At the end of a long grey day, it came down to suet and it was all over: Gary Oliver’s dull word was worth just 10 points, and meant that Wayne Kelly’s lead was unassailable.
The audience, which hung on his every word, went as wild as was possible for about 50 mainly middle-aged, very polite people, and Kelly was proclaimed British national Scrabble champion.
Kelly, a local government finance adviser who lives in Warrington, and who will invest a good chunk of his £2 000 winnings in a new computer, struggles slightly to convey the drama of his chosen sport.
“I’m on a bit of a buzz,” he said. “My colleagues will be pleased for me. They know all about it — I’ve talked about nothing else for weeks. But I know some people see it as a game, like Monopoly, that doesn’t really involve skill.”
He conceded that his last high-scoring word, travails, was “a bit of a slog word”, but he was proud of caromel, which was immediately challenged: “I wasn’t 100% sure of it myself, to be honest.” He was allowed the word, then shaken when Oliver came back with the 107-point ergotise — to argue logically.
Many hours earlier it had begun innocuously enough with wox and wee. Two moves later Oliver laid down eaterie for 85 points, Kelly could only come back with haul for 26, and the grand final of the national Scrabble championships suddenly got personal.
“Most people would only think of spelling it the common way, eatery, but Gary immediately saw that he could get in the ie — nice,” said Philip Nelkon, the tournament organiser, who works for Scrabble manufacturer Mattel and used to be a contender. He still glows quietly over the memory of his 293-point muezzins — the criers who lead the call to prayer in a mosque.
“It’s not like a family game at home, where everyone is desperate to block the others from getting to the triple word score because that usually decides it. These guys have the vocabulary — they’re not scared of the triple score.”
When play resumed after lunch at one game each and everything to play for, the board was soon littered with such strange, horrible words like woofy, suq and euoi.
“It is a very specialised vocabulary,” conceded Nelkon — his own name adapted by his grandfather from a much more Scrabble-useful central European version.
“You get people who are good at Scrabble who don’t even speak very good English.”
Kelly and Oliver were locked in combat in a quiet, narrow second-floor room, with an undistracting view of a blank brick wall. Each won scores of games, including nine in one day in the semifinals, to get to the finals for the first time.
Every word was relayed to the hall downstairs and followed by the audience, not on a video screen — even though the games were relayed live on the internet — but by real analogue human beings moving oversized tiles on a giant board. The commentator was a former champion, Brett Smitheram, who speaks fluent Scrabble. “This could be where Wayne considers playing unnipple,” he warned, to moans of dismay from the audience.
Kelly was planning three days off in London before he has to return to his studies for his next exams in public finance accountancy. “I’m going to go wild,” he promised. —