8 ms·

Scrabble star wins Spanish world title despite not speaking Spanish

160 points by n1b0m 2y ago

Suppafly 2y ago
I believe the same thing happened with the French Scrabble tournament. You don't need to speak the language, just be really good at memorizing lists of words.
- n1b0m 2y ago
  Yes he also won the French one after memorising the dictionary in nine weeks!
  - latentsea 2y ago
    How exactly does one memorize an essentially random list of approximately 40,000 strings such that they could pull any of those strings out a hat at will in just 9 weeks? What kind of sorcery would even make that possible?
    - darepublic 2y ago
      You could cheat with computer too
      - numeri 2y ago
        Nigel Richards usually outperforms (and is orders of magnitude faster than, at least for the complicated endgames, if I understand correctly) the best computer Scrabble programs.
    - nkrisc 2y ago
      Some just have different brains. I think most people could not do that no matter how hard they tried, but with billions of people some just can.
      - Onavo 2y ago
        It's not as hard as you think, he's an English speaker and French and English shares approximately 40% of the vocabulary. And once you have mastered French, you have the other 80% needed for Spanish as it's a Latin language like French.
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
        recursive 2y ago
        How hard do you think I think it is? Are you implying that it's easy for an English speaker to master the English scrabble word list?
        bee_rider 2y ago
        Well, I think it is impossible, so the comment works for me. And I refuse to update my priors to account for the fact that somebody did it. Because I can’t even memorize the English scrabble dictionary well enough to enjoy playing. I am happier to live in a universe in which Scrabble is just impossible.
        latentsea 2y ago
        For the stated time frame, it's definitely as hard as you think, and then much, much, much harder.
    - lupire 2y ago
      Most of the points are in bonuses and bongos, so you don't have to care much about the short words with common letters.
      - radlad 2y ago
        In fact, maybe it's better not to think of them!
      - vunderba 2y ago
        In fact, you do need to care about the short words. 1. they can be useful at locking down the board 2. knowing all of the words is necessary to be able to challenge when somebody attempt to play a phony, which, as a native Spanish speaker, you might be even more inclined to try against a non-native speaker.
        0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
        Do professional scrabble players use fake words as a strategy? I assumed that (minus the weirdo savant playing in a foreign language), everyone at the professional level has an extensive vocabulary for which it would be difficult to bluff.
        vunderba 2y ago
        It's not super common but if I was playing against somebody who didn't speak the lingua franca I'd probably throw out a couple phonies to test the waters. The CSW is the official English word list used internationally (outside of the US/Thailand/Canada because we just HAD to be different) and contains over a quarter of a million words. Unless you're at the UPPER OF UPPER ECHELONS, there's a chance a crafty player could slip a phony in by hooking an "S" on the board or some other subtle stem - especially with the pressure of time controls.
        numeri 2y ago
        There was at least one case of someone trying this against Nigel in French, and he got them.
    - teractiveodular 2y ago
      The strings are neither random nor independent. There are many English cognates, groups of related words, patterns of word formation, etc. It's still an insane feat, since it typically takes actual language learners years to get anywhere close to a native speaker's inventory of 10,000+ words.
      - YawningAngel 2y ago
        Depends which language learners. There are people who can learn 50 new words a day for months, but those people are rare and there feats are probably not replicable for most of us. https://isaak.net/mandarin/ https://isaak.net/mandarin/ is an example edit: Isaak is great, but it was 22 words per day not 50
        latentsea 2y ago
        My pace is typically 35 words a day when learning languages and most people think that's insane. It's still only around 1000 a month, which is why I chose that number. That's on the order of 12k a year if you don't miss a single day, which you usually do. The claim here is memorizing a full dictionary in 9 weeks. That has to be at least 40,000 words in 63 days. 634 words per day. And then or forgetting it. It's beyond rare. Its alien.
        rightbyte 2y ago
        Have you learnt many languages? I wish I had the energy to wanna do it. In school 35 words a day would be really pushing it for me. It had a really hard time learning English words. I had to study like an hour for 20 words to pass the test. But I learned grammar really fast.
        latentsea 2y ago
        Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Fluent in Japanese, can watch kdrama and mostly follow along and have basic conversations in Korean, forgot virtually all the Chinese I did but I managed to pass HSK2 after 2 months of study and then HSK3 the following month. I was only in China for 3 months on a work trip, so I thought I'd have some fun.
    - vunderba 2y ago
      The "sorcery" you're looking for is the correct genetic sequences that leads to an eidetic memory. No amount of compensation using mnemonic devices and memory palaces will get you even close to what Nigel Richards is capable of.
      - thrance 2y ago
        Genetic, or epigenetic!
        deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - tshaddox 2y ago
        Eh, I bet he’s using some normal Latin vocabulary and orthography skills too. I suspect he wouldn’t do quite at well memorizing a truly random set of combinations of 26 symbols.
        zeroonetwothree 2y ago
        Right it’s not random that it was French, and not, say, Russian.
        dmurray 2y ago
        You say that, but there are some world-class Scrabble players from Thailand who play Scrabble in English, a language with a completely different alphabet and orthography from their native tongue. They don't necessarily speak English well, either. One beat Nigel Richards for the World Championship in 2009 [0]. I think it would take Richards about 20 minutes to learn the Cyrillic alphabet and a few weeks to get familiar enough with the patterns of Russian to be a competitive player in that language. World champion is obviously a harder ask, but I wouldn't rule it out. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakorn_Nemitrmansuk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakorn_Nemitrmansuk
        borski 2y ago
    - masfuerte 2y ago
      Apparently his mother said, about teaching him Scrabble: "When he learnt to talk he wasn't interested in words, just numbers. I said: I know a game you're not going to be very good at because you can't spell very well and you weren't good at English at school." I guess the sorcery you are looking for is spite.
      - username135 2y ago
        amen to that
      - liquidise 2y ago
        > the sorcery you are looking for is spite. Both philosophical and poetic. True brilliance.
      - stevage 2y ago
        Scrabble really is a maths game. It just looks like a word game.
        vikingerik 2y ago
        Right. It's not a word game, it's an area-control game with 150,000 rules for legal placement of your resources. Codenames is a word game. Scrabble is about arbitrary sequences of glyphs.
        stevage 2y ago
        Interestingly there are versions with more restricted tilesets and hence fever words to learn. Like one that only uses the letters of BOGGLE.
    - vunderba 2y ago
      Where did you pull that number from? The ODS which is the official French Scrabble dictionary has something like 300,000 words. In 9 weeks that's averaging memorizing several THOUSAND words PER DAY. And don't give me BULL like "well plurality S/ES means a lot less" - yeah. NO. He still has to remember which words take what kind of plurality. And if you watch ANY interviews with him, you can tell he doesn't really take any shortcuts - he just straight-up memorizes them as a series of playable "tokens". I'm all for the "indomitable human spirit" but you could practice 24/7 and you'd still be SCRABBLING at base camp while Nigel Richards summitted Everest without the aid of supplemental oxygen. https://github.com/Thecoolsim/French-Scrabble-ODS8 https://github.com/Thecoolsim/French-Scrabble-ODS8
      - wongarsu 2y ago
        Scrolled to a random position in the file, and there's 37 lines of all declinations of the word "monologue". Followed by a bunch of nouns with just two to four forms, followed by 47 declinations of the word "monopolise". What he did is no small feat. You still have to memorize which suffixes are possible in which verbs (there are rules he would pick up on, but there are exceptions to the rules). But it is made easier by French verbs having a lot of possible suffixes, those suffixes being fairly regular, and English taking a lot of its "fancy" words with French (or adopting a Latin version that's close to what French adopted from Latin). I still couldn't come close to thinking about achieving it. He is doing the extreme sport version of scrabble for sure. And these advantages in French make it even more impressive that he could do the same even in Spanish.
        Asraelite 2y ago
        I actually don't think the exceptions are much of a problem overall. Most irregularities in a language happen with the most common words. Once you go from learning the most common words to simply learning all the words, the relative frequency of irregular formations that you encounter would go down dramatically.
      - BurningFrog 2y ago
        98% of those words are useless for competitive Scrabble.
    - ta_1138 2y ago
      While knowing every possible word is very helpful in scrabble, the most useful, important words for the game will be very different than the words that are useful for speaking the language well. There's many words out there that are going to be almost unusable, as they are low value. So you aren't really going to need all the words, but you want to memorize basically every word that uses the high scoring tiles, and understand how wide the 'gaps' you are leading when you leave high value letters on the board, especially near high scoring, whole word tiles. So you arent' overestimating how long it takes to memorize words, but how useful having a good, normal vocabulary in the language actually is for being good at scrabble. Go look at guides for English scrabble, and see the words you are trying to memorize.
      - BurningFrog 2y ago
        It would be interesting to determine how few words a Scrabble program needs to know to be a world class player!
        brookst 2y ago
        It will be probabilistic, because of the randomness of the draw. More words = greater chance of high scoring words for this board and draw. It likely wouldn’t take many words at all to beat a workd class player 1% of the time, and a pretty substantial vocabulary to win 99% of the time. Actually, 99% may not even be achievable because sometimes your opponent will just luck out with letters and board lineup.
      - Panzer04 2y ago
        Be that as it may, Nigel Richards (the scrabble star in this story) apparently knows virtually every word regardless, and fairly minimal study (supposedly).
      - ASUfool 2y ago
        Sorry, but you do not *want to "basically memorize every word that uses the high scoring tiles." Rather, you want to study the low-scoring tile-filled words because those are more likely to be found on one's rack. A key to high-scoring games is scoring "bingos" or using all 7 letters in a rack in a single turn as it gives a 50 point bonus. This is why we're taught to memorize the word lists that have such letters as TISANE in them as that string combines with most every other letter to make a bingo. The letters in TISANE are 1 point each. You also don't want to leave vowels (all of which are worth 1 point each) adjacent to the bonus squares. A parallel play with an I under/to the right of a triple-letter-square can easily score 62 if one puts a Q on the triple and another I to make QI both ways.
    - 1209412comb 2y ago
      How fast he was able to achieve this is amazing, but you probably can already do this with Chinese characters ( I assume you are from a Latin based language ), and even intuit how radicals combine into a character.
      - latentsea 2y ago
        Nope? Not at that pace anyway. At a fast pace for a human, yes, but not at 60x faster than "fast".
    - stevage 2y ago
      It's a tiny bit easier town that in that if you learn a tiny bit of grammar you can extrapolate sets of reloted words where you add an extra E or S or both.
    - sionisrecur 2y ago
      Avoid trying to make sense of how to write them based on how they sound seems like a start.
    - DontchaKnowit 2y ago
      mneumonic devices. 'memory palace' techniques. Currently learning spanish using this and it is pretty absurdly effective. Definitely couldn't do 40k words in 9 weeks, but obviously im a rank novice and this dude is a pro. But yeah I've memorized probably 2k words, their meanings, and their idiomatic usages in about 90 days using a program called learncraft spanish that uses mneumonic devices.
    - mmmore 2y ago
      Reportedly, by reading through the list twice and then reciting it to himself on bike rides.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J
- zarzavat 2y ago
  > You don't need to speak the language, just be really good at memorizing lists of words. That's half of it, the other prerequisite is that you have to be Nigel Richards.
- mkl 2y ago
  The article mentions this in the subtitle and body.
- labster 2y ago
  It’s in the subtitle of the article that he also won a French tournament. Please read the article.
- slibhb 2y ago
  Another piece of evidence in favor of my view that pretty much all competitive games and sports are awful when perfectly optimized.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    What does "perfectly optimized" even mean? If you're suggesting that a game feels less meaningful because its predisposed towards memorization, I'm not sure that leaves a lot of games left on the proverbial table for you. Furthermore, there's quite a bit more to Scrabble strategy such as: - balancing your rack - the natural RNG from drawing tiles - time pressure - anagramming I guess here's hoping you can start an international tournament of world champions for Snakes and Ladders, or Candyland? More seriously, perhaps you'd enjoy Fischer Chess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960
    - etrautmann 2y ago
      I agree with the parent that many games or sports are more fun to watch or participate in when not over optimized. Whether it’s the metagame, memorizing two letter words, or nailing a perfect serve in tennis or volleyball. It’s not fun for me to watch the very top where it’s so far optimized to have less variability, less serendipity, and less fun. Basketball may be an exception to that. All of this is personal opinion.
      - zem 2y ago
        scrabble is by no means over optimised; the randomness means every move is different, and single-game upsets (someone beating a much higher ranked player) are very common. what makes a champion is winning over the course of tens of games.
  - enragedcacti 2y ago
    Memorizing the words is necessary but not sufficient, there is still a ton of strategy and interesting dynamics to scrabble beyond the word list. The one that's most interesting to me is that at high level play it starts as imperfect information game but progresses into a perfect information game. At the start your opponent's rack could have anything, but once the bag is mostly depleted the challenge is not just to find the best scoring play, but to find your best play relative to all your opponents best plays for all possible racks they could have.
- saghm 2y ago
  A while back on a similar story about English scrabble posted here, someone commented with a story about how they were in a tournament where their opponent played some super esoteric word, and then they played the word "twig", which their opponent immediately challenged. I have to imagine that at the highest levels play, people who are good at memorization will dominate regardless of fluency.
- paulcole 2y ago
  Incredible recall of such an obscure fact that isn’t mentioned in the subtitle of the linked article.
- ChrisRR 2y ago
  I have a vague memory of reading that scrabble in a language that you don't speak has its advantages, as your brain isn't wired to favour words that it uses more often which may not be so valuable in scrabble
  - Etherlord87 2y ago
    I thought there's a rule you need to explain the word used when asked.
    - wiether 2y ago
      Knowing a word and its definition is not the same as using it daily, in writing or verbally. If I give you eight random letters and ask you to create words with them; if it's in a language that you use daily, you'll first see the ones that you use the most, not the longest/more complicated ones. Whereas if they should be picked from a dictionary, I can see that it could be easier to find long/complicated words, since you won't have a notion of "popular" words.
    - dagw 2y ago
      Being able to explain the word is a common house rule. The official rules only state that the word must be in an agreed upon standard dictionary (plus a few exceptions, like no abbreviations), which is the official Scrabble dictionary for competitions. As long as you can point to it there when challenged, you're good.
- lIl-IIIl 2y ago
  And, in the case of Spanish, the conjugations, which are valid to play in Scrabble. Also you need to memorize the different point values of the letters and different tile frequencies for Spanish or French.
  - ASUfool 2y ago
    Actually, the point values should be printed on each tile so they do not have to be memorized, though it may help in considering the opponent's responses if they have certain letters that combine with yours. And it's also acceptable to have a pre-printed scoresheet where one can track the letters that have been played so that would show the frequency of each. Tracking helps one a lot at the end as you know what letters your opponent has and can adjust your play to suit. Of course, at most tournament level play, they have been tracking and know your final rack too.
- interludead 2y ago
  It really challenges the assumption that language mastery is only about communication
- croisillon 2y ago
  indeed! related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21377311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21377311
- positr0n 2y ago
  There’s slightly more to it than that. There are also differences in strategy based on the differing distribution of letters in the game (Spanish removes some letters, adds other, adds ñ, and adds digraphs like LL, RR, and CH), differing distribution of letters in the spanish language, and some point value changes. This matters more in the probabilistic phase of the game than when scrabble transitions to a perfect information game in the end-game when no tiles are left in the bag (so each player know the board, their hand, and what the other player must have). You must develop a deep intuition for when to play the max scoring word you can find vs when to hold some letters in reserve in hopes of drawing even better hand next turn, etc.
- cainxinth 2y ago
  There was a Scrabble documentary called Word Wars (2004) and a crossword documentary called Wordplay (2006) that came out relatively close in time. Both are excellent films but reveal just how different fans of these two popular word games are. The top level crossworders had a general fund of knowledge and were mostly “normal” people. The hardcore Scrabblers were monomaniacs and dispositinally eccentric in many cases.
StarterPro 2y ago
[flagged]
- SamBam 2y ago
  This isn't Reddit.
  - KingMob 2y ago
    HN isn't much better, just tech-ier.
Sophira 2y ago
Will Anderson, another competitive Scrabble player and 2017 North America national champion, made an interesting and in-depth Scrabble analysis video about Nigel Richards' 2024 Spanish World Championship win that people here might enjoy watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RvNxkQ6Bgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RvNxkQ6Bgs
- edmn 2y ago
  Thanks to Anderson, I anticipated that this would be Nigel Rogers before reading the article.
munchler 2y ago
As a person who likes words, this is exactly why I dislike Scrabble. It's right up there with spelling bees.
- bubblyworld 2y ago
  You're allowed to like words in whatever way you want, friend. Let's not invent a moral hierarchy where there isn't one.
  - interludead 2y ago
    There’s no right way to enjoy words... Whether it’s through playing Scrabble, writing poetry, or diving into etymology
khana 2y ago
[dead]
zem 2y ago
honestly, the scrabble world would have been a lot more surprised had he not won.
precommunicator 2y ago
Someone should just make a Scrabble tournament in which the dictionary is just random strings that you just have to memorize
yzydserd 2y ago
Competitive Scrabble has as much to do with language as competitive Sudoku has to do with mathematics.
asimpleusecase 2y ago
Spanish, English and French have Latin roots. Whether Nigel knows Latin or not he had likely picked up on those underlying patterns.
interludead 2y ago
A testament to the sheer power of memory, dedication, and pattern recognition
jc_811 2y ago
Interesting, I wonder if he also memorized all the irregular verb tenses? If so that is a serious feat. For example, future tense in the 2nd person adds “ás” to the end of the verb. Pensar becomes pensarás. But, there are irregulars. You’d think the verb salir would be salirás (if you were memorizing), but it actually it saldrás Seems like an incredible feat that goes beyond memorizing a dictionary. Unless Spanish scrabble maybe has specific rules around verb tenses and whatnot?
- karatinversion 2y ago
  I don't know Spanish scrabble, but I have played Finnish scrabbe - another language that relies heavily on conjugation - and it disallows all conjugated and declined forms of words, except for nominative plurals.
  - jc_811 2y ago
    Ah, makes sense :)
- omegaham 2y ago
  I don't know about his Spanish Scrabble performance, but when he won the French Scrabble championship, there were players who attempted the French equivalent of "play salirás and see if he notices," and Nigel challenged all of them.
- paulcole 2y ago
  When Scrabble players talk about a "dictionary" they really just mean a list of words that are acceptable. They're not actually learning anything other than "_______ is an acceptable string." So even if just "pensar" is in what you and I would call a "dictionary", the Scrabble-acceptable word list will contain every form of it.
- mmmore 2y ago
  Nigel Richards reportedly[1] memorized the full French dictionary over the course of nine weeks (he doesn't speak French either). The way he did this is by reading through the dictionary twice and reciting the words to himself while on bike rides. He has an incredible mind. [1] https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J
mihaic 2y ago
I'm surprised a bit that nobody here is turning this into a question of where do LLMs lie on the spectrum of "understanding" compared to this.
- moralestapia 2y ago
  I came here to find/make this comment. This is pretty much the argument on why LLMs do not perform "reasoning" in the same way we do.
BrandoElFollito 2y ago
I think we had the same case in France. It is impressive.
2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago
how can you memorize all words of a language and still not have command of it? that's a feat in and off itself it seems.
- jerf 2y ago
  He memorized the series of valid letters. That's it. He still has no idea what "ongle" is, just that it's a perfectly valid French scrabble word. Certainly just knowing all the legal sequences of letters does not buy you much. If you study a language more distant from English than French, you'd be surprised at how even knowing all the meanings can still leave you pretty baffled at the meaning of a sentence. You do have to get farther away from English than French though; I can still half-read French off of a 4-year "not all that great" study in high school, and that's more a testament to how knowing enough English to recall Latin roots we don't use in our main vocabulary and some of the most common French words that are different from English is enough to read an awful lot of French from an English start than any skill of mine. I tried half-a-dozen words in Google Translate to pick my example above before I finally found a word that was either different enough that it wasn't basically the same as it is in English ("ski" -> "ski"), or something with enough Latin roots that English also uses that a strong English speaker would have a pretty decent chance of guessing ("smelly" -> "malodorant").
akudha 2y ago
Bit off topic - where can we get free access to the various world scrabble championship games? English especially, but others are good too
- boomboomsubban 2y ago
  A quick search gave me https://youtube.com/@NASPAScrabble/ https://youtube.com/@NASPAScrabble/
  - akudha 2y ago
    Sorry, I meant to ask, game data (moves and such). That channel links to this site, https://www.scrabbleplayers.org/tourneys/2024/csw/lxt/11/ https://www.scrabbleplayers.org/tourneys/2024/csw/lxt/11/ Not sure if they have the actual moves. Still looking
- ASUfool 2y ago
  You can find many annotated games if you check some higher-ranked players at www.cross-tables.com. Pull up a player's page such as Mack Meller and there's a whole slew of games he's played which you can view.
racl101 2y ago
AY CARUMBA!
boomboomsubban 2y ago
That he can do this is amazing. I wonder how he decides to pick up a new language of Scrabble, considering the near decade gap between French and Spanish. Also, what are the communication rules during play? Does he at least need to know enough Spanish to be able to issue or respond to a challenge?
pvaldes 2y ago
Somebody has the huge talent to learn multiple languages and interact with millions on a privileged position, but choose instead to earn the title of "king of scrabble". I'm unsure about if this history is comedy or drama. My suggestion to this person would be to be much more ambitious with this life. He has the skills.
- diggan 2y ago
  As far as I understand, he's not actually learning the languages he play in, he is "just" memorising words from the dictionary. Probably would make it way easier if he decided he wanted to learn one of those languages, but just knowing words doesn't make you proficient in comprehension and be able to create sentences.
  - imzadi 2y ago
    It's not even really learning the words, just how they are spelled. It's basically just pattern recognition.
- mulmen 2y ago
  Who are you to tell someone how to live their life? Winning a Scrabble championship isn’t hurting anyone.
  - kingkongjaffa 2y ago
    Not that I agree or disagree, but they probably think it’s waste of intellect. Like how good will hunting portrays being a janitor a waste of his talents.
    - mulmen 2y ago
      Nobody has a right to another’s intellect. It’s totally unreasonable to criticize someone’s life choices like this.
- talldayo 2y ago
  Being a scrabble champion is not mutually exclusive to real-world impact. If a Scrabble expert lived a day in our shoes as software developers, I bet they'd think we're a net drain on society too.

160 points by n1b0m 2y ago

I believe the same thing happened with the French Scrabble tournament. You don't need to speak the language, just be really good at memorizing lists of words.

n1b0m 2y ago
Yes he also won the French one after memorising the dictionary in nine weeks!
- latentsea 2y ago
  How exactly does one memorize an essentially random list of approximately 40,000 strings such that they could pull any of those strings out a hat at will in just 9 weeks? What kind of sorcery would even make that possible?
  - darepublic 2y ago
    You could cheat with computer too
    - numeri 2y ago
      Nigel Richards usually outperforms (and is orders of magnitude faster than, at least for the complicated endgames, if I understand correctly) the best computer Scrabble programs.
  - nkrisc 2y ago
    Some just have different brains. I think most people could not do that no matter how hard they tried, but with billions of people some just can.
    - Onavo 2y ago
      It's not as hard as you think, he's an English speaker and French and English shares approximately 40% of the vocabulary. And once you have mastered French, you have the other 80% needed for Spanish as it's a Latin language like French.
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
      - recursive 2y ago
        How hard do you think I think it is? Are you implying that it's easy for an English speaker to master the English scrabble word list?
        bee_rider 2y ago
        Well, I think it is impossible, so the comment works for me. And I refuse to update my priors to account for the fact that somebody did it. Because I can’t even memorize the English scrabble dictionary well enough to enjoy playing. I am happier to live in a universe in which Scrabble is just impossible.
      - latentsea 2y ago
        For the stated time frame, it's definitely as hard as you think, and then much, much, much harder.
  - lupire 2y ago
    Most of the points are in bonuses and bongos, so you don't have to care much about the short words with common letters.
    - radlad 2y ago
      In fact, maybe it's better not to think of them!
    - vunderba 2y ago
      In fact, you do need to care about the short words. 1. they can be useful at locking down the board 2. knowing all of the words is necessary to be able to challenge when somebody attempt to play a phony, which, as a native Spanish speaker, you might be even more inclined to try against a non-native speaker.
      - 0cf8612b2e1e 2y ago
        Do professional scrabble players use fake words as a strategy? I assumed that (minus the weirdo savant playing in a foreign language), everyone at the professional level has an extensive vocabulary for which it would be difficult to bluff.
        vunderba 2y ago
        It's not super common but if I was playing against somebody who didn't speak the lingua franca I'd probably throw out a couple phonies to test the waters. The CSW is the official English word list used internationally (outside of the US/Thailand/Canada because we just HAD to be different) and contains over a quarter of a million words. Unless you're at the UPPER OF UPPER ECHELONS, there's a chance a crafty player could slip a phony in by hooking an "S" on the board or some other subtle stem - especially with the pressure of time controls.
        numeri 2y ago
        There was at least one case of someone trying this against Nigel in French, and he got them.
  - teractiveodular 2y ago
    The strings are neither random nor independent. There are many English cognates, groups of related words, patterns of word formation, etc. It's still an insane feat, since it typically takes actual language learners years to get anywhere close to a native speaker's inventory of 10,000+ words.
    - YawningAngel 2y ago
      Depends which language learners. There are people who can learn 50 new words a day for months, but those people are rare and there feats are probably not replicable for most of us. https://isaak.net/mandarin/ https://isaak.net/mandarin/ is an example edit: Isaak is great, but it was 22 words per day not 50
      - latentsea 2y ago
        My pace is typically 35 words a day when learning languages and most people think that's insane. It's still only around 1000 a month, which is why I chose that number. That's on the order of 12k a year if you don't miss a single day, which you usually do. The claim here is memorizing a full dictionary in 9 weeks. That has to be at least 40,000 words in 63 days. 634 words per day. And then or forgetting it. It's beyond rare. Its alien.
        rightbyte 2y ago
        Have you learnt many languages? I wish I had the energy to wanna do it. In school 35 words a day would be really pushing it for me. It had a really hard time learning English words. I had to study like an hour for 20 words to pass the test. But I learned grammar really fast.
        latentsea 2y ago
        Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Fluent in Japanese, can watch kdrama and mostly follow along and have basic conversations in Korean, forgot virtually all the Chinese I did but I managed to pass HSK2 after 2 months of study and then HSK3 the following month. I was only in China for 3 months on a work trip, so I thought I'd have some fun.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    The "sorcery" you're looking for is the correct genetic sequences that leads to an eidetic memory. No amount of compensation using mnemonic devices and memory palaces will get you even close to what Nigel Richards is capable of.
    - thrance 2y ago
      Genetic, or epigenetic!
      - deleted 2y ago
        [deleted]
    - tshaddox 2y ago
      Eh, I bet he’s using some normal Latin vocabulary and orthography skills too. I suspect he wouldn’t do quite at well memorizing a truly random set of combinations of 26 symbols.
      - zeroonetwothree 2y ago
        Right it’s not random that it was French, and not, say, Russian.
        dmurray 2y ago
        You say that, but there are some world-class Scrabble players from Thailand who play Scrabble in English, a language with a completely different alphabet and orthography from their native tongue. They don't necessarily speak English well, either. One beat Nigel Richards for the World Championship in 2009 [0]. I think it would take Richards about 20 minutes to learn the Cyrillic alphabet and a few weeks to get familiar enough with the patterns of Russian to be a competitive player in that language. World champion is obviously a harder ask, but I wouldn't rule it out. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakorn_Nemitrmansuk https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pakorn_Nemitrmansuk
        borski 2y ago
  - masfuerte 2y ago
    Apparently his mother said, about teaching him Scrabble: "When he learnt to talk he wasn't interested in words, just numbers. I said: I know a game you're not going to be very good at because you can't spell very well and you weren't good at English at school." I guess the sorcery you are looking for is spite.
    - username135 2y ago
      amen to that
    - liquidise 2y ago
      > the sorcery you are looking for is spite. Both philosophical and poetic. True brilliance.
    - stevage 2y ago
      Scrabble really is a maths game. It just looks like a word game.
      - vikingerik 2y ago
        Right. It's not a word game, it's an area-control game with 150,000 rules for legal placement of your resources. Codenames is a word game. Scrabble is about arbitrary sequences of glyphs.
        stevage 2y ago
        Interestingly there are versions with more restricted tilesets and hence fever words to learn. Like one that only uses the letters of BOGGLE.
  - vunderba 2y ago
    Where did you pull that number from? The ODS which is the official French Scrabble dictionary has something like 300,000 words. In 9 weeks that's averaging memorizing several THOUSAND words PER DAY. And don't give me BULL like "well plurality S/ES means a lot less" - yeah. NO. He still has to remember which words take what kind of plurality. And if you watch ANY interviews with him, you can tell he doesn't really take any shortcuts - he just straight-up memorizes them as a series of playable "tokens". I'm all for the "indomitable human spirit" but you could practice 24/7 and you'd still be SCRABBLING at base camp while Nigel Richards summitted Everest without the aid of supplemental oxygen. https://github.com/Thecoolsim/French-Scrabble-ODS8 https://github.com/Thecoolsim/French-Scrabble-ODS8
    - wongarsu 2y ago
      Scrolled to a random position in the file, and there's 37 lines of all declinations of the word "monologue". Followed by a bunch of nouns with just two to four forms, followed by 47 declinations of the word "monopolise". What he did is no small feat. You still have to memorize which suffixes are possible in which verbs (there are rules he would pick up on, but there are exceptions to the rules). But it is made easier by French verbs having a lot of possible suffixes, those suffixes being fairly regular, and English taking a lot of its "fancy" words with French (or adopting a Latin version that's close to what French adopted from Latin). I still couldn't come close to thinking about achieving it. He is doing the extreme sport version of scrabble for sure. And these advantages in French make it even more impressive that he could do the same even in Spanish.
      - Asraelite 2y ago
        I actually don't think the exceptions are much of a problem overall. Most irregularities in a language happen with the most common words. Once you go from learning the most common words to simply learning all the words, the relative frequency of irregular formations that you encounter would go down dramatically.
    - BurningFrog 2y ago
      98% of those words are useless for competitive Scrabble.
  - ta_1138 2y ago
    While knowing every possible word is very helpful in scrabble, the most useful, important words for the game will be very different than the words that are useful for speaking the language well. There's many words out there that are going to be almost unusable, as they are low value. So you aren't really going to need all the words, but you want to memorize basically every word that uses the high scoring tiles, and understand how wide the 'gaps' you are leading when you leave high value letters on the board, especially near high scoring, whole word tiles. So you arent' overestimating how long it takes to memorize words, but how useful having a good, normal vocabulary in the language actually is for being good at scrabble. Go look at guides for English scrabble, and see the words you are trying to memorize.
    - BurningFrog 2y ago
      It would be interesting to determine how few words a Scrabble program needs to know to be a world class player!
      - brookst 2y ago
        It will be probabilistic, because of the randomness of the draw. More words = greater chance of high scoring words for this board and draw. It likely wouldn’t take many words at all to beat a workd class player 1% of the time, and a pretty substantial vocabulary to win 99% of the time. Actually, 99% may not even be achievable because sometimes your opponent will just luck out with letters and board lineup.
    - Panzer04 2y ago
      Be that as it may, Nigel Richards (the scrabble star in this story) apparently knows virtually every word regardless, and fairly minimal study (supposedly).
    - ASUfool 2y ago
      Sorry, but you do not *want to "basically memorize every word that uses the high scoring tiles." Rather, you want to study the low-scoring tile-filled words because those are more likely to be found on one's rack. A key to high-scoring games is scoring "bingos" or using all 7 letters in a rack in a single turn as it gives a 50 point bonus. This is why we're taught to memorize the word lists that have such letters as TISANE in them as that string combines with most every other letter to make a bingo. The letters in TISANE are 1 point each. You also don't want to leave vowels (all of which are worth 1 point each) adjacent to the bonus squares. A parallel play with an I under/to the right of a triple-letter-square can easily score 62 if one puts a Q on the triple and another I to make QI both ways.
  - 1209412comb 2y ago
    How fast he was able to achieve this is amazing, but you probably can already do this with Chinese characters ( I assume you are from a Latin based language ), and even intuit how radicals combine into a character.
    - latentsea 2y ago
      Nope? Not at that pace anyway. At a fast pace for a human, yes, but not at 60x faster than "fast".
  - stevage 2y ago
    It's a tiny bit easier town that in that if you learn a tiny bit of grammar you can extrapolate sets of reloted words where you add an extra E or S or both.
  - sionisrecur 2y ago
    Avoid trying to make sense of how to write them based on how they sound seems like a start.
  - DontchaKnowit 2y ago
    mneumonic devices. 'memory palace' techniques. Currently learning spanish using this and it is pretty absurdly effective. Definitely couldn't do 40k words in 9 weeks, but obviously im a rank novice and this dude is a pro. But yeah I've memorized probably 2k words, their meanings, and their idiomatic usages in about 90 days using a program called learncraft spanish that uses mneumonic devices.
  - mmmore 2y ago
    Reportedly, by reading through the list twice and then reciting it to himself on bike rides.[1] [1] https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J
zarzavat 2y ago
> You don't need to speak the language, just be really good at memorizing lists of words. That's half of it, the other prerequisite is that you have to be Nigel Richards.
mkl 2y ago
The article mentions this in the subtitle and body.
labster 2y ago
It’s in the subtitle of the article that he also won a French tournament. Please read the article.
slibhb 2y ago
Another piece of evidence in favor of my view that pretty much all competitive games and sports are awful when perfectly optimized.
- vunderba 2y ago
  What does "perfectly optimized" even mean? If you're suggesting that a game feels less meaningful because its predisposed towards memorization, I'm not sure that leaves a lot of games left on the proverbial table for you. Furthermore, there's quite a bit more to Scrabble strategy such as: - balancing your rack - the natural RNG from drawing tiles - time pressure - anagramming I guess here's hoping you can start an international tournament of world champions for Snakes and Ladders, or Candyland? More seriously, perhaps you'd enjoy Fischer Chess. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chess960
  - etrautmann 2y ago
    I agree with the parent that many games or sports are more fun to watch or participate in when not over optimized. Whether it’s the metagame, memorizing two letter words, or nailing a perfect serve in tennis or volleyball. It’s not fun for me to watch the very top where it’s so far optimized to have less variability, less serendipity, and less fun. Basketball may be an exception to that. All of this is personal opinion.
    - zem 2y ago
      scrabble is by no means over optimised; the randomness means every move is different, and single-game upsets (someone beating a much higher ranked player) are very common. what makes a champion is winning over the course of tens of games.
- enragedcacti 2y ago
  Memorizing the words is necessary but not sufficient, there is still a ton of strategy and interesting dynamics to scrabble beyond the word list. The one that's most interesting to me is that at high level play it starts as imperfect information game but progresses into a perfect information game. At the start your opponent's rack could have anything, but once the bag is mostly depleted the challenge is not just to find the best scoring play, but to find your best play relative to all your opponents best plays for all possible racks they could have.
saghm 2y ago
A while back on a similar story about English scrabble posted here, someone commented with a story about how they were in a tournament where their opponent played some super esoteric word, and then they played the word "twig", which their opponent immediately challenged. I have to imagine that at the highest levels play, people who are good at memorization will dominate regardless of fluency.
paulcole 2y ago
Incredible recall of such an obscure fact that isn’t mentioned in the subtitle of the linked article.
ChrisRR 2y ago
I have a vague memory of reading that scrabble in a language that you don't speak has its advantages, as your brain isn't wired to favour words that it uses more often which may not be so valuable in scrabble
- Etherlord87 2y ago
  I thought there's a rule you need to explain the word used when asked.
  - wiether 2y ago
    Knowing a word and its definition is not the same as using it daily, in writing or verbally. If I give you eight random letters and ask you to create words with them; if it's in a language that you use daily, you'll first see the ones that you use the most, not the longest/more complicated ones. Whereas if they should be picked from a dictionary, I can see that it could be easier to find long/complicated words, since you won't have a notion of "popular" words.
  - dagw 2y ago
    Being able to explain the word is a common house rule. The official rules only state that the word must be in an agreed upon standard dictionary (plus a few exceptions, like no abbreviations), which is the official Scrabble dictionary for competitions. As long as you can point to it there when challenged, you're good.
lIl-IIIl 2y ago
And, in the case of Spanish, the conjugations, which are valid to play in Scrabble. Also you need to memorize the different point values of the letters and different tile frequencies for Spanish or French.
- ASUfool 2y ago
  Actually, the point values should be printed on each tile so they do not have to be memorized, though it may help in considering the opponent's responses if they have certain letters that combine with yours. And it's also acceptable to have a pre-printed scoresheet where one can track the letters that have been played so that would show the frequency of each. Tracking helps one a lot at the end as you know what letters your opponent has and can adjust your play to suit. Of course, at most tournament level play, they have been tracking and know your final rack too.
interludead 2y ago
It really challenges the assumption that language mastery is only about communication
croisillon 2y ago
indeed! related: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21377311 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21377311
positr0n 2y ago
There’s slightly more to it than that. There are also differences in strategy based on the differing distribution of letters in the game (Spanish removes some letters, adds other, adds ñ, and adds digraphs like LL, RR, and CH), differing distribution of letters in the spanish language, and some point value changes. This matters more in the probabilistic phase of the game than when scrabble transitions to a perfect information game in the end-game when no tiles are left in the bag (so each player know the board, their hand, and what the other player must have). You must develop a deep intuition for when to play the max scoring word you can find vs when to hold some letters in reserve in hopes of drawing even better hand next turn, etc.
cainxinth 2y ago
There was a Scrabble documentary called Word Wars (2004) and a crossword documentary called Wordplay (2006) that came out relatively close in time. Both are excellent films but reveal just how different fans of these two popular word games are. The top level crossworders had a general fund of knowledge and were mostly “normal” people. The hardcore Scrabblers were monomaniacs and dispositinally eccentric in many cases.

StarterPro 2y ago

[flagged]

SamBam 2y ago
This isn't Reddit.
- KingMob 2y ago
  HN isn't much better, just tech-ier.

Sophira 2y ago

Will Anderson, another competitive Scrabble player and 2017 North America national champion, made an interesting and in-depth Scrabble analysis video about Nigel Richards' 2024 Spanish World Championship win that people here might enjoy watching: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RvNxkQ6Bgs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6RvNxkQ6Bgs

edmn 2y ago
Thanks to Anderson, I anticipated that this would be Nigel Rogers before reading the article.

munchler 2y ago

As a person who likes words, this is exactly why I dislike Scrabble. It's right up there with spelling bees.

bubblyworld 2y ago
You're allowed to like words in whatever way you want, friend. Let's not invent a moral hierarchy where there isn't one.
- interludead 2y ago
  There’s no right way to enjoy words... Whether it’s through playing Scrabble, writing poetry, or diving into etymology

khana 2y ago

[dead]

zem 2y ago

honestly, the scrabble world would have been a lot more surprised had he not won.

precommunicator 2y ago

Someone should just make a Scrabble tournament in which the dictionary is just random strings that you just have to memorize

yzydserd 2y ago

Competitive Scrabble has as much to do with language as competitive Sudoku has to do with mathematics.

asimpleusecase 2y ago

Spanish, English and French have Latin roots. Whether Nigel knows Latin or not he had likely picked up on those underlying patterns.

interludead 2y ago

A testament to the sheer power of memory, dedication, and pattern recognition

jc_811 2y ago

Interesting, I wonder if he also memorized all the irregular verb tenses? If so that is a serious feat. For example, future tense in the 2nd person adds “ás” to the end of the verb. Pensar becomes pensarás. But, there are irregulars. You’d think the verb salir would be salirás (if you were memorizing), but it actually it saldrás Seems like an incredible feat that goes beyond memorizing a dictionary. Unless Spanish scrabble maybe has specific rules around verb tenses and whatnot?

karatinversion 2y ago
I don't know Spanish scrabble, but I have played Finnish scrabbe - another language that relies heavily on conjugation - and it disallows all conjugated and declined forms of words, except for nominative plurals.
- jc_811 2y ago
  Ah, makes sense :)
omegaham 2y ago
I don't know about his Spanish Scrabble performance, but when he won the French Scrabble championship, there were players who attempted the French equivalent of "play salirás and see if he notices," and Nigel challenged all of them.
paulcole 2y ago
When Scrabble players talk about a "dictionary" they really just mean a list of words that are acceptable. They're not actually learning anything other than "_______ is an acceptable string." So even if just "pensar" is in what you and I would call a "dictionary", the Scrabble-acceptable word list will contain every form of it.
mmmore 2y ago
Nigel Richards reportedly[1] memorized the full French dictionary over the course of nine weeks (he doesn't speak French either). The way he did this is by reading through the dictionary twice and reciting the words to himself while on bike rides. He has an incredible mind. [1] https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J https://youtu.be/T-8NrvVqbT4?si=u797T9o1E-R8TL6J

mihaic 2y ago

I'm surprised a bit that nobody here is turning this into a question of where do LLMs lie on the spectrum of "understanding" compared to this.

moralestapia 2y ago
I came here to find/make this comment. This is pretty much the argument on why LLMs do not perform "reasoning" in the same way we do.

BrandoElFollito 2y ago

I think we had the same case in France. It is impressive.

2-3-7-43-1807 2y ago

how can you memorize all words of a language and still not have command of it? that's a feat in and off itself it seems.

jerf 2y ago
He memorized the series of valid letters. That's it. He still has no idea what "ongle" is, just that it's a perfectly valid French scrabble word. Certainly just knowing all the legal sequences of letters does not buy you much. If you study a language more distant from English than French, you'd be surprised at how even knowing all the meanings can still leave you pretty baffled at the meaning of a sentence. You do have to get farther away from English than French though; I can still half-read French off of a 4-year "not all that great" study in high school, and that's more a testament to how knowing enough English to recall Latin roots we don't use in our main vocabulary and some of the most common French words that are different from English is enough to read an awful lot of French from an English start than any skill of mine. I tried half-a-dozen words in Google Translate to pick my example above before I finally found a word that was either different enough that it wasn't basically the same as it is in English ("ski" -> "ski"), or something with enough Latin roots that English also uses that a strong English speaker would have a pretty decent chance of guessing ("smelly" -> "malodorant").

akudha 2y ago

Bit off topic - where can we get free access to the various world scrabble championship games? English especially, but others are good too

boomboomsubban 2y ago
A quick search gave me https://youtube.com/@NASPAScrabble/ https://youtube.com/@NASPAScrabble/
- akudha 2y ago
  Sorry, I meant to ask, game data (moves and such). That channel links to this site, https://www.scrabbleplayers.org/tourneys/2024/csw/lxt/11/ https://www.scrabbleplayers.org/tourneys/2024/csw/lxt/11/ Not sure if they have the actual moves. Still looking
ASUfool 2y ago
You can find many annotated games if you check some higher-ranked players at www.cross-tables.com. Pull up a player's page such as Mack Meller and there's a whole slew of games he's played which you can view.

racl101 2y ago

AY CARUMBA!

boomboomsubban 2y ago

That he can do this is amazing. I wonder how he decides to pick up a new language of Scrabble, considering the near decade gap between French and Spanish. Also, what are the communication rules during play? Does he at least need to know enough Spanish to be able to issue or respond to a challenge?

pvaldes 2y ago

Somebody has the huge talent to learn multiple languages and interact with millions on a privileged position, but choose instead to earn the title of "king of scrabble". I'm unsure about if this history is comedy or drama. My suggestion to this person would be to be much more ambitious with this life. He has the skills.

diggan 2y ago
As far as I understand, he's not actually learning the languages he play in, he is "just" memorising words from the dictionary. Probably would make it way easier if he decided he wanted to learn one of those languages, but just knowing words doesn't make you proficient in comprehension and be able to create sentences.
- imzadi 2y ago
  It's not even really learning the words, just how they are spelled. It's basically just pattern recognition.
mulmen 2y ago
Who are you to tell someone how to live their life? Winning a Scrabble championship isn’t hurting anyone.
- kingkongjaffa 2y ago
  Not that I agree or disagree, but they probably think it’s waste of intellect. Like how good will hunting portrays being a janitor a waste of his talents.
  - mulmen 2y ago
    Nobody has a right to another’s intellect. It’s totally unreasonable to criticize someone’s life choices like this.
talldayo 2y ago
Being a scrabble champion is not mutually exclusive to real-world impact. If a Scrabble expert lived a day in our shoes as software developers, I bet they'd think we're a net drain on society too.