His numerous achievements include winning the UK National Championship, British Elimination Scrabble Tournament, UK Masters, the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship and the UK’s highest rated player award.
thrive, earning him a place at Cambridge and then Oxford University to study Medicine.
Before his move to the United Kingdom, Harshan spent his childhood playing scrabble at Royal College when scrabble prodigy Missaka Warusawitharana created the school scrabble club. His involvement with the club opened his eyes to the Sri Lanka Scrabble League and Inter-School Scrabble at the age of 14. Harshan’s interest was further fuelled by a “strong peer group of excellent young Sri Lankan players,” such as Missaka, Naween Fernando and Suresh Chinnaiya and before long he was hooked. Following his move to the UK, Harshan joined his local scrabble club , competing in national and international tournaments even after university as a medical student and junior doctor. His numerous achievements include winning the UK National Championship, British Elimination Scrabble Tournament, UK Masters, the British Matchplay Scrabble Championship and the UK’s highest rated player award. Taking a break of around five years, Harshan returned to the world of scrabble last August at the prompting of his wife, Dr. Michelle Goonasekera who he adds “is sorely responsible for my current Scrabble obsession.”
The game itself surpasses the deceptive simplicity of being a family-fun board game or a mental and linguistic exercise. Expert level players keep their minds sharp and practise with the help of computer programmes like Zyzzyva which teaches and tests one on words in anagram form. Harshan’s opponent in the final- the current champion Nigel Richards, however, uses a system based on a photographic memory to scan through an alphabetized list of all words 2-15 letters long. This system, Harshan tells us allowed Nigel to win the French Language World Scrabble Championship even though he could not speak a word of French. For Harshan, the best practice is analyzing one’s past games and playing against the best in the arena. In addition, the runner up to this year’s world championship also revises shorter words and practices against Quackle which is the strongest Scrabble computer program. Exercise and sleep are