Tough tourney

11 January 2010 , By The Star

The Causeway Scrabble Challenge, held in Johor Baru from Dec 2-6 last year as part of the Iskandar Malaysia World Festival of Scrabble, was indisputably the biggest, toughest and richest Scrabble tournament in the world.

Unsurprisingly, the Premier Division was won by former world champion Nigel Richards, the New Zealander who has made Malaysia his home for the past 10 years.

The tournament was the biggest to date as it attracted the participation of a record 186 players from over 30 countries. They came from all walks of life – there were doctors, lawyers and engineers as well as professors, teachers and students. The youngest player was 11-year-old Nicholas Basquez from the United States; among the oldest players were several retirees in their seventies.

The competition’s website, www.causewayscrabble.com, carried the slogan “Toughness redefined”. The competition did, indeed, redefine the meaning of toughness. There were 45 rounds played over five days. Most local tournaments are two-day affairs, with only eight games played each day. And international tournaments are played over three or four days, at most.

The 50 players who qualified to play in the Premier Division hailed from five continents – South America being the only exception. They were selected based on predetermined stringent criteria. In the competition’s format, each player had to play against 45 other top-rated players from around the world, thereby making it the most gruelling and testing tournament there is.

And, finally, Causeway is the richest Scrabble tournament in terms of prize-money. The 2009 Premier Division winner, Nigel Richards, was rewarded with a handsome sum US$20,000 (RM67,550). The victory was all the sweeter because it was Richards’ first in the tournament in its current format. The runner-up, Thailand’s Pakorn Nemitr mansuk, received US$10,000 (RM33,750). Cash prizes were also awarded to the other players who finished in the top 10.

In the Open division, the winner, Michael Akonor from Ghana, received RM10,000 while the runner-up, Australian Peter Kougi, walked away with RM5,000.

The prize-money is set to become even bigger next year. The tournament’s organiser, Michael Tang, has announced that the top prize for the Premier Division in 2010 will be US$30,000 (RM101,260) and for the runner-up, US$15,000 (RM50,630).

Apart from the Premier Division, there will be two other divisions: the Masters Division, for players with WESPA (World English Scrabble Players Association) ratings of 1600 and above who fail to qualify for the Premier Division, and the Open Division, for players with a rating below 1,600. The Masters Division winner will receive US$5,000 and the Open Division winner, US$1,000 (RM3,375).

Apart from the size of the winner’s purse, many other firsts were recorded at Causeway 2009. This was the first time video clips of interviews with players (more than 100) were recorded and uploaded onto the competition’s website for the rest of the world to view.

Up-to-the-minute results were posted on Twitter for fans from all over the world to follow. All the bingos played in both the Premier and the Open Divisions (more than 10,000) have been put on the website. Each of the players in the Premier Division had his/her own annotator for all 45 games and more than 500 games in the division have been put on the Causewayers everywhere to replay and re-examine at their leisure. Hopefully they will learn from the experts that Scrabble ialso involves a lot of thinking and strategising. By the end of the last day of play, the Causeway website had received more than 145,000 hits from more than 130 countries.

The tournament’s organiser, Michael Tang, has brought the game to a new level. Indeed, the Cause way Scrabble Challenge has emerged as the premier Scrabble tournament in the world.

Causeway 2009 will always be remembered by all its participants as not only the toughest and the best, but also the best-organised and best-run tournament in the history of the game. This was made abundantly clear by the players when, at the end of the tournament, they all rose spontaneously from their seats and gave Michael Tang a standing ovation.