Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

lithub.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

11–20 of 92 posts

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#11

Post by viraptor »

TylerE wrote: post #5
paulpauper wrote: post #2

I thought I was good at scrabble but then I realized that playing against my parents does not count. Experts just memorize dictionaries. Just anther example of a game that has been optimized. Would not surprise me if we see a cheating scandal similar to professional chess.

At one point the top S rabble player in, iirc French or German was an American who didn’t speak the language. Just pure memorization

I come back from time to time to the thought of how exactly to define the threshold where games are fun while you're still improving. I hate playing with people who take the experience professionally, but having some strategy involved is definitely fun.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#12

Post by joshvm »

paulpauper wrote: post #2

I thought I was good at scrabble but then I realized that playing against my parents does not count. Experts just memorize dictionaries. Just anther example of a game that has been optimized. Would not surprise me if we see a cheating scandal similar to professional chess.

I think the most interesting thing about competitive Scrabble is that it's not really about memorising dictionaries. Once you assume that everyone knows every playable word, the real distinction is in the tactics. There's elements of statistics to determine what your opponent is likely to have, whether to play offensively or defensively, etc.

It's a very different game to "family" Scrabble, but we always had the etiquette rule that you should know the definition of a word you played. It isn't enough to know it's in the Scrabble dictionary.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#13

Post by billforsternz »

hackcasual wrote: post #4
groggo wrote: post #3

It would be interesting to have a "simple english" Scrabble dictionary, without QI and similar words. One reason Wordle is awesome is because they manually filtered down the possible 5 letter words.

There have been a few that aren't exactly vernacular. I'm still angry about "parer"

#metoo, and CONDO the other day, and REBUS for goodness sake.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#14

Post by sh4rks »

viraptor wrote: post #11
TylerE wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

At one point the top S rabble player in, iirc French or German was an American who didn’t speak the language. Just pure memorization

I come back from time to time to the thought of how exactly to define the threshold where games are fun while you're still improving. I hate playing with people who take the experience professionally, but having some strategy involved is definitely fun.

In my opinion, games are the most fun when you're playing against someone slightly higher than your skill level.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#15

Post by nathell »

paulpauper wrote: post #2

I thought I was good at scrabble but then I realized that playing against my parents does not count. Experts just memorize dictionaries. Just anther example of a game that has been optimized. Would not surprise me if we see a cheating scandal similar to professional chess.

I play Polish Scrabble competitively, and IME there’s much more to the game than just memorizing the dictionary. A program that has full knowledge of the dictionary and always plays the highest-scoring word will easily yield to a human.

There’s virtually no strategy, but tactics is of paramount importance. Things like keeping your rack balanced; which one of several similarly-scoring words to play, based on your knowledge of the game state; when and what to exchange, etc. These factors are all at play very much intuitively, and are learnt with practice over the years.

Polish is especially fun to play because it’s highly inflected, meaning that:

- the number of unique words in the dictionary is about one order of magnitude greater than in, say, English or French – it’d be much harder for Nigel Richards to learn them all;

- keeping an eye on certain combinations of letters (that might form an inflective ending) is much more important.

Plus, there’s a small but vibrant community, with its very own history and folklore to be proud of. :)

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#16

Post by jasone »

I got sucked into a variant of Scrabble insanity. In 2018 I spent close to six months writing a Scrabble engine, initially as an exercise to learn OCaml. But the algorithmic challenges pulled me deep down a fascinating rabbit hole. Eventually I was recording IRL games with my wife so I could analyze the positions, trying to understand why/how to exchange more often, and trying to make the engine ever stronger. It still lacks an end-game mode (where perfect play is possible due to empty letter bag), but by the time I put it aside, it appeared to be at least as strong as Quackle. (Fair comparison is hard since more CPU time allows deeper analysis.)

It's a project I hope to go back to someday, and maybe follow up on some of the human-like play options and variants I came up with along the way. The tournament word list is proprietary and at the time there were apparently no reasonable licensing options (licensing has since improved), which put a damper on releasing my engine.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#17

Post by bmitc »

I’m always amazed at those that can have such singular and deep pursuits and obsessions. I have been watching some video game speed running videos, and they seem to be of a similar makeup. It’s just not the way I’m wired, so it’s always fascinating to read about.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#18

Post by charcircuit »

groggo wrote: post #3

It would be interesting to have a "simple english" Scrabble dictionary, without QI and similar words. One reason Wordle is awesome is because they manually filtered down the possible 5 letter words.

Qi is a common word and being 2 characters definitely makes it simple.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#19

Post by jrumbut »

bee_rider wrote: post #9

I wonder if dominos on a scrabble board, or something like that, could be fun. Anything to replace the spelling. The game described in the article: > There is something magical, however, about realizing how to play Scrabble even one step above beginner: using the bonus spaces, creating overlapping words, hitting your first bingo. You also learn how to play defense. > The first time you realize that your opponent is s…

The two letter words and the common q-without-u words are enough to unlock a much more entertaining version of the game than the one you can play with a normal vocabulary.

Since you already know most of them you're only memorizing a few dozen very short words.

Then a few vowel dumps wouldn't hurt, short V/X/K words...

Post reply on HN