
Nigerians Dominate Scrabble Tournaments Using Five-Letter Word Strategy - vincentbarr
http://www.wsj.com/articles/for-nigerian-scrabble-stars-short-tops-shorter-1463669734
======
chime
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.

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.

~~~
Someone
_" they are applying the Chess strategy of thinking n-moves ahead to
Scrabble"_

That isn't new, what is new is that they (learni from analysis of games played
by computer) show is that the conventional strategy favours scoring points too
much over keeping a rack that allows you to score decently in future moves and
preventing your opponent from scoring heavily.

This is presented as a totally new strategy, but looking at the video showing
an example game, I get the impression it is more of a slight, but important
adjustment. For example, the Nigerian does have a seven-letter move in that
play.

And, by the way, I would expect this:

 _" Mr. Jighere and his teammates kept to themselves, going to bed early […]
his opponent, Mr. Mackay, spent the evening before their big match at a pub."_

also influenced the result. McKay probably saw this as a bit of a holiday,
while the Nigerians saw it as work. 449 vs 432 is not a crushing defeat.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
OK you guys. Here's the serious bit then:

>> McKay probably saw this as a bit of a holiday, while the Nigerians saw it
as work.

That's probably his way of unwinding and managing his psychology after a
match. It's a bit misleading for the article to bring it up as a disadvantage
since he's obviously a strong player who has probably competed for some time,
so he should be expected to know what works for him.

Also, you can perfectly well go to the pub without coming back with your pants
on your head. I usually drink half a glass of wine, then go home and code. No
reason why the guy didn't have a light drink then got back to his hotel and
trained.

By contrast, the Nigerian's practice of playing 48-hour games and studying
non-stop during their flight sounds more performance-degrading to me (having
played a board game competitively, I won't say which). But, again: what works
for them works for them.

~~~
absolutenumber
Stop.Just stop.You guys always begrudge success when Africans do good
things.It is pathetic and low.You ought to learn to appreciate and celebrate
people when they work hard to achieve success rather looking for ways to
belittle their achievements.

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
Did you post this under the wrong message? I didn't write anything that sounds
like I'm begrudging the Nigerians their victory.

------
bdarnell
Back 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
> 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
I think you missed the point that a restricted dictionary actually increased
the difficulty to the user.

~~~
jessriedel
I don't think so? The restricted dictionary is for the AI, not the user.

~~~
asdfologist
"it played better when all words of seven or more letters were removed from
its vocabulary."

~~~
jessriedel
Oh, I see what you mean now. Thanks, I think you're right.

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psuter
More 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/...](http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-
way/2015/07/21/424980378/winner-of-french-scrabble-title-does-not-speak-
french)

~~~
YeGoblynQueenne
To be fair, he can now speak French _words_. He just has no idea what they
mean.

~~~
Grue3
I doubt he can _speak_ them, per se. French pronounciation can be quite
tricky.

~~~
StavrosK
Eh, it's much less tricky than English.

~~~
malz
touché.

------
paulcole
The 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.

------
sixhobbits
"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".

~~~
corin_
Wikipedia's "Cultural Definition":

 _" From a cultural and sociological approach the Western world is defined as
including all cultures that are directly derived from and influenced by
European cultures, i.e. Europe (at least the European Union member states,
EFTA countries, European microstates);[31][32] in the Americas (e.g.
Argentina, Brazil, Canada, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Cuba, Mexico, United
States of America, Uruguay, Venezuela), and in Oceania (Australia and New
Zealand). Together these countries constitute Western society."_

I don't think I've ever heard any definition include any African country.

~~~
794CD01
Not even South Africa?

~~~
corin_
I can't think of any time I've thought of or heard someone speaking of South
Africa as a western country. Influenced by the West, sure.

~~~
varjag
Honestly I hardly heard anyone referring Venezuela or Cuba as the West either.
In practice it's really down to Anglo-Saxon + European first world countries.

~~~
semi-extrinsic
Same goes for North vs South. There is a funny quote by a US president (that I
can't seem to find right now) listing some countries in the southern
hemisphere, and they're all actually on the northern hemisphere.

------
dfan
This 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.

------
imgabe
I'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
WWF 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
I 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
In 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.

------
hardlianotion
As a Nigerian, this makes me absurdly proud. As a mathematician, I am
especially proud of the game-theoretic aspect of the win.

~~~
drcode
I'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
They 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.

------
mamurphy
A 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.

------
cdelsolar
I'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.

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taejo
Brian 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

------
BinaryIdiot
Pretty 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
:)

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megalodon
If 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)

------
hodwik
Huh? 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.

------
rosstex
Less is more! It's cool to see disrupting new strategies in classic games.

------
f_allwein
If 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_
Firstly 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.

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meeper16
They might have to start donning the official scrabble championship mantle too
[https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ap10...](https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ap103023753935.jpg)

------
SturgeonsLaw
> 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)

------
sdneirf
I wonder what happens when you apply Google's AlphaGo against the Nigerians.

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f_allwein
I liked the original title - can we change it back?

------
bencollier49
I'm pretty sure "Katti" isn't an English word. Did the journalist mishear
"Catty"? Is this not a word Americans recognise?

~~~
DanBC
What 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

------
brudgers
[tl;dr]

"Bingo" often beats going bingo.

------
jrochkind1
Let me be the first to say: moneytile!

