3 ms·

I played pretty high level Scrabble for a few years and most people who connect deeply with Scrabble are programmers, mathematicians, musicians, scientists, acc

I played pretty high level Scrabble for a few years and most people who connect deeply with Scrabble are programmers, mathematicians, musicians, scientists, accountants, etc. Hardly anybody at the medium-to-high levels of play are word people. At its core, Scrabble is just a game of probability, memory, spatial awareness, and pattern recognition. The words could be random collections of symbols.

sings 5y ago
My dream version of Scrabble would have a score system somehow based on word infrequency, so more interesting words would gain higher scores, exactly to mitigate the phenomenon you describe here.
- paulcole 5y ago
  It’s a fun thought but how do you define infrequency and what is an interesting word? ANESTRI is a very uncommon word by most “normal” measures (it’s the plural of anestrus, a period of sexual dormancy) but it’s (among) the most likely (by probability) 7-letter word played in tournament Scrabble games — there’s something like 9 anagrams of ANESTRI.
  - sings 5y ago
    Yes it’s certainly not a trivial problem. Assuming the requirement for a digital component in order to compute word scores, perhaps frequency could be weighted by previous (competition?) word plays.
  - chaboud 5y ago
    Keeping a rolling social history via some sort of merge-friendly approximate frequency data-structure (e.g., count-min sketch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch ) would allow you to score the game dynamically based on the play history of the current players, their friends, or others with similar or different characteristics (e.g., "We're playing Brooklyn Scrabble now!").
- CamperBob2 5y ago
  That would just reward people who spend years memorizing entire dictionaries. Scrabble is already too skewed in favor of the elite players, IMO. As paulcole says about chess, "the better player nearly always wins," and that's a problem when the only way to win is to turn the game into an obsession or a career. A big part of Wordle's appeal is that a reasonable vocabulary, and not a savant-level one, is all you need to bring to the table.
krallja 5y ago
Yep, in fact in 2015 Nigel Richards won the French Scrabble World Championship without speaking any French.
- paulcole 5y ago
  There’s a bunch of Thai guys who crush at North American English Scrabble.
ghaff 5y ago
Fascinating. Although I can program I’ve basically ended up as someone who can do fairly in-depth technical writing among many other things. And I’m not generally a word puzzle fan.
- paulcole 5y ago
  I can’t program but for awhile I wrote for a living. I was an English major in college and got hooked on Scrabble after reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a sportswriter from The Wall Street Journal. I’d always been into gambling and games with a luck factor like poker, backgammon, cribbage, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Always hated chess because the better player (nearly) always wins. Scrabble’s an interesting game but unless you’re very talented at anagramming and have a good memory, it’s a bit of a slog to learn enough of the “rules” of the game (the words) to make it really fun. At my “peak”, I was studying 20 or so hours a week and wasn’t even making progress anymore, just maintaining the stuff I’d already learned. It was a way to pass a few years of my life. I traveled around to tournaments, sometimes won enough to break even, met some interesting weirdos, and had a good enough time. But one day I just had enough and put it down and never picked it up again. Just stopped thinking it was fun, I guess. Biggest thing I took away from it was really seeing how a few minutes (and eventually a few hours) of work a day could help you change how your brain works and how you see the world. I vividly remember one day at work I saw a guy whose name badge said Demetrius. I instantly thought “oh if you add a ‘u’ to his name and rearrange the letters it spells ‘deuteriums.’” Now, when I think something is too hard or too big to accomplish, I think about that and just start chipping away.
  - cdelsolar 5y ago
    come back to tourney Scrabble! I see that we almost overlapped and played in the Phoenix nationals but different divisions. I was addicted until Feb 2020, then the pandemic started, so we made a site to let us play online tournaments (https://woogles.io https://woogles.io)
    - paulcole 5y ago
      Ha, yeah we definitely know some of the same people. I remember that Phoenix Biltmore being so expensive I shared a room with like 7 other 25-year old guys for the week. Was a really great time. Some of the after hours anagrams games blew my mind. Eddie L. at the Portland club got me into distance running and that’s been my main hobby the past decade or so. I’ve gotten really into the NYT Crossword and Spelling Bee, too. I’ll check out the site!

sings 5y ago

My dream version of Scrabble would have a score system somehow based on word infrequency, so more interesting words would gain higher scores, exactly to mitigate the phenomenon you describe here.

paulcole 5y ago
It’s a fun thought but how do you define infrequency and what is an interesting word? ANESTRI is a very uncommon word by most “normal” measures (it’s the plural of anestrus, a period of sexual dormancy) but it’s (among) the most likely (by probability) 7-letter word played in tournament Scrabble games — there’s something like 9 anagrams of ANESTRI.
- sings 5y ago
  Yes it’s certainly not a trivial problem. Assuming the requirement for a digital component in order to compute word scores, perhaps frequency could be weighted by previous (competition?) word plays.
- chaboud 5y ago
  Keeping a rolling social history via some sort of merge-friendly approximate frequency data-structure (e.g., count-min sketch - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Count%E2%80%93min_sketch ) would allow you to score the game dynamically based on the play history of the current players, their friends, or others with similar or different characteristics (e.g., "We're playing Brooklyn Scrabble now!").
CamperBob2 5y ago
That would just reward people who spend years memorizing entire dictionaries. Scrabble is already too skewed in favor of the elite players, IMO. As paulcole says about chess, "the better player nearly always wins," and that's a problem when the only way to win is to turn the game into an obsession or a career. A big part of Wordle's appeal is that a reasonable vocabulary, and not a savant-level one, is all you need to bring to the table.

krallja 5y ago

Yep, in fact in 2015 Nigel Richards won the French Scrabble World Championship without speaking any French.

paulcole 5y ago
There’s a bunch of Thai guys who crush at North American English Scrabble.

ghaff 5y ago

Fascinating. Although I can program I’ve basically ended up as someone who can do fairly in-depth technical writing among many other things. And I’m not generally a word puzzle fan.

paulcole 5y ago
I can’t program but for awhile I wrote for a living. I was an English major in college and got hooked on Scrabble after reading Word Freak by Stefan Fatsis, a sportswriter from The Wall Street Journal. I’d always been into gambling and games with a luck factor like poker, backgammon, cribbage, etc., so that might have something to do with it. Always hated chess because the better player (nearly) always wins. Scrabble’s an interesting game but unless you’re very talented at anagramming and have a good memory, it’s a bit of a slog to learn enough of the “rules” of the game (the words) to make it really fun. At my “peak”, I was studying 20 or so hours a week and wasn’t even making progress anymore, just maintaining the stuff I’d already learned. It was a way to pass a few years of my life. I traveled around to tournaments, sometimes won enough to break even, met some interesting weirdos, and had a good enough time. But one day I just had enough and put it down and never picked it up again. Just stopped thinking it was fun, I guess. Biggest thing I took away from it was really seeing how a few minutes (and eventually a few hours) of work a day could help you change how your brain works and how you see the world. I vividly remember one day at work I saw a guy whose name badge said Demetrius. I instantly thought “oh if you add a ‘u’ to his name and rearrange the letters it spells ‘deuteriums.’” Now, when I think something is too hard or too big to accomplish, I think about that and just start chipping away.
- cdelsolar 5y ago
  come back to tourney Scrabble! I see that we almost overlapped and played in the Phoenix nationals but different divisions. I was addicted until Feb 2020, then the pandemic started, so we made a site to let us play online tournaments (https://woogles.io https://woogles.io)
  - paulcole 5y ago
    Ha, yeah we definitely know some of the same people. I remember that Phoenix Biltmore being so expensive I shared a room with like 7 other 25-year old guys for the week. Was a really great time. Some of the after hours anagrams games blew my mind. Eddie L. at the Portland club got me into distance running and that’s been my main hobby the past decade or so. I’ve gotten really into the NYT Crossword and Spelling Bee, too. I’ll check out the site!