Pakistan’s Affan Salman won the World Youth Scrabble Championship in Kalutara, Sri Lanka, in September 2024, when he was just 16 years old, defeating a field of 138 of the best young players from 22 countries.
The three-day championship, held from 6 to 8 September 2024 at Citrus Waskaduwa in Kalutara, is the world title for school-age Scrabble. It was the 19th edition of a championship that has become the proving ground for the game’s next generation, and the standard rises every year: many of its past juniors now compete in the open World Scrabble Championship against adults. Affan’s victory made history twice over: he is one half of the first pair of brothers ever to hold the title, and his win gave Pakistan a fifth individual crown, something no country had achieved before.
A World Youth Scrabble Championship Won Before the Final Round
The official standings tell the story of a dominant week. Affan won 20 of his 24 games, losing only four, and finished with a spread of plus 1,793 points, the measure of how far ahead of his opponents his scores ran across the tournament.
So complete was his lead that he was declared the winner before the final round was even played, a situation players call being Gibsonised, after the practice of removing an uncatchable leader from the last pairing. Suyash Manchali of India finished second and Adheesha Dissanayake of Sri Lanka third, while another Pakistani, Ahmed Salman, placed 11th. Scrabble at this level is a serious discipline: top youth players study word lists of hundreds of thousands of entries, and games turn on vocabulary, probability and board strategy in equal measure.
The strength of the field underlines the achievement. The defending champion, Madhav Gopal Kamath of India, who had won the title in 2023, could finish only sixth in Kalutara. A single game can turn on one play: using all seven tiles in one move, a bingo, earns a 50-point bonus, and across 24 games the champions are the players who combine word knowledge with the maths of which letters remain unseen. Affan’s spread of plus 1,793 means he outscored his opponents by an average of roughly 75 points a game, a champion’s margin by any standard.
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Two Brothers, Two World Titles
What lifts the story from impressive to unique is the family chapter. Affan’s elder brother, Ali Salman, won the same championship in 2022. With Affan’s win in 2024, the Salmans became the first siblings in the championship’s history both to hold the world youth title, a feat reported by the Associated Press of Pakistan and the Pakistan Scrabble Association at the time. Family support runs through Pakistani Scrabble at every level: parents drive children to weekend tournaments and treat word study the way other households treat cricket practice, and the Salman household produced two world champions from that routine.
Pakistan also finished as the top team at the 2024 championship, underlining that the country does not produce one star at a time but a pipeline. Young Pakistanis have a habit of reaching world podiums in mind sports and memory disciplines, a pattern you can see in our profiles of other record-holding teenagers.
That pipeline has a structure behind it. The Pakistan Scrabble Association runs youth tournaments and training for school players across the country, and its World Youth Scrabble programme has sent strong squads to the championship year after year. Coaches describe a simple formula: children who read widely, drill word lists daily and play rated games every week. The Salman brothers are the programme’s most famous graduates, but the top-ten finishes Pakistan keeps collecting suggest they will not be the last.
Scrabble at world level turns on vocabulary, probability and board strategy
Photo: Jacobin_357, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons
The First Country to Five Titles
Affan’s crown was Pakistan’s fifth individual title at the World Youth Scrabble Championship, making Pakistan the first country to reach five since the championship began. For a sport with no stadiums and little sponsorship, that record has been built almost entirely by a committed community of coaches, clubs and families, centred on the Pakistan Scrabble Association’s youth programme.
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Where the Title Has Gone Since
Affan is not the current champion, and the honest record should say so. The 2025 title went to Madhav Gopal Kamath of India in Kuala Lumpur, the player Affan had dethroned a year earlier, in an edition that drew some 325 players. The 2026 championship in Nairobi was won by Dineth Fernando of Australia. Even so, Nairobi brought Pakistan another honour: the national side won the team title there in August 2026, its seventh team crown, a separate achievement from the individual title Affan won in 2024.
The individual record he set, 20 wins from 24 games at the age of 16, still stands as the standard for the next generation of Pakistani players now climbing the youth circuit. For Affan himself, the path from here leads toward the open circuit, where the World Scrabble Championship brings youth champions face to face with the best adult players alive, and where Pakistan’s five youth titles suggest its players will not be overawed. Whatever comes next, the 2024 title, won a round early against the strongest youth field in the world, is his for good.
If you enjoyed this, read about another Pakistani teenager who conquered a world stage in our story on Ahsan Ramzan, the Lahore teenager who became a world snooker champion at 16, or about the students in our report on Pakistani students topping ACCA exams. More Pakistani world records are gathered on our Pakistan World Rankings and Records page.
Sources
- World Youth Scrabble Championship 2024, official standings
- Associated Press of Pakistan: Affan Salman emerges as new champion of World Youth Scrabble
- Allsportspk: Pakistan’s Affan Salman clinches the 19th World Youth Scrabble Championship title
- Featured image: An English-language Scrabble game in progress (thebarrowboy, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
- In-body image: A completed Scrabble board covered in played words (Jacobin_357, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Umar Farooq is the founder and editor of Good News Pakistan. An engineer by profession and a writer by passion, he started the site in December 2022 to share good news from Pakistan, and has since written and edited more than 200 articles about its people, sports, science, business and world records. He believes the story of Pakistan is bigger than its headlines, and that good news, told honestly, is worth telling every day.