Who doesn’t love a game of Scrabble? Until you get the Q without a U and too many vowels.
Australia’s top Scrabble players have been in action, vying for a $1000 purse and a spot at the world cup and in one match, Naween Fernando saw off former world champion David Eldar. Along the way he bagged the highest single-word score in Australia this year – 194.
Eighteen of Australia’s top 20 players flew in from around the country, along with two international competitors from NZ and Spain.
Every turn is timed and each player has 25 minutes to make all their moves, with a 10-point penalty for every minute they run over time.
“It’s a much fuller set of rules than appear on the box,” says Carol Johnsen, secretary of the World English Speaking Scrabble Association and organiser of the event.
And then there are the scores. No-one in this group would be are happy with nines and 10s.
And the record?
“I managed to get a triple triple in an earlier game,” says Fernando, a Melbourne accountant who won his first national title since 2010. “There was a ‘v’ hanging out and I had a rack of ‘a, i, i, g, m, n, p’ and I managed to score 194 for ‘improving’”.
The word is the highest-scoring single word in Australia this year and ties with Jane Taylor’s “edify” and Andrew Fisher’s “ceterach” – the scientific name for a certain genus of ferns.
What’s your best score? Do you love a game of Scrabble?
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