Melbourne, December 16: Eleven-year-old Indian-origin Anand Bharadwaj has been crowned as the World Youth Scrabble Champion, after he successfully managed to recover from a triple-triple. Anand explained that if an opponent covers two triple word squares, their score multiplies by nine and adds 50 points.
Such was his predicament earlier this month at the finals in Malaysia when his opponent played ‘waysides’ for a tournament-high 176 points. “It was a crucial game, and everybody wrote him off. The ushers came and told me, ‘He’s trailing by 160 points, I think it’s gone.’ I didn’t know what to expect, but he came back and said, ‘I won it,’” The Age quoted his father, Melbourne Business School associate professor Kannan Sethuraman, as saying.
Bharadwaj was younger than all but three of the 83 competitors he beat in Malaysia and has now set his eyes on the World Scrabble Championship in 2013.
The family shifted to Melbourne from Chennai when Anand was 13 months old. By 15 months he was reading on his mother’s knee, able to page reference any quote from dozens of books. At four he kept fellow preps entertained by naming train stations in Melbourne sequentially.
In his voluminous vocabulary, ‘Douleia’ is his favourite word. ”It means worship of saints and angels. And it uses all the vowels,” Bharadwaj said.
Such was his predicament earlier this month at the finals in Malaysia when his opponent played ‘waysides’ for a tournament-high 176 points. “It was a crucial game, and everybody wrote him off. The ushers came and told me, ‘He’s trailing by 160 points, I think it’s gone.’ I didn’t know what to expect, but he came back and said, ‘I won it,’” The Age quoted his father, Melbourne Business School associate professor Kannan Sethuraman, as saying.
Bharadwaj was younger than all but three of the 83 competitors he beat in Malaysia and has now set his eyes on the World Scrabble Championship in 2013.
The family shifted to Melbourne from Chennai when Anand was 13 months old. By 15 months he was reading on his mother’s knee, able to page reference any quote from dozens of books. At four he kept fellow preps entertained by naming train stations in Melbourne sequentially.
In his voluminous vocabulary, ‘Douleia’ is his favourite word. ”It means worship of saints and angels. And it uses all the vowels,” Bharadwaj said.