Senior bureaucrat Mohan Verghese Chunkath has won the 2015 Bayer National Scrabble Championship held in Mumbai.
The tournament, held between May 29 and 31, saw veteran scrabble players from across India participating. Mr. Chunkath, a former Chief Secretary to the Government of Tamil Nadu, managed to wrap up the tournament with one game to spare and was hence ‘gibsonized’ — a term to describe a situation in which one player is already guaranteed to win the top prize. In his 24 games in the tournament, he played as many as 56 bingos. A bingo or a bonus play is a turn which exhausts all seven tiles on the rack.
Mr. Chunkath was the national champion for six years and represented India for the first time in the world Scrabble championship in Melbourne in 1999.