
Many of the best Scrabble players are Thais who don't speak English (2014) - Tomte
http://www.thestar.com.my/lifestyle/features/2014/08/16/the-best-scrabble-players-in-the-world-are-thais-who-dont-speak-english/
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FeteCommuniste
The champion of French Scrabble a couple years back was a New Zealander who
didn't speak the language: [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)

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greenpenguin
This article appears to originally be from the Guardian:
[https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/06/scrabb...](https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2014/aug/06/scrabble-
mathematicans-te-game-language)

The site also features several other Guardian articles by the same author.
Seems a little iffy?

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ciaranm
The 'comment is free' section of the guardian is their freelancer/blog bit.
What you're probably seeing is the same author being paid for the same piece
from multiple sources. Not all that fishy, just the way freelancing works.

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paulcole
The 2017 National Scrabble Championships are going on now and you can follow
along here:

[http://event.scrabbleplayers.org/games/nsc2017/](http://event.scrabbleplayers.org/games/nsc2017/)

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nemoniac
Amusingly, not once does the article mention that it's about English-language
Scrabble and not Thai-language Scrabble.

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mvid
That would seem implied, otherwise why would this be an interesting story?

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barking
More recently, there was a lot of comment last year about the strength of
Nigerian scrabble players, such as this :
[http://www.slate.com/articles/life/gaming/2016/05/have_niger...](http://www.slate.com/articles/life/gaming/2016/05/have_nigerian_players_developed_an_amazing_new_scrabble_strategy_don_t_believe.html)

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contingencies
As an abugida versus an alphabet, Thai and English are not that different in
structural conception, though Thai has almost double the number of consonants.

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spraak
Not that different in structural composition...? I don't follow what you mean.
I do speak some Thai, too

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peteretep
The op means: the letters map vaguely to the sounds used to produce them.

Also speaking some Thai, I'm like you unsure this is any kind of useful
insight. More useful would be that there's enough Latin alphabet signs in
Thailand that all literate Thais can already sound-out English, even if they
don't understand it.

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contingencies
I meant that it's not much of a conceptual jump for people with native
literacy in abugidas to an English game like scrabble, since the writing
system is already really rather similar.

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dspig
and I guess because many of the words are not ones a native speaker would know
anyway and are only learnt for the game.

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mathattack
If understanding isn't important, wouldn't a halfway decent AI kill most
players in the game?

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princeb
this is a fairly interesting question for you to ask.

i put it to you to think about how you can write a scrabble solver, if you're
given the official word list. I don't think it's that much of a step up from a
sudoku solver!

