Australia’s competitive Scrabble association has been ordered to revoke the suspension of one of its players after a bitter six-year dispute over alleged cheating.
A Melbourne court on Monday overturned a 2008 suspension issued by the Australian Scrabble Players Association (ASPA) to Mohammed Hegazi for conduct unbecoming and “prejudicial to the interests of the association”.
But the magistrate, Phillip Ginnane, said the court lacked jurisdiction to order ASPA to formally declare that Hegazi was not a cheat. The player was also ordered to pay costs of around $3,000.
Hegazi maintains a blog where he provides updates on the dispute and rails against the “nutcases” who periodically add words to the official dictionary of the 77-year old board game.
He claims on the blog that around one-third of players in official tournaments bend Scrabble rules, mainly by glancing at letters before they pick them out of the bag.
Reports and emails posted on Hegazi’s blog suggest he regularly accused other players of misconduct, including a 2005 incident where he told an opponent she had “held the bag incorrectly” in order to see the available tiles.
The opponent called an adjudicator over, who asked her to demonstrate how she withdrew tiles. She was cleared of any wrongdoing. “We completed the game in a very uncomfortable atmosphere,” she reported. “I am not a cheat.”
Hegazi himself was accused of cheating in 2008 and suspended for 12 months. Such was his disgust at the “improper persecution”, he took a three-year gap from the game before turning to the courts for redress.
In mediation last October, ASPA agreed to revoke the suspension, but Hegazi pursued the matter into the magistrate’s court hoping to clear his name.
He told the ABC he was a “bit disappointed” the cheating accusation would not be withdrawn.
A notice about the suspension’s revocation will be printed in the next issue of ASPA’s magazine, Across The Board.
The current president of ASPA’s Victorian branch, Carol Johnsen, said only that the dispute had been “a very long, tedious process”.
“Once the notice is published in our quarterly publication, that is to be the end of the matter,” she said.