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Coffee with: Scrabble ace Dean Saldanha still having fun with the tiles

Earlier this month Saldanha participated in the Vancouver Scrabble Club tournament in Richmond
Saldanha
Dean Saldanha recorded 185 points in a single turn by playing the word “exordium” at a Scrabble tournament in Richmond earlier this month. Photo by Matthew Hoekstra

Rain is sprinkling and the afternoon air has dropped below 10 degrees outside a Seafair coffee shop. Dean Saldanha orders an iced chocolate beverage — cold like the chill his opponents must feel at the Scrabble table.

His wife, Sonia, knew all about his letter game smarts — the anagram ambush, the triple word score strike — but she agreed to play the longtime B.C. champion nonetheless.

“We played once and never played again,” laughs the affable Saldanha, 33. “She said, ‘I’ll play any other board game against you but I won’t play Scrabble.’ I’m trying to get her back into it because she liked the game before she met me.”

A competitive player since the age of 10, Saldanha’s tournament schedule has quieted since the arrival of his two young children, but he still finds time for competitions.

Earlier this month Saldanha participated in the Vancouver Scrabble Club tournament in Richmond, where he played the highest scoring word of his career. 

Laying down the tiles to spell “exordium” (the beginning or introductory part, according to the Oxford Dictionary), he recorded 185 points. Until then his highest point total for a single word was 176. Of the event’s two tournaments, he walked away with one win and one second-place prize.

“It was a good weekend,” he says from a high table looking on to No. 1 Road.

Although born in India, Saldanha grew up in Dubai, United Arab Emirates. His father, Norbert, and mother, Miriam, were regular kitchen table Scrabble players but a newspaper ad changed that. 

It advertised a Middle East Scrabble tournament four hours away. They drove there and Norbert returned with a win. Not bad for his first tournament. Next, they started a Scrabble club, which soon outgrew the family living room.

Soon enough a young Saldanha, at age nine, wanted to get in on the game. He was tired of watching only the adults score points.

“They would ask me to set up the board quite often. It’s not that tedious of a process, but of course it was back then for me as a young kid. So one day I asked my mom if I could play,” he says. 

“I almost beat her, which was surprising to her at the time.”

Three or four games later, he handed mom a loss. Saldanha soon realized he had a keen ability to find anagrams by rearranging the letters of a word to form another word.

“I don’t know how I came about it. I would be anagramming street signs, car names and that kind of thing. It just grew from there.”

He became a student of the game, reading books, thumbing through the dictionary and memorizing word lists. 

Scrabble became a family affair. His sisters, Dion and Dielle, also started playing tiles. 

Saldanha moved to Richmond with his family as a teenager, finishing his last two years of high school at Hugh Boyd secondary before completing a business and marketing degree at Kwantlen Polytechnic University. 

A sports nut and hockey player, Saldanha now works for BC Hydro and continues to play his favourite game with the Vancouver Scrabble Club each week. 

He’s played thousands of games in his career, including one memorable tournament match in which he scored a whopping 673 points, a result of scoring a triple-triple (a play that covers two triple word squares) and a double-double (covering two double word squares in one turn) in the same game.

“I’ve always said if I’m not having fun at it anymore then I’ll stop playing. But I just haven’t stopped having fun. I still love the challenge of winning every game,” he says. 

“I still enjoy the anagramming, the word-finding and the strategic aspects of the game, so I keep playing. It keeps bringing me back.”

Saldanha now sits at No. 5 in the Canadian Scrabble player rankings and 20th in North America. 

Scrabble Day is April 13, and for a player seeking to get serious, Saldanha recommends playing online where many of the current top players got their start. 

He also suggests learning the 101 two-letter words of the game, and coming to the Vancouver Scrabble Club, which meets Thursday nights for friendly matches in the basement of Oakridge Lutheran Church in Vancouver. 

“Scrabble continues to be one of those games where almost anybody can play,” he says. “You can have a meaningful game between a young person and someone in their 80s or 90s.”