Top of the tile: wordsmiths of all ages vie for Australia's Scrabble honours
The air in the grand ballroom of Bankstown Sports Club is still. The lights are bright and the decor opulent, but the atmosphere is one of hushed concentration.
Its inhabitants, safely ensconced in this sanctuary away from the singsong of poker machines outside, do not speak except to count scores on Scrabble boards atop their white-tablecloth work benches. The only other sounds are the soft clink of tiles as bags are shaken and their contents withdrawn for the next, tension-fuelled move.
To the naked eye, the vibe at the three-day national championships is decidedly understated. Look a little closer and one might spy the man towards the back wearing glasses, a plain T-shirt and a simply fabulous pair of zig-zagged technicoloured trousers. He and a female opponent are huddled over a board featuring the words “spew”, “vom”, “yay”, “gif” and “equid”.
Next to this pair is a man in a shirt plastered with parakeet prints and a woman with hair down to her waist. Among their words thus far are “novum”, “bug”, “woo”, “ohm” and “tiller”. In the far corner, in a tailored red blazer is 87-year-old Rene Chelton, the tournament’s oldest competitor. She is playing youth talent Vinh Nguyen.
Up the front is the youngest. Eightyear-old Jeffery Lam is almost swallowed up by his high-backed chair. His feet barely touch the ground and he has to lean over to reach the board.
In the opposite corner, Scrabble master Chris May is already figuratively penning his acceptance speech. He has a good handle on Bob Jackman, a familiar foe indeed. He and the Scrabble NSW president (also wearing a colourful shirt) have played each other competitively hundreds of times.
“I thought I was sitting pretty,” says May, a 36-year-old lawyer who has a doctorate in musicology from Oxford and holds the Guinness World Record for the highest number of simultaneous Scrabble games (28).
“I was writing my victory speech in my head. Then Bob got back within striking distance, put me in a sticky situation. I started drawing very poorly, had several turns in a row where I was choking with vowels and had very little opportunity on the board to use them. I was very worried. I had to think really hard, and managed to fall over the line for a win.”
This is the final game in a bestof-24 tournament, and there are live calculations in play. May is in top spot, one win in front of Jakob Teitelbaum but with an inferior winning margin. If Teitelbaum loses his last bout with Victor Tung, the title goes to May. But if Teitelbaum wins and May loses, he can kiss the trophy goodbye.
Teitelbaum does prevail but so too does May, eking out a result by a slim 26-point margin for an overall record of 20 wins and four losses. Observers suspect Teitelbaum might be the first contestant to have won 19 games and not the tournament.
Many of May’s wins were close, but he “just got a bit of help from the letters where it counted and Dave didn’t”.
The “Dave” he refers to is world No 2 David Eldar, who places third. Eldar beat May both times they played and was top of the table after 18 games before being unceremoniously dethroned.
Even after the penultimate round, when he knows it is too late to make up the difference, he sits with his laptop replaying his most recent game on the Quackle software, having written down every move on a piece of paper for review. He won’t sleep tonight if he has not done this.
Earlier in the tournament Eldar, 31, played the word “guitguit” (one of several species of small tropical American birds of the family Coerebidae). Then he sits across from John Holgate, who won his first national championship in 1987 and has repeated the feat numerous times over.
Their board is a variation on a theme of Harry Potter, with “owl”, “wand” and “outdream” all played so far. Also there is “mitral” (relating to the valve between the heart’s left atrium and left ventricle), “fenman” (a dweller of a fen, in particular the Fens of England) and “saponite” (a clay mineral consisting of hydrated magnesium aluminium silicate and occurring in metamorphic rocks such as serpentine).
Sydney’s Esther Perrins, who not so long ago was the world’s top-ranked female player, finishes seventh.
They are playing in the championship division (entrants with a rating higher than 1,300). The plate – or second – division is won by Jeffery’s 11-year-old brother, Alex Lam, with a game to spare. Even in this knowledge, the Cabramatta Public School student is not going to throw his final game to Judy Mansfield, a woman easily identifiable by her dangly tiled earrings bearing the letter ‘J’. Mansfield loses this one, but finishes a credible 10th.
In round 23, Alex makes light work of Wendi Symes, meaning the only rival left in his way is Susan Roberts, still deep in her 23rd-round hit-out against Peter Bauer. Mathematically, she is still in with a shot but would have to beat Bauer and then win her final game by 200 points or more, while relying on Alex to lose his by about the same margin.
An annexation is thus highly unlikely, but the tournament director, John Hamilton, would still not bet his house on it because “it has happened before”. Alex seemingly knows this too, for as soon as he is done with Symes he spends the ensuing minutes loitering around the Roberts-Bauer tie until the matter is settled and he is officially crowned the youngest national champion, breaking the record set by a 14year-old Matthew Selvanera in 2008.
“He’s been beating the snot out of the adults,” remarks George Khamis, the Scrabble NSW vice-president and a member of the tournament’s executive organising committee.
There is even an adult in the championship draw who can attest to this. “He beat me about six months ago,” says Ivor Zetler, who finishes 35th. “It’s very humiliating.” Zetler, a South AfricanAustralian doctor based in Sydney, is about to sit down across from a woman who asks him to “go easy on the medical words”.
The Australian Scrabble fraternity is a niche crowd, but also a cross-section of society. The field comprises teachers, Uber drivers, coalminers, lawyers, doctors and children’s authors.
It is later learned that amazing pants man is Garth van Vliet, chief balloonist at Jay Jay the Balloonguy and owner of The Jolly Juggler, a manufacturer of juggling equipment. It is also learned that said pants are golf pants and, though he does not play golf, has about 20 pairs in different but equally loud designs.
In a flash he opens the Loudmouth Golf website on his phone and peruses its wares. “Now you’re making me buy more stuff,” he says, admiring a pair adorned with hotdogs.
Van Vliet was born in South Africa and came to Australia partly for the Scrabble scene. He spends hours a day practising. Mostly it brings joy, but sometimes not. “It’s also frustrating as hell,” he says. “Doing the useless the hard way, that’s how it should be described.”
His 21-year-old son used to play but has since got into Rubik’s cubing. Or, more accurately, “speedcubing”. Last year he went to the world championships.
“Give him five Rubik’s cubes, put them in front of him, he checks each one out, puts a blindfold on and solves them in about two minutes … the top guys have, like, 13 cubes memorised. He’s quite a way down actually. He goes to the world champs but he’s nowhere near the top – kind of like me and Scrabble.”
Van Vliet’s national campaign has been “pretty rough”; he finishes 29th from 48 in the championship division with 11 wins and 13 losses. On day