy at the right time during the game," says Hingorani.
"To put it simply, there are things that differentiate a tournament game from the
kitchen-table Scrabble we play with friends," quips Prabhu, looking a tad sheepish as I raise my eyebrows at the term used for something I love playing back home.
The scrabble dictionary
An acolyte's first day at the club includes an introduction to a formidable tool -- the Scrabble dictionary approved by the World English Scrabble Players Association. It contains 1,67,000 words -- and some world champions know each of them. (Now you know why they would rather not bother with the meanings; it just slows them down in learning the words.)
There are different categories of word lists -- words to which you can't add the alphabet 'S' (oys, zoic, uns), words to which you cannot add any alphabet at the beginning or end (sjoe, jynx, zzzs, for instance) etc. "This is how we all started, except may be some like Hingorani. He wasn't spoon-fed with these lists -- he made so many of these mind-boggling lists all by himself," says Prabhu.
After the lists come techniques like rack balancing, tile tracking and, most important of all, probability.
Every player tweaks these to suit his style and temperament. Commonly, when a player is leading, he tends to block the Scrabble board by making words that would leave little chance for his opponent to score well. But Prabhu doesn't use this technique. "I almost always prefer keeping the board open to play. That way, both players get ample opportunity to perform. That's the real battle of wits," he believes.
Juggling with alphabets
PC Jose, a co-founder of the group, overhears Prabhu and smiles. "You may know all the words in the dictionary, but if your strategy isn't sharp, your chances of winning are slim."
Hingorani glances at Sherwin Rodrigues, a 20-year-old Scrabble world champion, to explain. "Rodrigues knows fewer words than Jose. But his math and strategy are brilliant -- he hardly lost a game even as a child."
To prove his claim, Hingorani asks Rodrigues to make a word by adding any other alphabet to the letters in my name. "K, A, R, E, E, N, A," thinks Rodrigues aloud. And then, in a flash, he says, "Add a W to that and you get the words 'awakener' and 'reawaken'."
Flattering, to say the least.
Rodrigues beat the Oman champion at the age of 13. Last year, when Malaysia invited 50 Scrabble players around the world, Rodriguesbeat the reigning world champion, Nigel Richards. Richards is the first player to hold the UK and US championship titles concurrently. (US follows a different Scrabble dictionary).
"It's quite amusing, though, that the anagram of 'Sherwin' works out to be 'Whiners', announces Prabhu, drawing a few laughs.
And, for the record, muzjik is a Russian peasant, oys is Scottish for grandchild and uns is a transuranic element that has not been found in nature.Bless them.
* ('Awakener' is what Scrabble world champ Sherwin Rodrigues came up with in an instant, when asked to form a word by adding an alphabet to the first name of the writer, Kareena N Gianani)
Tiles of the trade
Rack balancing: Good players plan which alphabets to use each time and which to retain for subsequent turns. For instance, if your rack has B, C, M, P and three vowels, it would be smart to retain C because it makes the maximum 7 or 8 -letter words, which gain a hefty bonus.
You could even miss chances to gather alphabets to make a high-scoring word. A rack is said to be balanced if it has 4 consonants and 3 vowels.
Tile tracking: This means keeping track of every tile you and your opponent uses in a game. So, you won't keep waiting for that alphabet if you already know it got used.
Probability: Given the number of tiles of an alphabet, there is a certain probability of picking one. For instance, the combinations, E, T, A, R, I, O, N and O, T, A, R, I, N, E, have the highest probability of turning up on your rack. A player must know the top 3000 probabilities and at least 1000 7 and 8-letter words using these alphabets.
