Scrabble champs set for world stage
Siblings to represent Canada at international tournament for popular board game
When champion Scrabble player Dean Saldanha is balancing his rack, he’s not thinking of the word he can make on this turn. He’ll be thinking ahead, gambling that he will hit on a higher-scoring, high-probability word on the next turn or the one after that.
“My strategy on each turn is more about deciding what I want to keep and what I want to discard so I have a chance of getting a seven-letter word later on,” said Saldanha, 36.
That seven-letter word, or “bingo,” is the holy grail of scrabble, worth an extra 50 points, explained Saldanha, a project manager for B.C. Hydro who, along with his sister Dielle, 30, will be representing Canada at the Goa Scrabble Championships Oct. 16-20. The tournament will feature ranked players from 53 countries.
Saldanha became obsessed with Scrabble while growing up in Dubai, where his father and mother started a kitchen-table club that later became the Dubai Scrabble Club. He tagged along and helped set up the boards until at around age nine his mother
taught him how to play.
“I lost the first two games and beat her on the third,” said Saldanha. “She wasn’t too happy about that.”
Soon he was playing against all the adults in the club and winning.
“A 10-year-old can have a meaningful game of Scrabble with a 90-year-old,” said Saldanha. “That’s one of the great things about the game.”
To prep for a tourney Saldanha spends up to two or three hours a night studying words, visualizing possible letter combinations and anagramming.
“I can’t always turn it off,” said Saldanha, who added that his wife, who prefers not to play Scrabble with him, is
A 10-year-old can have a meaningful game of Scrabble with a 90-year-old.” Dean Saldanha
nonetheless “very understanding.”
Although it’s important to memorize all the two- or three-letter words you can (qi can come in handy) anagramming is a crucial skill.
“You can get better at anagramming by training your brain to look for prefixes and suffixes in a word, like dis, mis, ed, ing, ion. You train your brain to recognize patterns,” said Saldanha.
He rattled off anagrams easily: “Pontiac can become caption. You might have a-de-i-n-s-t, then it can become stained or detains or instead.”
Saldanha recommends setting up the tiles on your rack in alphabetical order, and not separating them into words. “You don’t want your opponent to see that you are planning a three-letter word or a four-letter word.”
Word games appear to be enjoying a resurgence, thanks to online games like Words With Friends, and many tournament Scrabble players are mostly in it for the love of the game.
“It’s not like poker, you can’t get rich playing Scrabble,” said Saldanha.