To prepare for the game, he carried a diary in his satchel, spending every spare moment committing words to memory.
His French competitors used computers to spit out anagrams, the game's key building blocks.
But in spite of all their advantages, France lost to an African player for the third year in a row last week in the one-on-one duel at the Francophone World Scrabble Championship.
"We have far less means than the French players," says Poka, who as a child in Ivory Coast made his own Scrabble set out of wood because he couldn't afford a store-bought one, "but we keep on beating them."
There is more than a little irony in the string of wins given that French is the language of West Africa's colonisers. With literacy rates as low as 30% in Guinea and 40% in Senegal, many Africans still speak local dialects and know only a smattering of French, the language of the elite.
