

Scrabble: what makes good players good (2012) - zem
http://iq.brenbarn.net/2012/06/16/scrabble-what-makes-good-players-good/

======
couchand
_There don’t seem to be any websites that offer large archives of Scrabble
game records. I found one or two, but they seem to focus on archives of
professional games, whereas I was particularly interested in the whole
spectrum of skill levels, and how they’re differentiated._

I'd be very curious to see a similar analysis of those higher level games. My
expectation is that the cutoff there would start about the 80% percentile of
the players in the original post, which I think is about where I am.

Specifically I'd like to see the relationship between two of the trends named
by the author: higher-ranked players tend to rely more on bingos and bingos
are more likely with blanks. I have to guess that at a certain level of play
the luck of the draw on blanks is not as important as the skill of the
players, but it would be interesting to see.

------
CurtMonash
Unless I missed it, he didn't discuss defense at all.

I'd expect that to be a relatively small factor, and indeed hard to tease out
from other influences on points-against (e.g., if you get more tiles then your
opponent gets fewer). Still, it could be interesting ...

~~~
lnanek2
I don't know, I've never played Scrabble, but in Words with Friends, if I'm
against a poor opponent, I get every single double and triple word score and
they get none. The entire game is basically about preventing your opponent
from getting them by where you play. Sometimes you will play a short word just
to spoil their chance of getting one.

I admit it is a completely different game, though, because all players are
allowed to try all combinations and placements of their letters before
submitting their turn. There is no penalty for laying out your letters and
trying to submit to check if they work, basically. So one can try all possible
bingo combinations on their turn if they want.

~~~
zem
that's a separate issue; the real difference is that the scrabble board is a
lot better balanced than the wwf one, and so preventing access to premium
squares doesn't feature nearly as heavily.

~~~
couchand
Agreed. My experience with Scrabble bonus squares is that they tend to be
balanced pretty well in games that are otherwise balanced pretty well.

