Word has it …

Published August 31, 2014
Scrabble team with officials
Scrabble team with officials

It was during one of Pakistan Scrabble Association’s (PSA) regular championships at the Beach Luxury Hotel a couple of years ago that, among the players focusing on the alphabets on their little wooden stands, one noticed a kid with a cannula in his hand playing as well.

“Hassan Hadi Khan is sick and was admitted to hospital until this morning when he insisted on coming to play here. His parents, of course, couldn’t refuse a sick child’s wish. But they will get him back to hospital right after,” Tariq Pervez, PSA’s director, Youth Programme had said at the time.

On another table among some other senior scrabble players, one came across the boy again to wonder what happened to that cannula in his hand. “Oh this is Hassan’s twin Hammad Hadi Khan. Both brothers are quite crazy about scrabble,” informed Mr Pervez.

And now we hear of a Hasham Hadi Khan, the twins’ nine-year-old little brother who created a world record in the 6th Sri Lanka International Scrabble Championship in Colombo last week. The youngest player in the Pakistan scrabble team of senior and junior players, Hasham scored 878 points against 11-year-old Matheesha De Silva of Sri Lanka.

According to the Guinness Book of World Records the highest score ever recorded in a scrabble match was made by Toh Wei Bin of Singapore, who scored 850 against Rick Kennedy of Scotland in 2012.

Hasham’s scores including a triple-triple play for his word “GRUNTLES” and included three more bingos; SHERIAT, RETSINA and HEADERS.

His opponent Matheesha was reduced to a mere spectator as Hasham threw a flurry of bingos while cleverly challenging off all invalid words that Matheesha tried to form in a desperate attempt to reduce the deficit.


“I started playing scrabble after watching my older brothers play. And our father is the one who they watched playing to take to the game,” Hasham laughed. “It’s a vicious cycle,” he laughed even harder.


Around 80 of the world’s best players, including world champion Nigel Richards, were witness to the spectacular show of vocabulary and tactical skills by the nine-year-old. All hailed Hasham as the next big thing in scrabble. Nigel Richards himself congratulated Hasham on his record while modestly admitting that he himself has never gone past a score of 700 in a major event.

“I started playing scrabble after watching my older brothers play. And our father is the one who they watched playing to take to the game,” Hasham laughed. “It’s a vicious cycle,” he laughed even harder.

Three’s company: Hasham with his twin older brothers
Three’s company: Hasham with his twin older brothers

And where did he learn such big words? “Scrabble of course. My vocabulary is better than many of my class fellows, too,” Hasham, a class five student at BVS Parsi School, boasted.

Asked if now after creating a world record right under their noses, his older brothers were jealous of him, Hasham quickly said, “No, no, they are very happy. They are very proud of me and say they have been good teachers.”

About his other interests, the word nerd said that he loved playing football in school.

Meanwhile, Nadeem Hadi Khan, Hasham’s father said that Hasham, starting school at two-and-a-half years of age, had always been an exceptionally bright child. “I liked playing scrabble so brought a board home and the kids liked it too. I think Hasham was in class two at the time. Now the children’s mother wants them to study but they spend most of their time playing. But then the game itself has a lot to do with education,” he pointed out.

Hasham with Nigel Richards
Hasham with Nigel Richards

About all his kids selected in the Pakistan scrabble squad and playing in Sri Lanka now, the father said he and his wife had a lot to owe to the PSA, its president, Mrs Goshpi B. Avari, and the kids’ sports and games teacher at school, Sir Azar, and the school principal, Mrs Kermin Parakh. “The government has shown no interest in the mind sport and there is no financial help from it either. We couldn’t have afforded to send all three kids despite their selection in the team had there not been help from the PSA and its president. The PSA arranged for their travel and Mrs Avari arranged for their stay at the Avari Dubai Hotel the last time and this time they found a sponsor to help us with all that,” he said.

Until only four years ago, when the PSA started organising regular inter-school championships to look for new talent at the grassroots level, they kept the minimum age for participation at 11 years. “I had never thought eight or nine-year-olds were capable of becoming professional players but I have been proven wrong over the years by all this budding talent around me.

Pakistan’s team of young scrabble players made their mark in their very first outing at the World Youth Scrabble Championship [WYSC] in 2010, and they kept getting better and better until last year when Pakistan’s performance was record-breaking. Apart from the winner Moizullah Baig, the runner-up, Javeria Mirza, was also from Pakistan. In fact, eight players from Pakistan finished in the top 20 out of 136 players which is the best performance by any country in the history of WYSC. Pakistan is the talk of scrabble world now,” PSA’s director, Youth Programme, concluded.

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, August 31, 2014

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