Hacker News Reader

Comment by nippoo | Hacker News Reader

I was at the World Scrabble Championships in Prague a few years ago (with Nigel Richards). The amazing thing was how many of the highest-level Scrabble players were Thai and spoke barely any English. There are about 200,000 words in the Scrabble dictionary and and an average English speaker only knows 40,000. So knowing the language doesn't give a huge advantage, and all competitors end up spending years memorising word lists with no definitions - at a high level it's basically just a combinatorics game. The majority of the English-speaking competitors were mathematicians / scientists, rather than linguists for similar reasons.

This sometimes has amusing repercussions - the world no 2 at the time, who was Thai, played the word "hetairas" and then challenged the word "twigs"...

View on HN

Honestly knowing just the spellings and not the meanings / useage contexts behind the words strikes me as an advantage since you’re as likely to weight “obscure” words as common words in your internal search algorithm. Knowing the language I feel must bias you.

Exactly what I was thinking. My brain works against me when I’m trying to recall obscure words that fit a pattern when making a limerick or whatnot.

> internal search algorithm

A cool thing you can do is memorize the words two ways, how it's spelled and also with the letters rearranged alphabetically. That way when you arrange your tiles alphabetically you can just see all the words you've memorized this way that you have or are close to.

Wouldn't that be an enormous timesink though? You basically have to memorize the dictionary... and then memorize it again but in a more complicated way.

Learning pairs (normal, alphabetical) doesn't take anything like twice as long as just learning the normal word. Our brain is funny with associating things, especially if there is some logic to it like always rearranging the characters in the first word alphabetically.

Getting to the top at almost any activity is a massive timesink. Lot to be said for not being too competitive.

I never heard of that before, cool idea.

At the highest levels, Scrabble is not a word game at all. It's a territory control game with 200,000 different valid ways to play resources.

Territory control? Either player can build off any word, so I don't think you can control any territory. You capture valuable squares before your opponent can when you have the opportunity, because unused squares are no man's land, and up for grabs.

Because Scrabble is turn based, any opportunities you create for yourself, you create for your opponent first. Making sure you don't make `valuable squares' available to your opponent is, arguably, more essential to winning than claiming them for yourself.

‘scorched earth’, wasting a valuable square on a low-scoring move, say (as an extreme example) by playing a blank tile on a triple-character square, just to deny the next player from using it, can also be a valuable tactic at times.

Many people don’t realize that, in competitive games, the goal isn’t to make a high score, it is to make a score that’s higher than that of your opponents.

Another game where many players dont realize that is Twister (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twister_(game) ). You shouldn’t play to make it easy for yourself to stay in play, you should play to make it easier for you than for your opponents to stay in play. In general, that means occupying circles close to your opponent, rather than those easily reachable by you. You should try to ‘lock’ your opponents in a corner of the playing area.

You control the 'territory' (squares) by using them, denying them to your opponent.

Areas right next to a played word are hard to capture, 2 parallel words would have to combine to form multiple 2 letter words, this create a natural buffer and you can corner off areas, block bonus tiles, offer easy point opportunities on away from the area you want to control to distract your opponent. A lot can be done with short words positioned well and can likely beat a more spelling knowledgeable person with positioning strategies.

I think of it as a territory control game even at low levels of play!

If one cares about score whatsoever, I'm not sure how one could play without paying a great deal of attention to gaining/denying access to the multiplier tiles.

How do you control (= lock the other player out of) territory?

Think more about not building long offshoots that will give your opponent lots of places to "hook onto" (or forcing them to do the same). Cleverly building and stacking words close and parallel to others rather than perpendicular, etc

https://www.meeplelikeus.co.uk/scrabble-1948/

Most hilarious read on why Scrabble should be played like a territory control war game

That's absolutely delightful, thanks for the read !

I love the Terry Pratchett reference too!

On Thais and Scrabble: https://www.bangkokpost.com/thailand/special-reports/1024881...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com