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Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy
- rosstex 10y agoLess is more! It's cool to see disrupting new strategies in classic games.
- meeper16 10y agoThey might have to start donning the official scrabble championship mantle too https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ap103023753935.jpg https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ap10...
- chime 10y agoIf I understand this correctly, they are applying the Chess strategy of thinking n-moves ahead to Scrabble, where the opponent's tiles are hidden and ones own future tiles are mostly unknown. If you use all the tiles, on the upside you get +50 extra points. The downside is that you leave a lot more room for the opponent to score big since there are more letters on board after your move. Also, you have no control on your next 7 tiles and this can negatively affect your scores for the next 3-5 moves. The benefit to keeping a few good tiles for future moves comes at the cost of fewer points in the immediate round. The upside is your opponent has fewer open tiles to score big on. In general, the first strategy beats the second because of the bingo advantage, however their secret sauce is a list of 5 letter words that the opponent can't build on to score big points. So these inert words make the second strategy better for now. I haven't written any Scrabble AI but I wonder if most of them optimize for the immediate move or look further down the game? Unlike Chess, there are many more unknown variables per move in Scrabble - tiles you both might get, x-y position of n-tiles placed per round, scores of each tile placed, tile bonuses (double/triple letter/word) etc. If anything, the Nigerians' victory has shown that there is a lot more room for optimization in Scrabble and scoring the max per round may not be the globally optimal solution.
- iopq 10y agoMy friend was cheating against me in words with friends by looking up the biggest words. I beat him pretty handily with defensive play. In words with friends you can easily control the double and triple words by avoiding plays that open certain areas of the board. There are more double words in Scrabble so WFF is more strategic in that regard.
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y ago>> If I understand this correctly, they are applying the Chess strategy of thinking n-moves ahead to Scrabble, where the opponent's tiles are hidden and ones own future tiles are mostly unknown. 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scrabble_letter_distributions
- yompers888 10y agoOn an unimportant note, jokers are not included in poker, nor in almost any other game. It is my understanding that they exist to use as replacement cards in the case of a lost or damaged card (rather than having to throw out the deck.)
- splonk 10y agoJokers are actually used in occasional uncommonly played poker games (certain variants of 5 card draw). For the most part those games haven't been played much in public card rooms since 10-20 years ago but you can occasionally come across a game.
- BinaryIdiot 10y agoPretty interesting strategy. I also play very defensively when I play scrabble to the point where I try to sabotage what I think my opponent's next move(s) is(are) which, when using short letters, makes this really, really easy. Then again I've never played competitively so who knows about that "easy" part :)
- sixhobbits 10y ago"Nigeria is beating the West at its own board game" I know that the definition of "the West" is pretty vague, but this journalism seems a decade or two behind its time with its "us and them" style. Scrabble doesn't belong to Europe/USA and Nigeria fits geographically, politically, economically, and religiously into common definitions of "the West".
- iopq 10y agoeconomically? GDP - per capita $1091.64
- DanBC 10y agoAre you talking about Niger, not Nigeria? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PPP%29_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_GDP_%28PP... Nigeria has a GDP per capita of about $6100. Have I misunderstood that page? Not that far off some EU countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Europe_by_GDP_(nominal)_per_capita https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_sovereign_states_in_Eu... Country CIA[4] 2010 Estimation Moldova 1,433 Kosovo 1,813 Bosnia and Herzegovina 3,500 Albania 4,000 Ukraine 4,350 Republic of Macedonia 4,669 Belarus 5,500
- tboughen 10y agoWhile some of those countries may be European, none are EU member states. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European_Union https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_state_of_the_European...
- jpatokal 10y agoYes, you have misunderstood: it's GDP per capita at purchasing power parity (PPP), not actual dollars. Roughly speaking, the hypothetical average Nigerian has an actual dollar income of $1000, but the spending power of somebody earning $6100 in the US.
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- f_allwein 10y agoI liked the original title - can we change it back?
- f_allwein 10y agoIf you watch the video, one big win for Jighere was to play QUIZ (93) on a triple word score field. This was right after a round where he did play 8 letters, which, according to the short word strategy, he should not have done. So while he did manage this well, there was also good bit of luck involved. Or maybe it's good to have a strategy, but sometimes you need to ignore it.
- corin_ 10y agoFirstly a pedantic point, he played 7 letters not 8, but his 7 made an 8 letter word. I don't play scrabble more than once or twice a year and am not great even by playing-it-with-family standards. But the concept that not using all 7 of your letters leaves you with a potentially bad next hand is one part of their overall strategy, according to the article. They also will be thinking about what letters are already gone and therefore what might be left to draw, they're thinking about what opportunities they might be opening up for the opponent, and they're thinking about their future opportunities too. And of course they're thinking about how many points they'll get, too. His Bingo (I never knew that was a thing in scrabble before today) scored 72 points, so if he can find a way to justify it, it's something to at least consider. Looking at the board when he played it (and including the 7 tiles he put down), there are five clear spots where there is an open vowel with space to become a 4 or 5 letter word, which might make him worry less about not pulling a vowel if he reloads his letters. Add in all the other strategic thinking he has and I don't, I wouldn't be surprised if he made an intelligent rather than lucky decision. Of course, with his next draw, he was lucky that not only did he get Q and Z, but he also got a blank. But every time you get new letters in scrabble you're going to be lucky or unlucky, regardless of how well you play.
- jrochkind1 10y agoEh, from the article it's clear it's really a "rack management strategy", not a "short word strategy." An intense rack management strategy leads to more short words than you might expect, but does not rule out long words in certain circumstances.
- psuter 10y agoMore counterintuitive Scrabble facts: the French Scrabble world champion is from New Zealand and doesn't speak French. http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/winner-of-french-scrabble-title-does-not-speak-french http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/...
- YeGoblynQueenne 10y agoTo be fair, he can now speak French words. He just has no idea what they mean.
- Grue3 10y agoI doubt he can speak them, per se. French pronounciation can be quite tricky.
- vijayr 10y agoHe memorized the entire scrabble French dictionary in a matter of weeks!
- bencollier49 10y agoI'm pretty sure "Katti" isn't an English word. Did the journalist mishear "Catty"? Is this not a word Americans recognise?
- DanBC 10y agoWhat dictionaries did you check? Did you check the one this tournament was using? Words don't have to be English, they have to be listed in the book the tournament uses. http://www.anagrammer.com/scrabble/katti http://www.anagrammer.com/scrabble/katti In which Scrabble dictionary does KATTI exist? Scrabble (US/Canada) No Scrabble (UK) Yes!(9 pts) Official Scrabble (OSPD) No WordFeud Yes!(9 pts) Words with friends No Hanging with friends No Letterpress Yes!(5 pts) Lexulous (US) No
- taejo 10y agoBrian Sheppard's thesis "Towards Perfect Play of Scrabble" [0] has a lot of good info on Scrabble strategy which can be applied to human play as well as to AI (though obviously things like B* and Monte Carlo search aren't realistic for human players) [0] https://project.dke.maastrichtuniversity.nl/games/files/phd/Shepard_thesis.pdf
- mamurphy 10y agoA couple of comments are slightly misconstruing the "rack management" strategy. Using all your letters for the 50 point bonus is sometimes OK. >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.
- hardlianotion 10y agoAs a Nigerian, this makes me absurdly proud. As a mathematician, I am especially proud of the game-theoretic aspect of the win.
- michaelhoney 10y agoI'm interested in how the odds change as tiles are played. When, say, the J and both Vs and Ws have been played, the remaining tiles are less dangerous.
- drcode 10y agoI'm curious though by your characterization of this as being "game theoretic"... It seems like this strategy is a consequence of correctly analyzing the game state tree, which doesn't on the face of it seem to involve game theory to me (in the way that term is usually used in economics.)
- hardlianotion 10y agoThey are treating this as a stochastic game. They are accounting for their opponent's likely response when deciding their own move. That is enough for me, anyway.
- imgabe 10y agoI've been playing Words with Friends more or less constantly for the past 5 years or so and I've come to pretty much the same conclusion. It's far more important to deny your opponent the opportunity to get valuable triple/double letter or work scores than it is to always grab them yourself. If you do extend to get a bonus tile, make sure the potential scoring opportunity is limited. Things like: 1. Don't leave a vowel next to a triple letter score in line with a triple word score - that leaves an opening for a valuable consonant to start a word and end on the triple word score. 2. If you pass parallel to a triple letter tile, beware of having a vowel adjacent to the tile and a consonant after it. Especially if the vowel is A, I, or O as these form two letter words with Z, Q, and J respectively. If they can get get for example JO going in two directions on a triple letter that's 60+ points. 3. Always be aware of whether the J, Q, Z, X have been played or not. 4. Sometimes it's better to play a less valuable word if it helps you get rid of difficult letters like too many vowels or consonants in hopes that the next draw will even out your hand and let you play a better word. I think WWF is a little different because the tiles permit higher scoring possibilities than Scrabble, but I imagine the strategies are much the same.
- SOLAR_FIELDS 10y agoWWF forces you to focus more on the board strategy due to the mechanics of the game being different than Scrabble: the player doesn't have to actually know and/or memorize the words they are playing, they can just attempt as many high scoring combinations they want until they get a hit in the game's dictionary database.
- thoth 10y agoI use this strategy when playing WWF as well, and have stumbled across words unknown to me. I also play illegal words to check the validity of other words formed. For instance, if I wonder whether an existing word can take an -S or -D ending, I'll play a word I know is wrong. WWF helpfully comes back with a list of which words aren't valid. :) Neither of these work against a live opponent so I play WWF a lot differently than Scrabble. Like you said, strategy is different when playing - in WWF, I can focus more on rack management and scoring spaces playing WWF; in Scrrabble, I am nudged towards playing words I know because I can't test them. Back when I played Scrabble I studied the 2 and 3 letter works plus the hooks and didn't find that aspect of the game all that fun.
- Theodores 10y agoIn my younger years I played Scrabble quite obsessively, sometimes in 36 hour long sessions with a dozen of us playing. Against mere mortals (i.e. those that dn't know all 102 two letter words) I considered myself unbeatable. However, several years after my 'peak Scrabble' days, I found myself in a rural pub with not a lot to do than play the game, against someone who really didn't have the wordplay for it. Much to my horror I lost!!! His 'strategy' was to play 2 or 3 letter words, nothing longer, ever... He just lacked the tiles and vocabulary for longer words. Consequently the whole top left of the board had no places to go, totally locked out by little words. Amongst my normal Scrabble playing friends I always played an open game, in contrast my 2-3 letter competitor played a closed game, not that that was deliberate. Therefore, if you are not playing against a pro, try 2-3 letters rather than five - you really could win against those far more experienced than you.
- SturgeonsLaw 10y ago> this country of 500 languages That caught me by surprise, until https://www.ethnologue.com/country/ng/languages https://www.ethnologue.com/country/ng/languages
- jrochkind1 10y agoLet me be the first to say: moneytile!
- bdarnell 10y agoBack in the day (2001) I worked on the PalmOS version of Scrabble. One thing that surprised me when I was tuning the AI was that it played better when all words of seven or more letters were removed from its vocabulary. Apparently searching through the longer words was a worse use of time than searching for other placements of shorter words (except on the highest difficulty, where it was given a larger time budget). We ended up giving the lower difficulty levels a restricted dictionary anyway, but this was to affect players' perception of the difficulty rather than the actual difficulty (the AI on "beginner" mode shouldn't be playing a lot of words you've never heard of). We adjusted time budgets so that difficulty still ramped up as the dictionary expanded at higher levels.
- jessriedel 10y ago> We ended up giving the lower difficulty levels a restricted dictionary anyway, but this was to affect players' perception of the difficulty rather than the actual difficulty (the AI on "beginner" mode shouldn't be playing a lot of words you've never heard of) It seems to me like a restricted dictionary or smaller time budget (or, for that matter, dumber search algorithms) are all sensible measures of a low difficulty level. Otherwise you're using "difficulty" to mean "difficult for me to program cleverly" rather than "difficult to beat" or "like a human expert".
- asdfologist 10y agoI think you missed the point that a restricted dictionary actually increased the difficulty to the user.
- jessriedel 10y agoI don't think so? The restricted dictionary is for the AI, not the user.
- asdfologist 10y ago"it played better when all words of seven or more letters were removed from its vocabulary."
- megalodon 10y agoIf someone wants to experiment, I wrote a script a year ago that generates valid words from a set of letters and scores them according to Scrabble rules. [0] [0] https://github.com/mateogianolio/scrabbler https://github.com/mateogianolio/scrabbler
- sdneirf 10y agoI wonder what happens when you apply Google's AlphaGo against the Nigerians.
- dfan 10y agoThis article slightly overstates how disruptive the strategy is. Of course top-level Scrabble players already knew about rack management and defensive plays, and would not always just greedily play the highest-scoring word. It's more a question of finding the optimal weightings of the different elements, and the Nigerians have shown that the conventional wisdom was probably weighted too highly towards making big plays immediately.
- hodwik 10y agoHuh? I learned scrabble from a professional player 15 years ago, and at the time he said this was the default strategy for all serious players.
- brudgers 10y ago[tl;dr] "Bingo" often beats going bingo.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- paulcole 10y agoThe article really bungles the strategy talk. In the actual game, there are 14 tiles unseen. http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated.php?u=22368#17 http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated.php?u=22368#17 If Wellington plays his 86 point bingo, he empties the bag and if Lewis bingos back, the game ends and he'll get the value of Wellington's final rack added to his score. By not emptying the bag, Wellington keeps control of the game and prevents the only way he can lose. It's not some crazy strategy, it's a pretty clear decision for a high level player. Source: Played tournament Scrabble and memorized something like 50k words for about 4-5 years.
- cdelsolar 10y agoI'm a tournament Scrabble player and while I'm glad this article has brought some awareness to our game, this is pretty standard tournament strategy. It's about balancing your rack and playing short words when needed. If you have a long word that uses all your letters, it is 99% of the time the right play. The only reason why he passed up the bingo PEREIRAS in that endgame is because it would have emptied the bag and if his opponent had a bingo to end the game, Jighere would have lost.