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Comment by sethrin | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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..

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