Player Profile		Alastair with his trophy for high game in the 2001 Australian Open Championships. He scored 532.
Alastair Richards

Youngest tournament regular
Australia's youngest competitive Scrabble player at present is Alastair Richards, aged nine.

School is boring
Currently, Alastair is enrolled in a grade 4/5 composite class at a small country school. His best subject is Maths, rather than Spelling! He considers school boring, but really enjoys the school band, where he plays the Baritone (a large brass instrument). Previously, he learnt to play the piano, violin and cornet. Apart from his passions for Scrabble and music, he plays chess occasionally, and has a talent for distance running, particularly the 800 metres. At home, he enjoys the challenge of Ages of Empires, a tactical computer game which has complemented his scrabble by teaching him words such as "paladin" and "yurt".

An early hook
The first words he learnt to spell were, appropriately, an interesting hook combination -HUG+E. This suited him as a cuddly three-year-old. Alastair started his formal schooling the day before his fourth birthday, after watching his siblings being home-schooled. When he was aged five (1997) his parents took up Scrabble, and Alastair followed. The family is now known as "The Travelling Richards".  This nickname is partly due to the nature of Paul's work (he manages the construction of power stations, and moves every year or two) but also because of the family's penchant for travelling together anywhere for a Scrabble tournament.

Picking up a few points
Alastair started competing in tournaments in South Australia at the age of seven (in late 1999). After the first tournament (where he won one game) his rating was just 385. His current rating  is 1044.  This is a massive increase of nearly 700 points over less than two years. This was sufficient to give him the third highest rating gain (398) in Australia for 2000, behind two teenage players Chris May (496) and Edward Okulicz (401).

His first trophy, at the age of seven, was a second placing in the April 2000 Auran tournament in Queensland (where he won 5 of 7 games). Since then he has accumulated numerous trophies. His best performance so far was a clean sweep at Kempsey (NSW) in February 2001, where he won B section with 7 games of 7. Currently he plays in Advanced section in Queensland (one level below Masters) where he has won a number of second and third place trophies, as well as High Game and High Word trophies. Alastair's highest tournament game was 532, which earned him a trophy in the 2001 Australian Championships (open Section).

Alastair had a long-held goal to play in a Masters tournament before reaching the age of ten.  He is set to fulfil that goal in January, 2002.  He then aims to qualify for entry into the Australian Masters Championship.