Komol Panyasophonlert struggles to string an English sentence together, but is still hoping to be crowned champion of the wordsmith's favourite board game, Scrabble.

Mr Komol, the world number three, is one of several top-ranked Thais hoping to showcase their talents in the King's Cup tournament, which kicked off in Bangkok on Thursday.

While the 31-year-old computer programmer claims to have memorised "more than 90 per cent of the dictionary" in English, he can only tell you what a few of those words mean.

"I memorise small words first, then big words later," he explained in Thai, adding he tries to spend at least half an hour each day hitting the books.

With about 6,000 players set to attend, the King's Cup is the globe's biggest Scrabble competition and an indication of its wide popularity in Thailand.

The game is a favourite among schoolteachers who use it as a language-learning tool, and the kingdom is the only Asian country to field world champions, despite its notoriously low levels of English proficiency.

Amnuay Ploysangngam, who founded Thailand's first Scrabble association in the 1980s and is credited with popularising the game, said today nearly three-quarters of schools have Scrabble clubs.

"We never expected that one day we would become world champions," he said.

Yet the success of Mr Komol and other elite Thai players — none of whom is a fluent English speaker — is testament to what really drives victories in the top tier: an analytical mind.

The world's best Scrabble players commit up to 100,000 words to memory, a figure more than double the lexicon of an average English-speaking adult.

AFP