A Richmond brother and sister are heading to Poland this October to lay a few tiles, and maybe win $20,000 in the process.
Dean and Dielle Saldanha are travelling to Warsaw next month in the hopes of out-spelling the competition at the World Scrabble Championship.
The siblings are prepared to pit their linguistic wits against the professors, students, scientists and computer programmers who make up the approximately 112 competitors vying for board control and triple-word scores.
Growing up in Dubai, Dielle and Dean weren't interested in taking a risk on the monopoly of trivial pursuits available to them, but one game caught Dean's interest.
His parents were avid Scrabble players, and by the time he was nine, Dean was tired of setting up their board and asked to get into the game at his parent's Scrabble club.
"They took him to the club and he was beating up all the adults," Dielle said.
"I had an ability for anagramming," Dean acknowledged.
The family moved to Canada in 1998, and it wasn't long after settling into a new country that Dielle was ready to join her brother at the board.
"My third tournament was a national championship in San Diego. . . and after that I was hooked," she said.
Dielle laughed when asked about explaining Scrabble competitions to her friends.
"The first time they hear it they're, like, 'Wait, wait, you do what?'" she said.
Dielle, who finished in the top 100 at the 2009 WSC credits some of her success to her innate ability to enjoy games.
But while the 63-year-old game might appear to be fertile ground for wordsmiths, the siblings have found that a large vocabulary isn't usually a top player's most important attribute.
"It's more of a math game than a word game at the higher levels," Dielle said.
For Dean, who placed 13th at the 2005 world championships, math skills are crucial in those moments when you need to calculate the probability of a few essential letters falling out of the bag.
There are 96 legitimate two-letter words in Dean's Scrabble dictionary, and he said he's committed each one to memory.
Besides etching a giant vocabulary on your brain, a poker psychology can sometimes prevail amid the clicking and flipping of the tiles.
"There's a bluffing factor in North American Scrabble," Dean said, explaining that a player loses a turn if his challenge of a word is wrong.
"If you're a higher-rated player you can get away with a lot against a lowerrated player," he said.
Besides trying to close off the board against an intimidating player and a few other tricks of the trade, Dielle said it sometimes come down to chance.
"Luck is such a large part of the game. You can do everything right but still lose by 200 points."
Still, Dean does everything possible to tilt the board in his favour, including wearing a hat to shield his eyes from his opponent.
"I'm convinced if they can see my eyes, they know where my next move is going to be," he said.
But while the players are committed to Scrabble, sponsorship has become difficult to come by.
Hasbro, the original makers of Scrabble, used to sponsor the tournament.
"That fell through a couple years ago," Dean said. "Hasbro doesn't do anything for the players."
The brother and sister Scrabblers have tried to raise funds and are still looking for sponsors, but they're both determined to make it to Warsaw next month, and are prepping with the thicker dictionary they'll need to use.
"We have to learn all the words that are in the British dictionary," Dielle said.
That means access to approximately 120,000 words that aren't eligible in the North American game, according to Dean.
The tournament is scheduled to take place between October 12 and 16.
