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Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

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Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#41

Post by zem »

DLWormwood wrote: post #39
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…

regular scrabble player here. 2, 3, 7 and 8 are absolutely way more valuable than all the other lengths.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#42

Post by lmm »

jacquesm wrote: post #16
RyJones wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

At a guess check-mate is the most surprising to neophytes. It gets them every time no matter how often it happens.

Huh? If checkmate is confusing you can just play until you take the opponent's king, with minimal difference to the game.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#43

Post by lmm »

SquareWheel wrote: post #18
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".

Been playing Scrabble casually for about a year, and I've found two letter words are where you get the most points. If there's a vowel beside a triple letter, often you can stick an X on there and get it 6 times. And X's have a ton of two letter words, at least in the dictionary I've been using. So maybe they're "offensive", but they seem to be a great way to score points.

That's what makes them so offensive. If you just got a tiny advantage from these obscure words it would be fine, but with the tournament scrabble ruleset, any player with higher strategic skill but who hasn't bothered to rote-memorize the wordlists will lose. Which makes it an unfun game.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#45

Post by jowiar »

msluyter wrote: post #33
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.

I would imagine one of the writers of The Office is a Scrabble player - this timing is a bit too coincidental.

'za' was added in OSPD4, which was published in June 2005: http://www.merriam-webster.com/info/pr/2005-scrabble-diction...

Michael suggests ordering some za in Season 2 Episode 13 (The Secret) which aired in January 2006.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#46

Post by dfan »

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

Yeah, I was actually going to use en passant, but I figured more people would understand the comment if I used castling.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#47

Post by Cushman »

arthurdenture wrote: post #31
Cushman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

I gave the example to illustrate what I mean by "bullshit word", but the question is more or less this: Are you using this word because it's a word you know, or because it's a word you found in a list of Scrabble words?

I'm not saying that the idea of a canonical word list doesn't make game-mechanical sense, just that it turns Scrabble from a word game into a list of symbols game in a way that seems stupid to me.

It's not meant to be more than an intuitive house rule to encourage people to play with "real" words.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#48

Post by Dylan16807 »

arthurdenture wrote: post #31
Cushman wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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, t…

It's a demonstration that scrabble's dictionary uses completely arbitrary and unpredictable methods to choose which bullshit words it has. It can't even use the excuse it's trying to be 'complete'.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#49

Post by jlewis_st »

zem wrote: post #8

as 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…

Interesting, hooking could argue for weighting letters at the beginning or end of 3+-letter words higher than those in the middle.

Re: Rethinking the value of Scrabble tiles

#50

Post by jlewis_st »

cdelsolar wrote: post #38

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 tile…

Yes, my distaste for C is probably because I'm not a good enough player, haha. I received an email mentioning the CLARINETS heuristic for choosing tiles to leave in one's rack, and in that context the drop in C's value makes sense, as you say.
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