Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles • Hacker News Board

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#31

Post by arthurdenture » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 3:33 AM UTC

Cushman wrote: post #12

dfan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, they're part of the game. It's like getting offended at a chess player for castling.

Good analogy, actually. There is a popular perception that being good at chess indicates skill at strategy or reasoning. In reality, these are helpful, yes, but mostly what it indicates is that you know a lot about the game of chess. Similarly, there is a perception that skill at Scrabble indicates a large English vocabulary. It's reasonable for someone with good reasoning or a large vocabulary to find it distasteful…

You've just moved the line of argumentation: instead of "is the word in the dictionary we're using", it's "is that word a bullshit word" -- but only one of those questions is answerable definitively. The only way to play without argument is to use a dictionary, at which point you might as well use the standard one.

(Like another poster in this thread, I do also play friendly games with an open two-letter-word list, to level the playing field for people who don't care to memorize trivia.)

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#32

Post by zem » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 3:34 AM UTC

jspthrowaway2 wrote: post #26

mediocregopher wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, Wikiped…

wow, that factor notability discussion was a depressing read.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#33

Post by msluyter » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 3:43 AM UTC

transfire wrote: post #7

2-letter Scrabble words are more offensive than curse words, and anyone who insists on them deserves only two: "F" and "U".

Aside; It's funny: I never though anyone actually used the word "za" seriously (for "pizza") until I saw it used in an episode of "The Office." When we saw that, my wife and I burst out laughing. Now we use it all the time ironically. In any event, I love the two letter words. For me, they give the game strategic depth.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#34

Post by caf » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 3:45 AM UTC

zem wrote: post #29

furyofantares wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The luck element is a result of the malapportionment that the OP mentions (it's good to receive the overvalued tiles, and who receives them is down to luck).

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#35

Post by nathell » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 3:58 AM UTC

Little known is the fact that Butts actually did some manual fine-tuning of the frequencies he obtained from NYTimes. E.g., he decreased the number of S's to four in order to mitigate its affixability to almost every singular noun and enhance the gameplay.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#36

Post by zem » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 4:41 AM UTC

caf wrote: post #34

zem wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

The luck element is a result of the malapportionment that the OP mentions (it's good to receive the overvalued tiles, and who receives them is down to luck).

that's part of it, but not nearly as large a part as you'd imagine. there are ways to defend against, e.g., someone getting the X both ways on a triple letter score (the most common large "tile lottery" moment). harder to overcome is someone simply drawing one bingo after another (possibly by being lucky with the blanks and Ss), getting an early 100-200 point lead, and then simply closing the board down (both players have low-scoring moves thereafter, but you already have the lead), or having a close-fought game be irretrievably lost because you get a final rack with six vowels, or none, or an unplayable Q that hits you with a 20 point penalty and let's your opponent play his final rack out letter by letter, for a large number of points.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#37

Post by robryan » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 5:04 AM UTC

Tloewald wrote: post #20

robryan wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you had enough real games data you could see how often a word is found when present and use that is a weighing factor. Although the arrangement if a word might also impact the likelihood to be found.

Changing the values of tiles will change the game, so you'll have a new mismatch. I think that a simpler fix would be to ban plays of fewer than three or four tiles are placed (I'd say four since three is still too easy). You can still score off the stupid two letter gotchas, but you have to place a three or four letter word down to score anything. The game would end when all players had two few tiles to play.

I am speaking of Boggle, where the scoring is based on unique words.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#38

Post by cdelsolar » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 7:53 AM UTC

Competitive Scrabble player here :) -- the reason the C goes down to two points despite having no two-letter words is that it is actually a very good letter - basically, it's in a lot of high-probability bingos. In contrast, the V is one of the worst tiles in the game. It's telling that the Q stays at 10 despite QI -- the Q is by far the worst tile in the game.

In any case I've always wondered what the values of tiles should be if we were to use our current word list rather than the NY Times - thanks for this analysis. The blank is missing though, it would probably have a significantly negative value (-25 to -30?).

At the end of it all I'd rather keep the values what they are. Part of the beauty of Scrabble is the fact that there is chance. Despite the Z and the Q both being worth 10 points, one realizes pretty quickly how much worse the Q is.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#39

Post by DLWormwood » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 9:22 AM UTC

caf wrote: post #21

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.

I believe that is part of what his definition of “ingoing and outgoing entropy” is refering to. That said, it does seem weird to heavily bias for the 2-3 letter and 7-8 cases. I would think the moderate length words should not get such short shrift, since these words tend to be the ones used to determine when the various letter and words value tiles get hit in any given game. (Full disclosure: not a regular Scrabble player.)

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#40

Post by Someone » Mon, Dec 31, 2012, 9:29 AM UTC

RyJones wrote: post #11

dfan wrote: post #9

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sorry, they're part of the game. It's like getting offended at a chess player for castling.

I'd guess en passant is more surprising to neophytes than castling

That, and stalemate ("what do you mean, a tie? You can't move, so you lose!"), but that is a rarer occurrence, as it requires the neophyte to be on the winning side (he won't complain if he is the one without a legal move, and you announce it a tie)