I think she just needs to work through something mentally, and one really good finish without the bad luck would certainly help with that, but maybe she just needs some down time to come back refreshed next season. 5th grade Chaitra took out words like this pretty easily. She was the very first speller out, and her confidence just seems completely shot at the moment, which is really sad to see, because other than this, almost all of her middling finishes have been far more a result of poor word luck than consistency issues. Finally, I really don’t have the slightest clue what is going on with Chaitra Thummala, who missed in round 1… of the semifinals… on eparchy. If that wasn’t odd enough, while receiving his round 1 word in the finals, he somehow activated a voice recording that gave the definition of the word! Obviously, this led to immediate suspicions that he had a dictionary open, and a very lengthy discussion was had over the possibility of disqualifying him ultimately, it was decided that there wasn’t quite enough evidence (he could have said something that accidentally triggered a Cortana), and he ended up getting out in round 3. First, he was quite suspect in a duel with Sophia Lopez for the last available finals spot, where after some misses that looked the part of roughly 900-level, he suddenly seemed to become 300 points better and spelled stuff like planaea and syllis.

The most unexpected name in the ranks was Tejas Katira, who… was the subject of more than one controversy throughout the day. She seems like the nearest thing to the Abhijay Kodali of the present era. She will get out very early one day and seem elite the next, and we’re about to see exactly that within the timespan covered in this very article. If she didn’t already prove it at WSC, it’s obvious that she should be considered on the same level as the best spellers of the pre-Covid era at this point, and Yash is very close behind.įarther down the rankings, Pranav Anandh impressed with a fourth-place finish, Sam Evans and Faizan Zaki broke 1000, and Tarini Nandakumar missed benefice she probably confused it with boniface, but I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a speller fluctuate as often as Tarini does… well, not since her brother. That gave Deetya her 4th win of the season, and she is definitely putting together one for the ages. April co-champs Yash Shelar and now-World Champion Deetya Vuppala continued on for quite a while after this, with Yash ultimately missing Cylas, appealing due to being given incorrect etymological info, and soon after going down on Mundelein, one of my favorite new SpellPundit geo module words. Dev Shah was once again the first out, on Cracca, which is apparently one of just a few taxonomic words that SpellPundit somehow missed in compiling Module 4. Otherwise, this event was very smooth sailing, and ended with the same top 3 as April’s SPOSB. I would certainly say he delivered, producing an event with only a few notable slip-ups in word placement among them were lavaret, which got Surya Kapu out in the semifinals in the same round as words like patrician and excrescence were used, and standpattism rather late in the finals, which has a variant Saketh didn’t know about (but honestly, this isn’t a word I would use regardless). The structure this time was largely the work of Saketh Sundar, who was given almost complete authority over list construction after the 2021 CSSB went up in flames. After a disastrous mishap left the 2021 edition basically for naught, this year’s event had a lot to answer to, and the product was something that, objectively, has to be considered the superior of the two events being covered in this article, even if it wasn’t the more enthralling.

But before we get into that, I did want to give some additional coverage to last weekend’s Canada Super Spelling Bee event. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an event whiplash as hard as this SASB did, and I mean that in ways both good and bad. But how did it end up? In a flash of the classic SASB nationals spectacle that has traditionally been found only here, or with a pitiful whimper, continuing the negative momentum of the regionals? Well, as we’ll see, the answer is actually both. As we know, for multiple reasons, it will not go down as one of the best.

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