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

71–80 of 92 posts

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#71

Post by hkgjjgjfjfjfjf »

bena wrote: post #60
gillesjacobs wrote: post #36

Been casually trying to increase my ELO on Wordfeud. When you know the dictionary by heart (Wordfeud has rather restricted dictionaries) and have the basics of bonus hunting and hooking down, Scrabble becomes a pure game of imperfect knowledge and strategy. The known information is the prior letter distribution, the played letters on the board and in your rack. The unknown information is your opponent's rack. However…

Tangent: Elo, not ELO. The rating system is named after the creator Arpad Elo, it doesn't stand for anything.

Technical correctness, the best sort of correctness

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#72

Post by sixstringtheory »

powersnail wrote: post #29

I had a brief interest in scrabble, but when I played against online players and computers, I lost the interest all together. The problem was that Scrabble dictionary is too inclusive, and the Scrabble game rewards making multiple words. So, instead of learning fun and obscure words, it’s more important to spot how to make viable grids that gives you five words with one move, while involving some high-scored letters.…

We keep a hall of fame list of all bingo bonuses with their scores. It’s a meta game to play once you’ve reached the point where games regularly come down to the wire in the mid to high 200s and hunting for those two letter words becomes a boring chore.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#73

Post by mrandish »

patrickdavey wrote: post #26
jrumbut wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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...

Also, consider just printing out the legal two letter words and leaving them there for anyone to check ... Saves on the "win by memory" and allows more tactical play by all. I've been playing like that with my parents (in their 80s) and it makes for a much more fun game!

My wife and I used to play regularly and printed out a list of two and three letter words that we could refer to under our rules. It helped us learn those words.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#74

Post by mrandish »

> My mood swung on the outcome of each contest, which is heavily subject to chance, what with the letters emerging randomly from the bag

I saw a fun documentary on competitive Scrabble tournaments and I've always wondered if tournaments have considered using computers to randomize the tile draw but constrained to equalize the "luck" between players in a game. I know that competitive Rubik's cube tournaments use a computer to generate a starting cube pattern that's not purely random in that it eliminates easy solves.

I guess the simplest form would be ensuring each player in a game draws an equal distribution of letter-points in a game but I'm sure there are more complex ways to be random but weighted to ensure equal opportunity in a match. What I don't know is if reducing the variability of draws would even be considered an improvement at competitive levels.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#75

Post by yamtaddle »

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.

I'm convinced the purest way to play Scrabble is with siblings or close friends who will kick your ass if you get too cute with the "technically permitted" words. Keeps things in check.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#77

Post by yamtaddle »

scotty79 wrote: post #51
gareth_untether wrote: post #48

Every year my family plays Scrabble on Christmas Day. The score book goes back about a decade. Until 2016 my sister was ruling champion. Enough was enough. I installed a Scrabble game on my phone. Played every day and took the crown at our next Christmas Scrabble game. The win thoroughly surprised everyone. That year I had read Carol Dweck’s Growth Mindset. Which the Scrabble win nicely illustrated.

How's your sister? So many years of winning might make your sister incorporate being a scrable champion as a part of her identity. And nobody feels good after part of their identity gets shattered.

Yeah, any kid who owned the only Sega Genesis in a friend group knows practicing Street Fighter too much will just mean no-one wants to play it with you anymore.

Same goes for memorizing useful-in-Scrabble words that occur on Scrabble boards 100x more than they do anywhere else.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#78

Post by kelseyfrog »

mrandish wrote: post #74

> My mood swung on the outcome of each contest, which is heavily subject to chance, what with the letters emerging randomly from the bag I saw a fun documentary on competitive Scrabble tournaments and I've always wondered if tournaments have considered using computers to randomize the tile draw but constrained to equalize the "luck" between players in a game. I know that competitive Rubik's cube tournaments use a com…

There's an infinite number of methods to balance luck and they touch on our conception of fairnes and competition itself.

For instance, which is more fair, letters balanced by pointsbanf partitioned before the game starts, or weighted letter draws based on the current board state and the potential number of scorable points per player? And perhaps more importantly, why?

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#79

Post by LawTalkingGuy »

kelseyfrog wrote: post #78
mrandish wrote: post #74

> My mood swung on the outcome of each contest, which is heavily subject to chance, what with the letters emerging randomly from the bag I saw a fun documentary on competitive Scrabble tournaments and I've always wondered if tournaments have considered using computers to randomize the tile draw but constrained to equalize the "luck" between players in a game. I know that competitive Rubik's cube tournaments use a com…

There's an infinite number of methods to balance luck and they touch on our conception of fairnes and competition itself. For instance, which is more fair, letters balanced by pointsbanf partitioned before the game starts, or weighted letter draws based on the current board state and the potential number of scorable points per player? And perhaps more importantly, why?

Try them all and see what they do. I got into simulating games as a kid based on arguments over what the effect of various table-rules were on games. (Spoiler: The effect of every optional rule in Monopoly is to make the game take 5x as long.)

Maybe you could spend points to pick two letter and keep the best...

Why? Because then 1) you'd know what that rule would do, and 2) maybe it'd be neat! Like, maybe you'd find an easy way to provide more balance between newbs and experts, or minimize the variation in score against a given opponent, or whatever.

Re: On the insanity of being a Scrabble enthusiast

#80

Post by dagw »

Tams80 wrote: post #40
dagw wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You obviously don't hang out with people into pseudo-eastern 'philosophy'. I know several people who use it regularly. Of all the 'weird' two letter words mentioned, I'd consider qi probably the most reasonable and common, and certainly one that I actually hear used

Especially with it being the name of the defacto standard of wireless charging. A brand name, yes, but from an actual word.

It was also the name of a promising, but ultimately failed, display technology[0].

[0] Anybody else here remember being both very excited about, and then very disappointed by, the Adam?

Post reply on HN