Scrabble: what makes good players good (2012) | Hacker News Reader

Scrabble: what makes good players good (2012)

iq.brenbarn.net

30 pointszem6 comments

There don’t seem to be any websites that offer large archives of Scrabble game records. I found one or two, but they seem to focus on archives of professional games, whereas I was particularly interested in the whole spectrum of skill levels, and how they’re differentiated.

I'd be very curious to see a similar analysis of those higher level games. My expectation is that the cutoff there would start about the 80% percentile of the players in the original post, which I think is about where I am.

Specifically I'd like to see the relationship between two of the trends named by the author: higher-ranked players tend to rely more on bingos and bingos are more likely with blanks. I have to guess that at a certain level of play the luck of the draw on blanks is not as important as the skill of the players, but it would be interesting to see.

Unless I missed it, he didn't discuss defense at all.

I'd expect that to be a relatively small factor, and indeed hard to tease out from other influences on points-against (e.g., if you get more tiles then your opponent gets fewer). Still, it could be interesting ...

equity loss (difference in score + leave equity between your play and quackle's best play) would be an interesting metric too.

I don't know, I've never played Scrabble, but in Words with Friends, if I'm against a poor opponent, I get every single double and triple word score and they get none. The entire game is basically about preventing your opponent from getting them by where you play. Sometimes you will play a short word just to spoil their chance of getting one.

I admit it is a completely different game, though, because all players are allowed to try all combinations and placements of their letters before submitting their turn. There is no penalty for laying out your letters and trying to submit to check if they work, basically. So one can try all possible bingo combinations on their turn if they want.

that's a separate issue; the real difference is that the scrabble board is a lot better balanced than the wwf one, and so preventing access to premium squares doesn't feature nearly as heavily.

Agreed. My experience with Scrabble bonus squares is that they tend to be balanced pretty well in games that are otherwise balanced pretty well.

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