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Comment by sethrin | Hacker News Reader

I'm glad someone did these experiments. I find that Scrabble begins to seem unfair after a certain level: there is certainly a great deal of strategy involved, but just as much of the game involves memorizing a fairly arbitrary collection of words: "za" is allowed, but "ok" is not, and there are far too many obscure transliterations of Arabic terms. The Scrabble Dictionary is more-or-less synonymous with the game itself, and the if the idea of memorizing a particular dictionary is already of dubious entertainment value, this is not improved by using a bad dictionary.

Scrabble is a classic game. The basic idea seems great. I just wish you could have a Scrabble game without having to say, "Seriously, that is considered a word? This game is ridiculous!" and feeling like the other person has an unfair advantage.

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Scrabble isn't a word game. It's an area-control game with 150,000 rules to define legal placement for your resources. Some of those rules have mnemonics in the form of words you know.

Unlike a game such as Go, in Scrabble once you place your pieces they are no longer only yours and can now be used by both players to add on more pieces next to them (although you do get payment for placing them at first, especially at positions with multipliers, since then your opponent can't use those multipliers).

However, if you do not use all of your cards in one turn, you will keep some and can plan ahead a bit, for use later.

> Unlike a game such as Go, in Scrabble once you place your pieces they are no longer only yours and can now be used by both players to add on more pieces next to them

Yes, this is an important aspect of area control in Scrabble. Scrabble is about not letting other players play on high-scoring spaces. It's not enough to take them when you can; you have to avoid playing near those tiles so that your opponents won't be able to play on them.

As many have commented, there are two Scrabbles.

Below a certain level, it is a fun “beer and pretzels” game, where having a good vocabulary helps, and when someone plays an unusual word, the other players “ooh” and”aah.”

Abive a certain level, it is a strategy game requiring a large memorized list of allowable combinations of tiles to play, and the correspondance to actual words has no more significance than the shape of a rook in chess resembling a tower.

The gap between the two games is tremendous, and this is, in my opinion, the game’s only fault. It’s very intimidating to enjoy the beer and pretzels game, but discover that in order to play seriously, it’s not just 10,000 hours of study, but much of that will be rote memorization.

But nevrtheless, the beer and pretzels version of the game is also a valid pursuit. It’s just not the Scrabble you choose to play.

I've played where each player gets a sheet of all 2 letter words to balance this feeling.

Any list of words will have both inclusions and exclusions that someone finds objectionable.

The exclusion of "OK" is hardly arbitrary; it isn't allowed because it isn't pronounced "ock". Compare RADAR / LASER / SCUBA / LIDAR vs CD / SMS / PC / BM

Ok is being added.

https://www.cnet.com/news/its-finally-ok-to-play-ok-as-a-scr...

So, it's very arbitrary.

Apparently “ok” was recently added.

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2018-09-24/score-scr...

yes, OK will become tournament valid in February of next year.

If you're playing the board game, you can agree to use your own dictionary.

The problem is that the allowed two- and three-letter words matter the most, and using a game-specific dictionary at least provides an authoritative list, if not a good one. The omission of "ok" from the official dictionary is likely deliberate, and there is at least some etymological reasoning behind that. The inclusion of "za" is more nonsensical, but as a two-letter word which uses "z", it's extremely common in gameplay, and could be argued as being important enough to merit inclusion simply to make the game easier. I'm not sure that there is any good solution to this. I think that high-level Scrabble might simply fail to be a very good game.

My girlfriend loves Scrabble but hates the list of nonsensical but allowed two letter words, so in our version they aren’t allowed.

An exception is made for “qi”, just because. Mine is not to question why, simply to regularly lose.

Qi is too sweet to relinquish.

QAT has saved my bacon so many times.

As a tournament Scrabble player, high-level Scrabble is actually an extremely good game, one of the best ever made. There is a huge amount of depth to it. I can expound upon it some more, but don't know how interested people would be.

I am currently in Boston for a tournament - the Can-Am (Canada vs USA championship).

Ah, is this open to the public? Where is it being held?

In Cambridge, MA at a community center. It is not quite open to the public. You have to be a member of the North American Scrabble Players Association (www.scrabbleplayers.org - $30/year) and have amassed a high enough ELO to qualify for this tournament. There are many tournaments held all over the country that are open to any NASPA members though. I'm excited for it! I represented the US in 2013 in Vancouver and we won that one.

I don’t doubt that high level Scrabble is intriguing, but I think the problem (if you even want to call it a problem) is that it’s effectively a completely different game than the casual game of Scrabble.

Casual Scrabble is all about coming up with fairly well-known words. Serious Scrabble, I presume, is about controlling board position armed with a vast knowledge of legal words.

As soon as someone in a casual game plays a questionable esoteric word that, if challenged, turns out to be a legal word, the casual game becomes a lot less fun for everyone involved.

Your presumption about serious Scrabble is actually very accurate. The actual words themselves don’t even matter that much. I practice anagramming during a lot of my free time, to the point where seeing letters like EOHISTRE immediately (within less than half a second) brings up theories, theorise, isothere in my head. The game is largely about controlling the board, rough probability calculations, inferencing of your opponent’s tiles from their previous moves, etc etc. There’s a lot to it. It hasn’t even been seriously solved by a computer (the best AI does not beat the best player more than 50% of the time).

Don't the high level players of every game think their game is one of the best ever made?

Presumably they wouldn't devote that much energy to something if they didn't regard it as such.

They also probably aren't high level players in enough other games to give a credible comparison among all the possible contenders, simply due to the time required to become high level in multiple games.

I agree. I think that Scrabble is a great game which, by its very design, cannot be an interesting game at serious competitive levels. It’s great fun to play with a group of friends who will accept words on an unspoken honor system. But as soon as there is serious competition with meaningful stakes, it reduces almost entirely to the arbitrary choice of word lists.

The same is true for a lot of great party games. Scattergories is a great example. As soon as it becomes seriously competitive, the key rule (that everyone votes whether to allow each submission) effectively ruins the fun.

It is not true at all that it’s not an interesting game at the higher levels. There’s so much more to scrabble than just whether a word is good or not.

No, it's interesting at the low level (play with the words you know) and interesting at the "serious" level (memorize a substantial portion of the 250,000 words). You can tell the latter because there are plenty of serious Scrabble tournaments.

It breaks down somewhere in the middle, where you play with your group of friends but want to be competitive, and it turns out someone gains a huge advantage by learning all the 2- and 3- letter words, all the "Q without U" words, or whatever. One imperfect way to address this is to print out the 2- and 3- letter words and make them available to everyone.

a list of allowed two-letter words on a piece of paper, with the game, and updated from time to time by agreements, solves this well ! local example - 'IQ' is not allowed, but 'Qi' is on the list..

The high level players will memorize all 3 letter words and sometimes 4 letter words as well. Their scrabble-dictionary vocabularies are incredible. Here's an old article about the highest score ever (at the time). It included a triple triple worth 365 points alone for QUIXOTRY. https://slate.com/technology/2006/10/830-how-a-carpenter-got...

What odds would you give that that word has been used more than five times in the history of English literature?

Turns out to be both more common and mean something a little different than I thought: https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=quixotry&year_... https://www.google.com/search?tbm=bks&q=quixotry

Google Books returns over 8000 results, and some of them aren't even dictionaries!

The corpus I searched returned no results, but I'll take the correction: mea culpa.

Quixotic which I think that's derived from isn't that obscure.

the high level players will memorize all words until 9 letters, and some even know those and beyond. I know all the 2-8 (approximately 80K words) pretty well, although not as well as I'd like.

I don't understand why the article portraits the described game as unworthy of the high score. An experienced player will always hedge, and thereby the high scores will all go to less bothered players gambling their way to a win.

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