Comment by laurentl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by laurentl | Hacker News Reader

Surprised that no one mentioned Duplicate Scrabble, which is the most common tournament form in France. Ar each round, everyone gets the same draw and submits their best word. The overall best word is kept and added to the board.

This completely eliminates the luck factor, as everyone gets the same draw at each round. Missing an “easy” bingo in one round is a surefire way to lose. Obviously this means that to play at a competitive level, you need to memorize all possible words up to 9 letters or so. Fun fact: the current top player of French scrabble is from New Zealand and doesn’t speak a word of French. He just memorized all ~200k valid words in the OSD.

Needless to say, this version is vastly less fun to play casually.

If I understand your description of the rules correctly, it sounds like that removes any sort of strategy from the game (manipulating the board and the rack), making it a sequence of Scrabble puzzles instead with no between-player interaction. That's not necessarily a terrible thing, but I think it would remove a lot of the interest for many people (me included).

I have read about Nigel Richards, the New Zealander French Scrabble champion who doesn't speak French, and I think that the game he is the champion of is "regular" Scrabble (with French vocabulary). For example the Guardian article https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2015/jul/21/new-fre... talks about his "pretty rotten draw of letters".

Edited: Ah, I see from his Wikipedia page (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_playe...) that he has won both Classique and Duplicate titles.

Your understanding of the Duplicate rules is correct. It removes any element of chance (all players are judged on how well they manage a given draw) but it also removes any element of strategy. As an aside, it also makes it a lot easier to organize large scale tournaments - you can organize a Duplicate game with any number of players.

I find it a lot less fun to play, but I know serious players who don’t understand why you would play Classic scrabble.

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