For valuing Scrabble tiles, Valett also needs to include the representation of the letter in common prefixes and suffixes that can be prepended or appended to existing words. I believe that one reason that G is so playable is the common -ING suffix.
Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles
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Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles
#22article claims to be written 1 year from now: "30 DEC 2013 - JOSHUA LEWIS"
Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles
#23as a competitive scrabble player, one mistake that I think he might have made is overweighting corpus-based probability versus game playability. his transition-in and transition-out weights are a good start, but there's also the fact that n+1 letter words that can be made by "hooking" (adding a single letter before or after) n letter words are far more useful than those that cannot. also the layout of the premium squ…
Maybe you and the OP should petition the Words With Friends people to give you a statistically significant data-dump of real games so you can analyze and revalue the letters. It would be a service to us all.
I've come across words in the OSPD that Words with Friends didn't take, as well as words not in the OSPD that it did take. A casual Google suggests that Words with Friends uses a modified version of a dictionary called ENABLE[1], so while it would be interesting data to see, the dictionary difference is a little troublesome for conclusions pertaining to Scrabble.
(You can, of course, play Scrabble with any dictionary but most serious folk I know use OSPD. I'd never even heard of ENABLE until Googling this question.)
[1]: http://blogmybrain.com/words-with-friends-cheat/words.txt
Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles
#24Earlier quoted context omitted.
That would be really interesting data to look at. There would be a lot of factors to consider that might make it hard to apply to re-valuing Scrabble, though: 1. Most Words With Friends play is casual, and casual players are likely to play very differently than competitive players. 2. The data would show you what words players play given the current scoring system, and wouldn't necessarily translate to another scorin…
Regarding 1: perhaps one could segment the players based on their scores --- the people I know who play scrabble competitively generally have a significantly higher average word score.
True - in competitive scrabble luck actually plays a pretty small role. It's much closer to chess than it is to poker.
Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles
#25Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'd guess en passant is more surprising to neophytes than castling
I had never even heard of that (although I'm by no means an avid chess player). I think I'll have a hard time convincing my friends that's a real rule.
The Wikipedia article is good at explaining the rationale. According to it, it was added around the time the two-space opening move for a pawn was added to balance the game.
Oddly, though Wikipedia deletes programming languages like Factor due to non-notability[1], editors get to go nuts on everything chess or Star Trek without recourse. If you want to know more about why things in chess are the way they are, Wikipedia is your pal.
[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Factor_(programming_langua...
Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles
#27as a competitive scrabble player, one mistake that I think he might have made is overweighting corpus-based probability versus game playability. his transition-in and transition-out weights are a good start, but there's also the fact that n+1 letter words that can be made by "hooking" (adding a single letter before or after) n letter words are far more useful than those that cannot. also the layout of the premium squ…
Maybe you and the OP should petition the Words With Friends people to give you a statistically significant data-dump of real games so you can analyze and revalue the letters. It would be a service to us all.
Quite frankly, the words with friends board layout and tileset was so badly balanced that after then first couple of weeks I could no longer stand to play it. I think a better route would be to have quackle play itself millions of times and get data from there (it's a reasonably common thing for people developing scrabble heuristics to do nowadays).
Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles
#282-letter Scrabble words are more offensive than curse words, and anyone who insists on them deserves only two: "F" and "U".
As a house rule (since none of us have any plans to ever competitively play Scrabble), the list of all legal two-letter words which came in our "deluxe Scrabble" instruction manual is available to all players at all times.
It has really helped cut down on the number of games where we get stuck or frustrated because there's "nowhere to move", both by making more moves legal, and helping us keep the board configuration more compact, while at the same time eliminating what we see as trivia (what 2-letter words are legal) vs. "regular English" in the games we play.
Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles
#29Earlier quoted context omitted.
Regarding 1: perhaps one could segment the players based on their scores --- the people I know who play scrabble competitively generally have a significantly higher average word score.
True - in competitive scrabble luck actually plays a pretty small role. It's much closer to chess than it is to poker.
on the granularity of an individual game there's a surprising amount of luck even in the top levels of the game. for instance, i'm at best a high B-division player, but i've won tournament games against two world champions (and, on the flip side, lost to players rated far lower than me). it's the overall performance in an (ideally 15-game+) tournament that lets the best players consistently rise to the top.
Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles
#302-letter Scrabble words are more offensive than curse words, and anyone who insists on them deserves only two: "F" and "U".
As a house rule (since none of us have any plans to ever competitively play Scrabble), the list of all legal two-letter words which came in our "deluxe Scrabble" instruction manual is available to all players at all times. It has really helped cut down on the number of games where we get stuck or frustrated because there's "nowhere to move", both by making more moves legal, and helping us keep the board configuration…
one of the world's largest tournaments, the annual king's cup tournament in bangkok, actually supplies 2, 3 and selected 4 letter word cheat sheets to all the players, to compensate for the fact that thai players use the north american rather than the world dictionary.