Night on the tiles has very different connotation for dedicated word hounds

THE main hall in Torquay’s enormous Riviera Conference Centre forum has never been so crowded and yet so quiet.

The only sound is the sound of small bags full of little plastic tiles rattling.

This is the sound of the Scrabble World Championships 2018.

In the forum 100 of the best Scrabble players in the world, from 26 different countries are quietly battling it out in four days of heats for the most sought-after title in Scrabble.

And one of the favourites – in both the popularity sense and the sense that he stands a good chance of winning, is Cornwall’s Brett Smitheram.

The 2016 winner, Brett is originally from Truro, grew up in Camborne in Cornwall, and now lives in Surrey where he works as a management consultant. Now aged 39, he has been ranked as a Scrabble Grand Master for nearly 20 years. One of the reasons for his popularity is that he is known as a great ambassador for Scrabble.

Following his championship win, Brett has been active in both local and international media championing the Make Mind A Sport campaign to get Scrabble recognised as a sport.

In 1997 he won six episodes of the Channel 4 show Countdown, qualifying him for the final.

In Torquay he won his first three heats using words like reniform (kidney shaped) and his winning ‘bingo’ ganoins (glassy tissue covering the scales of a fish).

In the second heat he explained how he won with a seven letter word: “I was excited because he didn’t block me. It was similar to the 2016 final when there was an ‘i’ in a very dangerous position.

“I had the letters to put ‘Braconid’ (meaning a type of parasitical wasp) on the ‘i’ and I had to tell myself there’s no way he’s not going to block it.

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“But then he started clicking down tiles on the opposite side of the board and I couldn’t believe it.”

In his third and toughest heat he played American Stefan Rau from New York who said afterwards that Brett beat him with two ‘bingo’ scores. In America a bonus 50 for using all seven tiles is called a ‘bingo’.

“If not for that, I would have had him,” Stefan said. “He had one bingo and then he picked from a very unlikely bag and got another bingo.”

Brett said: “From his point of view there weren’t many combinations left to make a seven-letter word. But unknown to him I picked the letters to make ganoins.

“He played and took a 20-point lead – if I hadn’t had two bonuses in a row he would have won.”

Jason Keller, from New Jersey said: “There are a couple of big tournaments around the world this year, but this is the big one for a lot of us.”

And Pauline Weatherhead from Ireland said: “This tournament is a very big deal. This is the biggest you will get in the Scrabble world.”

Tournament director Amy Byrne said members of the public are welcome as long as they keep quiet and don’t approach the players.

“They are not allowed to speak to the players or get too close,” she said.

There are strict rules at the beginning and end of play and one of the first rules of Scrabble is that all players are honour bound not to cheat.

Anybody caught cheating will be reported and refused entry to future tournaments.

Another tough rule of international tournaments is that if a mobile phone rings during the competition players get an official warning. If a phone goes off a second time they are fined and lose 50 points and they will forfeit the match if it rings a third time.

Competitors get 25 minutes each per game and use a chess clock – making the maximum length of any game 50 minutes.

The quickest games can be over in 20 minutes. Some players make a point of using all of their allotted time – but there can be a danger of running over time and losing by default.

Others play as quickly a possible and this is particularly a mark of the younger junior players. One of the adult players who watched the exciting junior finals admitted: “They are scarily quick – and it’s amazing how good they are.”

Pictures: ANDY STYLES