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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
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).<p>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.
More counterintuitive Scrabble facts: the French Scrabble world champion is from New Zealand and doesn't speak French.<p><a href="http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/winner-of-french-scrabble-title-does-not-speak-french" rel="nofollow">http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/2015/07/21/424980378/...</a>
The article really bungles the strategy talk. In the actual game, there are 14 tiles unseen.<p><a href="http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated.php?u=22368#17" rel="nofollow">http://www.cross-tables.com/annotated.php?u=22368#17</a><p>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.<p>It's not some crazy strategy, it's a pretty clear decision for a high level player.<p>Source: Played tournament Scrabble and memorized something like 50k words for about 4-5 years.
"Nigeria is beating the West at its own board game"<p>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".
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.
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.<p>If you do extend to get a bonus tile, make sure the potential scoring opportunity is limited. Things like:<p>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.<p>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.<p>3. Always be aware of whether the J, Q, Z, X have been played or not.<p>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.<p>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.
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.<p>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.<p>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.<p>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.
A couple of comments are slightly misconstruing the "rack management" strategy. Using all your letters for the 50 point bonus is sometimes OK.<p>>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.<p>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."<p>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.
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.<p>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.
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)<p><pre><code> [0] https://project.dke.maastrichtuniversity.nl/games/files/phd/Shepard_thesis.pdf</code></pre>
Pretty interesting strategy. I also play very defensively when I play scrabble to the point where I try to sabotage what I <i>think</i> my opponent's next move(s) is(are) which, when using short letters, makes this really, really easy.<p>Then again I've never played competitively so who knows about that "easy" part :)
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]<p>[0] <a href="https://github.com/mateogianolio/scrabbler" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/mateogianolio/scrabbler</a>
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.<p>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.
> this country of 500 languages
That caught me by surprise, until <a href="https://www.ethnologue.com/country/ng/languages" rel="nofollow">https://www.ethnologue.com/country/ng/languages</a>
I'm pretty sure "Katti" isn't an English word. Did the journalist mishear "Catty"? Is this not a word Americans recognise?
They might have to start donning the official scrabble championship mantle too <a href="https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ap103023753935.jpg" rel="nofollow">https://espnfivethirtyeight.files.wordpress.com/2014/08/ap10...</a>