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Player Profiles
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Past profiles: Adam Logan
Gareth Williams
by Roy Kietzman
Experience counts, Gareth Williams insists, as he landed in fifth place at the eighth World Scrabble Championship in November 2005. Though he was in fourth place in the WSC in 1993, “I feel that to achieve fifth 12 years later was perhaps harder, in that there are a lot more players of immense strength in the world now,” he explains.
“You only have to glance at some of the names in the bottom half of the WSC 2005 final table to confirm that. “In both cases, if I’d been offered that result before the tournament started, I’d have been delighted to take it,” Gareth said, “but, of course, there were times, on both occasions, when an even higher position was possible. “In retrospect, one then remembers the crucial errors.”
Gareth insists he has “a relatively weak vocabulary, at WSC level.” Having identified that weakness, “It’s therefore disappointing that losses have stemmed from missing words I did know….“Occasionally, I get impulsive, playing about looks like a good move on a two-second analysis, even when I’ve plenty of time.”
Born in Cardiff, Wales, the 53-year-old lecturer in maths and information technology at Coleg Morgannwg [roughly Glamorgan college] started playing Scrabble in 1982 at Cardiff Scrabble Club. He also belongs to the Newport Scrabble Club. Gareth who was an honours, first class, graduate from the Open University, received a post-graduate certificate of education.
He has also competed in Australia, Germany, Ireland, Malaysia, the Netherlands and the USA. The Welshman has already booked to get into the Saxon-Germanica double-header competition in July in Germany. “I hope to enjoy that as a social event as much as a serious contest.”
The British Masters Scrabble Championship is on his tourney calendar in August, that is, if he doesn’t head to Brazil. However, looking back at the WSC, “it was a fantastic experience.” Out of the 24 games, arguably the best match was against Gerry Carter (Thailand), “partly because we were restarting on the third day after I’d had a long run of wins, and I often start a day slowly, that is, playing badly, but on this occasion I felt good from the start and that I was seeing all my options and making good decisions.
Mind, it helped that Gerry started the game with a phony.” Ending on a high after that game, “I’d felt I was into my stride and then played carelessly, giving Ganesh Asirvatham, Malaysia] an easy 64 for ‘qi’ when I had a host of other options, and he had rack problems which I solved neatly for him. I made other bad choices, too, in that match.
However, having now played in seven WSCs means “I wasn’t overawed by the occasion. I think I’ve a good temperament and usually focus well on the game situation.” Gareth admits he spent very little time in preparation but did accustom himself to the five-point bad-challenge penalty with fellow aces John Grayson and Neil Green.
But he made no dedicated attempt to learn new words though “I have to admit I try to pick up stuff from the magazines, from UK Scrabble, from just playing, of course, but it’s all completely unsystematic. “I bought Official Scrabble Lists for the current word source about five years ago and have been working through it, marking words I wasn’t sure of. I’m currently about half way through it.
Gareth believes the role the World English-language Scrabble Players Association should play is “working towards achieving and maintaining worldwide convergence as far as possible on rules and the dictionary. “In respect of ratings, I think world ratings are valuable, and, in view of the low proportion of games played between players from different countries, we should maintain parallel system indefinitely.”
When not honing his strategy and techniques in the brainy game, Gareth likes to read historical works, then compile genealogical tables from them. However, the conviviality of the table, good food and beverage, are also important to him as well as listening to fine music. Gareth’s prize money at the WSC as partly spent on an MP3 player.
“Having transferred most of my digital-based musical collection to it, I’ve filled two-thirds of the 20 gigabytes and still have a lot of vinyl LPs to include so I might be forced to spend the rest of the prize money on a larger model.” As one of the earliest batch of Britain’s grandmasters, Gareth cites winning the BMSC in 1989 and the UK masters seven years later as among his treasured achievements in the mind sport. With challenging Scrabble events on the horizon, he’ll doubtless discover more crowning achievements.