Budding Scrabble players, some of them international champions already, look up to him. All attribute their success to him as he has coached them always with their best interests at heart. He is referred to as the “coach of coaches” by the Pakistan Scrabble Association (PSA). But Waseem Khatri, the top Scrabble player of Pakistan, didn’t have the luxury of his kind of high-level coaching when he was starting out as a Scrabble player himself.

Waseem was eight or nine years of age when introduced to the game by his older cousin Ashfaq. “Having learnt how to play from him, I started playing the game with my brother at home,” says Khatri, adding that they played a very simple kind of Scrabble just making little words then in whatever space they could on the board.

“I knew this couldn’t be it. I could do better than that so I started playing Scrabble with my cousin who had taught me the game in the first place,” he says. “Still, I wasn’t satisfied because my cousin was also stuck at a certain level in Scrabble and I knew I could play better than him as well, especially after I started beating him,” he adds.

Meet Waseem Khatri, the top Scrabble player of Pakistan

That was when the cousin introduced him to the Scrabble group he used to meet up with on Fridays and one Sunday in a month. “They used to meet up for Scrabble at the Beach Luxury Hotel. It was a very big thing for a shy young boy from Bhimpura to be introduced to the senior players,” he says.

“The average age of the senior players was over 40. There was no concept of the youth joining in but there I was, barely 14, swimming among the big fish,” he smiles. “I lost from all of them but I didn’t let it dishearten me. I hoped to upgrade my game by playing more with them,” he says.

And he did. “By 2007, I qualified to feature in the National Scrabble Championship. There, too, I was the youngest player surrounded by veterans. Though my performance in the championship was nothing notable, the exposure was great. It made me realise that I needed more exposure and that practice makes perfect,” he shares. “Once I discovered I could play Scrabble on the internet, I started playing online.”

Khatri was able to improve his game so much that in just one year, by 2008, he was the winner of the national competition. “Around 18 then, I was the youngest player in the event and the youngest to have won it, too,” he says.

The same year, he also travelled to India to play in an event there. “I was also accompanied by two other very senior players from Pakistan, Wajid Iqbal and Anwer Siddiqui,” Khatri shares. “It was my first time outside Pakistan. We travelled to India by train,” he adds, saying that he wasn’t particularly happy with his performance in India “though I finished above my fellow players from Pakistan there.”

In 2009, he qualified for the World Scrabble Championship (WSC) in Malaysia featuring 108 players. Khatri says that three Pakistanis had qualified for the international event. “There was Rodney Judd, who was in his 50s, there was Dr Rashid Khan, who was 40, and then there was me in my late teens,” he says.

Khatri finished 42nd while Rashid Khan was 83rd with Rodney Judd somewhere in the 90s.

According to WSC rules, you need to finish in the top half to be able to play in the next edition of the championship while also bagging another seat for your country. Khatri’s 42nd position enabled him to play in the next WSC two years later besides also getting a place for another player from Pakistan when the championship was going to be hosted by Poland in 2011. The event only happened after two years at the time though that has been changed since then and it is an annual event now.

Being the Pakistan number one, Khatri by then had gained much confidence and experience and was very much looking forward to playing in the next WSC. “But come 2011 and I was denied a visa by Poland. It was extremely disheartening for me,” Khatri shares.

Wajid Iqbal of Pakistan had got his visa though and he proceeded to Poland to play but couldn’t finish in the top half to get another seat for Pakistan that year. “But what happened with Poland has not happened again. I have not been denied visa by any country after that,” says Khatri, for whom there has been no looking back after that. He features in all national-level ranking events and maintains his top seed, and he features in all the top international Scrabble events, too.

Seeing Khatri’s rise, PSA, too, concentrates on developing Scrabble talent among the youth here. They hold big interschool Scrabble championships with 800 to 1,000 players featuring in the events. The best among them are then groomed to play and excel at the international level. Pakistan’s youth team has featured several times in the World Youth Scrabble Championship (WYSC). With the influx of fresh talent every year it has won WYSC in 2013 and been runners-up after that, besides bagging many top positions in age categories. This year three Pakistani players bagged the top positions in the under-10, U-12 and U-14 categories. And all these young players look up to Khatri as their national coach.

“Playing at the international level has been great for our youth team. They get to meet other players of the game and interact with them while experiencing the different cultures,” he says.

“Being in my twenties now, I no longer qualify as a youth player,” says Khatri who is a familiar face in the World Scrabble Championships now. He has by now represented Pakistan in four world championships with his best performance coming in 2014 when he ended up 13th in England. Earlier, in 2013, he also finished fourth in the Sri Lankan Open.

“Besides working hard at my own game, I train youth players here. And when coaching them I don’t hold back and teach them absolutely everything that I know,” he says.

Scrabble involves brainstorming and calculations. You plan your every move to get maximum points. You can also use probability to get an idea of the letters your opponent possesses since there are only a set number of tiles there. And by making calculated guesses about your opponent’s tiles you can think up moves to block their moves,” he points out.

“It is a mind game after all. And knowing how to do all this keeps the mind sharp. It helps you in your studies, too,” he says. Thus a kid from a primary school in Bhimpura joined the Aga Khan School in Kharadar and went on to attend St Patrick’s College from there.

Today, Khatri coaches students in Scrabble at the Happy Home School. “I teach the game to around 1,000 students,” he says. “The school has four campuses and I spend each week of a month in each campus as they have reserved a library period for Scrabble. The other teachers say that the game has improved the students’ spellings, reading skills and mathematics. One of my students from the school even qualified for WYSC,” he says with pride.

“Representing your country is something to be very proud of. Thanks to fine performances by our youth team in the international arena, Pakistan is known as a Scrabble-playing nation. It is a very good image for us,” he says, adding that there aren’t so many young players playing in international competitions even in the UK and USA, which happen to be the pioneers of the game. “But they take Scrabble as a hobby, whereas we here have identified it as a learning and language tool for education.”

The writer tweets @HasanShazia

Published in Dawn, Sunday Magazine, January 1st, 2017