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| Friday, 23 January 2004 |
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by Sarath Malalasekera Sri Lankan Harshan Lamabadusuriya, a final year medical student at Oxford University, was crowned the British National Scrabble Champion in London recently. He is a son of Prof. Sanath P. Lamabadusuriya, Dean and Senior Professor of Paediatrics, Medical Faculty at the Colombo University. The finals of the National Scrabble Championship was held at the Lilian Balyliss Theatre at Sadlers Wella in London in the presence of over 200 spectators. Lamabadusuriya won the best of five finals easily by winning the first three games. Lambadusuriya's opponent was Clive Spate, a 51-year-old maths tutor, who had recently won the Channel four grand slam event. Lambadusuriya who attended Royal College, Colombo, in the nineties, represented his school at scrabble and after moving over to the UK in the late nineties, won several scrabble tournaments held throughout England. He has represented Sri Lanka at the World Scrabble Championships in Las Vegas, USA in 2001. He has also made several appearances on British television on Channel Four in Countdown and was also a finalist. He won the Christmas Special Edition in 2003. Scrabble Club News, in its September 2003 issue stated that Lambadusuriya has steadily climbed up the UK rankings and is currently in 11th place alongside Clive Spate and above the other two semi-finalists. Lambadusuriya first learnt all the two-letter words (around 106), then the three and four-letter (about 3,000 and 6,000 and finally the seven and eight-letter which earn a 50-point bonus for using all tiles at once. "The skill of the Scrabble player is being able to take a jumble of letters and spot a word," he said. "Shakespeare may have had a vocabulary of 100,000 words, but he might not have been able to see one in the chaos. The challenge is to exploit the total number of permutations of any given set of letters, to the point where "words no longer have meanings they are just a string of letters." Lambadusuriya captained the Cambridge University Scrabble team in 1999 and was the vice-captain and secretary of the Oxford Clinical School Cricket team in 2002 to 2003. As a student player, he organised the first ever Varsity Scrabble match. |
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