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Comment by maaarghk | Hacker News Reader

This is absolutely beautiful. I'm interested in the comment that high level scrabble playing is more mathematical than linguistic; does there happen to be anyone here who could recommend some related reading?

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At a high level, most people have memorized a large amount of the dictionary so the key is minimizing the score the opposition can get when you play a work, while still maximizing your score.

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/621823/probability-m...

I believe Jason Katz-Brown reads this board (@jasonkb) who is the author of the Quackle AI (the strongest scrabble program, perhaps?)

http://people.csail.mit.edu/jasonkb/quackle/

it is mildly statistical, but this basically pales to the amount of memorization you can do. It's good to set your rack up so that you have a good chance of getting decent letters in the subsequent turns, but the gradient of improvement is almost always in favor of "memorize more words" (admittedly, by going through the most common to least common groups of six letters plus one more) rather than math.

But in the strictest sense, statistics is more important than linguistics. It just doesn't really matter because memorization is so much more important than both of them.

The book Word Freak was pretty good and as far as I can tell, accurate.

> memorization is so much more important than both of them

Is that really true at this high of a level though? There are a little under 120K words in SOWPODS that are 9 letters or less (looking through some of those archived games, it seems like 10+ letter words are uncommon). So there's a hard upper bound on what memorization can do for you, and it seems plausible that that limit (or close enough to make strategy the dominating factor) would have been reached by a handful of people.

I mean, maybe? That's still a scenario where the vast amount of memorization you did is more important than the strategy you may come up with. There aren't top players who got there with superior strategy and a vastly inferior vocabulary.

I feel like ‘vocabulary’ is a slightly misleading word in this context, since it implies some level of understanding. ‘Set of allowed combinations of letters’ is evidently the measure used.

> That's still a scenario where the vast amount of memorization you did is more important than the strategy you may come up with

But if both players have memorized about the same number of words, the game is then entirely about strategy.

I think that's the point of what the article is saying. Sure, memorization is critical to get to the point where you can compete at that level, but once you're there, memorization is just a given. What differentiates the players' performance is their strategy.

Stefan Fatsis' book Word Freak is a must-read for anyone that wants to get an inside view into the characters and lifestyle of tournament Scrabble:

http://www.amazon.com/Word-Freak-Heartbreak-Obsession-Compet...

Beware, though, lots of F-words in the book, because of certain personalities featured prominently in it.

Thank you! During lunch break I walked to my local library and checked it out.

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