Pakistan to host world’s first ever online youth scrabble championship this month

Pakistan is all set to host the world’s first ever international online youth scrabble championship starting January 22.

As reported by Geo News, the word-based board game tournament will feature at least 96 players from 16 countries across five continents.

Owing to COVID-19 restrictions, scrabble championships, like any other event involving hordes of people, cannot be conducted physically. Therefore, this edition of the youth scrabble championship will be conducted online.

According to the report, Pakistan has been selected as the host for this prestigious tournament by the World English-language Scrabble Players Association (WESPA), the global regulatory body for the game of scrabble.

Pakistan Scrabble Association (PSA) Youth Director Tariq Pervez has been immensely appreciative of this development, saying that it is a great honor for Pakistan to be hosting a tournament of this caliber.

The PSA official said the first virtual youth championship will be sponsored by Quetta Gladiators and Pharmevo.

Tariq said they have come up with technological solutions to hold the virtual championship as all the scrabble events have been cancelled till 2022 in the world.

He was accompanied by Faraz Maqbool of Quetta Gladiators, Mansoor Khan of Pharmevo, tournament director Hassan Hadi Khan and director technical Vali M Khubaib.

For the purpose of this virtual tournament, participants will compete in teams of six. Teams are divided into four groups of four teams each who will play the group stages on round robin league basis. The top two teams from each group will qualify for the quarter-finals.

All games will be completely surveilled by the technical team through webcams. Selected matches will be live streamed with running commentary by leading commentators Will Anderson and Jesse Day of USA. Waseem Khatri and Daniyal Sanaullah will be doing the Urdu commentary for Pakistani viewers.