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Comment by tekla | Hacker News Reader

Well Scrabble is not a game of intelligence, more memorization.

Like that dude who won a French scrabble tournament despite not knowing French.

Apparently there’s a lot more involved than fitting rare words into nooks. This video blew my mind a little bit. Top players reason about words like chess pieces

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=ayBTn59PliQ&pp=ygUVc2NyYWJibGU...

Scrabble is interesting because average people think about it like a casual game, but it's nearly as strategic as chess despite significant randomness. Most people play with a completely greedy approach. Thinking just one move ahead about rack and board state is enough to beat someone with a great vocabulary but no strategy.

/Sonic Shuffle/ moment :þ

No seriously, you'd be (like I was) surprised at how sweaty a game that appears for all the world like a /Mario Party/ clone can get.

In particular, he won the French world championship, twice: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigel_Richards_(Scrabble_pla...

Nigel Richards (who tournament scrabble players regard as the game's undisputed GOAT) did not win the French championships just by having an eidetic memory (though it surely helps!), he is also amazingly good at the tactics and strategy of scrabble, including anagramming, board vision, rack balancing, and calculation of probabilities and lookahead. there is a considerable amount of "intelligence" involved, however you want to define that.

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