Thai/British Scrabbler remains in contention at world championships

 

Picture: Gerry's game against former World Scrabble Champion Joel Wapnick of Canada in Round 16 at the world championships in Nottingham, England.

 

Bangkok resident Gerry Carter remained in contention after day two of the World , Scrabble Championships in Nottingham, England.

 

Gerry, who represents Thailand, was in 17th place with a 10/7 win loss record. There are 18 more games to go today and Friday before the top eight play the semi finals.

 

Highlight for Gerry today was beating former world champion Joel Wapnick of Canada in Round 16 by 586 - 354. Gerry played STRAYER, INQUIRED and TAUPIES for bonus words. FOUS and FIXATE were also worth 66 and 60 respectively.

 

The Canadian music professor played INTEGRAL and DERIVATE.

 

Leading the way is Austin Shin of England. World number one Nigel Richards of New Zealand is in fourth.

 

-- © Copyright Thai Visa News 2017-08-24

There are some strange looking English words in Gerry's game shown above. I am having trouble with "GOV" and "ABO" if anybody knows their meaning. I doubt in this case ABO means Australian aboriginal.

Gerry's word "QI" is interesting in that it has been added to the Scrabble dictionary simply to give players an opportunity to improve their score by using the letter "Q" which has 10 points. The word is Chinese in origin and has been plucked from ancient Chinese folk law.

Like the word "QI" there is a word "ZA" which has been included in the Scrabble dictionary which supposedly means pizza. Again a word to give players the opportunity to use the high scoring letter "z". 

Seems like the Scrabble aficionados and rule makers are inventing their own new words to suit the game and players. In my opinion that sort of word "rigging" might be good for the pros but it degrades the game itself. A misguided form of "honest" cheating.

I once had a 10 year old Thai student whose father was obsessed with Scrabble. He had his boy learning all these obscure and unfamiliar words from self-help books. The kjd won several competitions, it was amusing, his dad once got kicked out for using binoculars to view the competitors' words. But I told the dad it was pointless, his son would never be using these words.He gave up when he was 14,

9 minutes ago, bannork said:

I once had a 10 year old Thai student whose father was obsessed with Scrabble. He had his boy learning all these obscure and unfamiliar words from self-help books. The kjd won several competitions, it was amusing, his dad once got kicked out for using binoculars to view the competitors' words. But I told the dad it was pointless, his son would never be using these words.He gave up when he was 14,

And could the boy speak english? My son has a classmate who like the one described is very good at scrabble but can hardly speak a word of english. So, what is the point.  

So all of a sudden he is Thai/British,so is he a Thai resident or citizen,i would have expected Falang representing Thailand,as a more accurate headline

Actually he spoke English very well, finally he won a scholarship to study in Japan after completing his degree in Law at Chula.

7 minutes ago, bannork said:

Actually he spoke English very well, finally he won a scholarship to study in Japan after completing his degree in Law at Chula.

Good to hear.

 

I seem to recall that Thai Visa member Rooster59 (of TWTWIT fame) mentioned that he was competing on the Thai team.

 

Could this be him?