Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy

>they increasingly hold off on other high-scoring moves, such as six-letter words, or seven-letter terms that only use six tiles from the rack. Instead, by spelling four- or five-letter words, a player can keep their most useful tiles—like E-D or I-N-G—for the next round, a strategy called rack management. The Nigerians rehearse it during dayslong scrimmage sessions.

My paraphrasing: "unless you are using all your tiles for the 50 points bonus, make sure you have decent letters after your turn; even then, consider whether the bonus is worth it."

Examples off the top of my head: what's especially decried is using 6 of your letters leaving "Q" or 5 of your letters, leaving you with something like "LW" and 5 randoms, which makes for awkward turns.

Yep, Scrabble is a hidden-information, stochastic game (the opponent's future tiles are also randomly drawn).

Scrabble is probably more similar to poker and other card games in that respect. The key difference is that the distribution of letter tiles is skewed: the number of tiles is not the same for each letter [1]. This is different than, say, playing cards, where you get exactly 4 of each card (plus the, I think two, Jokers).

Which means it's easier to make a prediction for what's coming out of the opponent's bag, possibly (they're more likely to see the more common tiles).

>> they are applying the Chess strategy of thinking n-moves ahead

Well, that's a universal m-player game strategy, not specific to chess. Minimax and all that, ja? Did I misunderstand what you mean?

Except of course in this case the optimal strategy for Scrabble seems to be under dispute (long or short words best?) and so programming an AI player with minimax might not be that straightforward.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions

The common definition of "the West" would be western Europe (we could take this as the parts of Europe which did not affiliate with an Eastern Orthodox church, or as the parts of Europe which did not affiliate with the Soviet Union), the United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.

Geographically, Nigeria is not located in any of those places, or related to any of those places. It is located in the part of the world referred to as "sub-Saharan Africa".

Politically:

> Kin-selective altruism has made its way into Nigerian politics, resulting in tribalist efforts to concentrate Federal power to a particular region of their interests. Nationalism has also led to active secessionist movements such as MASSOB, Nationalist movements such as Oodua Peoples Congress, Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta and a civil war. Nigeria's three largest ethnic groups (Hausa, Igbo and Yoruba) have maintained historical preeminence in Nigerian politics; competition amongst these three groups has fuelled corruption and graft.

> president Olusegun Obasanjo, acknowledged fraud and other electoral "lapses" but said the result reflected opinion polls. In a national television address in 2007, he added that if Nigerians did not like the victory of his handpicked successor, they would have an opportunity to vote again in four years.

> As in many other African societies, prebendalism and high rates of corruption continue to constitute major challenges to Nigeria. All major parties have practised vote rigging and other means of coercion to remain competitive.

(from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nigeria#Government_and_politic... -- this is the lowest of low-hanging fruit)

Economically, Nigeria is nothing like "the West".

Religiously,

> According to a 2009 Pew survey, 75% of Nigeria's population were Muslims. A later Pew study in 2011 estimated that Christians now formed the majority of the nation, comprising 50.8% of the population, while Muslims comprised 47.9%.

( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_Nigeria#Religi... )

All four of your claims appear to be nonsense.

Nah. A British gentleman will always go down his local for a pint after work :P

You know, I might be misreading this but I think you mean Western society is, by contrast, Christian.

The West has made a big todo about being secular on a national level, regardless of what the population believes or does not believe. In some countries, the people are also largely a-religious. There's culture war, check, but to say that a nation's religion plays any role in whether it belongs to the West or not is, dunno. Dangerous?

I don't disagree that in the past cultural lines were drawn along religion, but, surely we 've come a bit of way since? Maybe not if you look at current wars, but still: is that really, really what we think the West means? An alliance of Christian nations?

'Cause that, like, sucks.