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Elite Scrabble players look at the language differently than speakers. For example you need to know words with 'Q' but no 'U'. Not something that comes up in everyday speech. https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-no/...
And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.
> Nigel Richards of Christchurch, New Zealand, memorized French dictionary in nine weeks
It would appear that he speaks all the words of French. He may not speak the syntactically correct language but knowing all the words should take you a long way to winning this competition.
Reading the title I assumed he only used neologisms and other words common with foreign languages or something along those lines.
IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels. If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer…
No, this is not true. All professional scrabble players know the short words. None of them has an advantage because of that. The advantage is knowing the “bingos” (ie the 7 and 8 letter words). Players like Nigel Richards will also know the 6-letter words, which are much less useful, but which not all pros will know. There’s a lot to pro scrabble (I know because I’ve played many of the best players in the world onlin…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
No, this is not true. All professional scrabble players know the short words. None of them has an advantage because of that. The advantage is knowing the “bingos” (ie the 7 and 8 letter words). Players like Nigel Richards will also know the 6-letter words, which are much less useful, but which not all pros will know. There’s a lot to pro scrabble (I know because I’ve played many of the best players in the world onlin…
AIUI you need to know both. You need to know the short high-letter-value words so you can dump those letters semi-productively while you build up a rack that's good for bingos. Have I been misinformed?
Elite Scrabble players look at the language differently than speakers. For example you need to know words with 'Q' but no 'U'. Not something that comes up in everyday speech. https://scrabblewordfinder.org/scrabble-words-with/q/and-no/...
I learned the word 'qanat' from Frank Herbert's Dune. And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.
IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels. If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer…
IMO this is because Scrabble is a terrible game. Knowledge of the breadth of your language will only get you so far in the game: the winner will be the person who can put the greatest amount of short words with 'X' and 'Z' in triple-word panels. If I were to re-invent the game I would remove the triple tiles and half the point value from most letters. This way you can give advantage to people who put longer and nicer…
Success comes from astute tile-balancing and relentless pursuit of bingos. Which means that people already are using the strategy you want, and are getting compensated appropriately for it under the current rules.
One of my proudest foreign-language speaking moments was playing, and winning, a game of Codenames in France, against native french speakers. It was an amazing way to learn new vocabulary. If you haven't played, it's a 4x4 grid of words with 2 teams guessing which words belong to which team, giving additional words as clues. After the board setup, the French players would explain the single, double, sometimes triple…
The Chinese guy destroyed us. He nickel-and-dimed us with esoteric 2 letter words that we had never heard of and he strategically blocked us from the double and triple-word score squares.
On the way home from the party, my classmates and I were complaining about how the point of Scrabble was to show off your vocabulary and it was weird that we would lose to someone who could barely speak the language.
My girlfriend/now-wife interrupted our kvetching with, "You're all upset because someone else out-strategized you by understanding the rules better than you did. Get over yourselves."
She was correct.
The disconnect between "Scrabble the word game" and "Scrabble the area game with a semi-arbitrary set of rules for tile placement that is somewhat related to words" has been discussed here before. But honestly, it isn't that exceptional a disconnect. Most board games have a "theme" that increases our enjoyment. But many of them are actually math games that could be played without thinking about the theme at all. Ches…
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I learned the word 'qanat' from Frank Herbert's Dune. And I thought 'faqir' was written with a K.
The middle consonant is a ق, which is the same consonant at the end of "Iraq", or Qur'an. There's been a tendency to write this with in English more recently -- consider "Qur'an" vs. "Koran". The version produces transliterations that may look more natural for English spelling, but there is another Arabic letter, ك, which is transliterated as , so the version helps distinguish the two.