Anand Bharadwaj

Anand Bharadwaj 

Anand Bharadwaj is world youth scrabble champion

The newly crowned World Youth Scrabble Champion, Anand Bharadwaj, explains that if an opponent covers two triple word squares their score multiplies by nine and adds 50 points. Such was Anand's predicament earlier this month at the finals in Malaysia when his opponent played ''waysides'' for a tournament-high 176 points.

His father, Melbourne Business School associate professor Kannan Sethuraman, was sitting outside.

''It was a crucial game, and everybody wrote him off. The ushers came and told me, 'He's trailing by 160 points, I think it's gone.' I didn't know what to expect, but he came back and said, 'I won it.' ''

Anand has a habit of coming from behind, recalling from memory another game where he trailed 498-42

''I had 'bendies' on my rack, then I was thinking with an 'r' that makes 'bendiers'. Hang on, 'bendier', the anagram of that is 'inbred' and if I put an 's' on that, that's 'inbreds'. So I went out with 'inbreds' for 76, getting double 'o' on his rack, to make my score 500 to his 498. He was kind of shocked.'' In Scrabble terms, his opponent had been ''pipped''.

Anand is 11. The year 5 student was younger than all but three of the 83 competitors he beat in Malaysia and has his sights set on the World Scrabble Championship in 2013.

Fellow Australian and world No. 4, Andrew Fisher, mentors Anand, offering advice of equal benefit to the rank amateur.

''Master the short words initially,'' he says, ''the two and the three [letter words] are very important.''

Anand spends half an hour each day on a computer program, banging out anagrams at about one per second. The aim is to master the 130,000 words officially accepted in Scrabble. Though to label him a Scrabble player would be like calling Barry Jones a quiz master, or Condoleezza Rice a pianist. Each wunderkind steers themselves.

''I love music,'' Anand said, nominating Bach as a favourite. He composes on piano and yesterday he walked across the living room, picked up his flute and delivered a flawless rendition of Bach's Polonaise in B minor.

The family moved to Melbourne from Chennai when Anand was 13 months old. By 15 months he was reading on his mother's knee, able to page reference any quote from dozens of books. At four he kept fellow preps entertained by naming train stations in Melbourne sequentially.

An admirer of Mahatma Gandhi, Anand hopes to take after his mother, an epidemiologist, and study medicine.

In his voluminous vocabulary, is there a favourite word? ''Douleia,'' he says. ''It means worship of saints and angels.'' And it uses all the vowels.