Tuesday, Aug 30, 2016

Dubai: A Dubai teen is this year’s top wordsmith after bagging the 11th World Youth Scrabble Championship (WYSC) in France.

Sanchit Kapoor, 16, clinched the title at Le Grand Palais in Lille, France, becoming the first UAE world champion in the mind sport. The world risaldar — an old cavalry rank in the Indian army — gave Kapoor a high score of 77 points that catapulted him to the top spot, beating 2014 world champion Jack Durand.

The UAE’s best finish until Monday was placing fourth in 2012 and 2013 for fellow Dubai resident, Navya Zaveri.

Sanchit, the sole representative from the UAE at the tournament this year, was also playing his record sixth consecutive WYSC.

“His high game was against Radinka Dissanayake of Sri Lanka where he scored 604 to 310 and where he played words like ‘uranism, medcinal, aeneous, silkier, and intitled.’ Those are bingos where he used all seven tiles so he got 50 points extra for each tile,” Nikhil Soneja, Kapoor’s coach and chairman of the UAE Scrabble Club, told Gulf News.

Kapoor won 20 out of the 24 games in the competition that featured 107 participants aged 17 and under from 14 countries. He dominated the tournament and held on to his top spot for the entire second half of the three-day tourney, a huge improvement compared to his consecutive top seven finishes at the last three WYSCs.

“He plays very fast and assesses situations quickly but is mature enough now to be patient and take more time when needed to calculate more complex scenarios,” Soneja said of Kapoor.

Kapoor, a GEMS Modern Academy student, is also academically brilliant. In 2015, he achieved a perfect 2400/2400 score in the coveted Scholastic Aptitude TEST (SAT) exams. His score put him in the top 0.5 per cent out of the 1.8 million students who appear all over the world for this College Board exam.

By Janice Ponce de Leon Staff Reporter

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