Professional Scrabble Players Replay Their Greatest Moves | The New Yorker

in the living room scrabble is a word game but in the tournament levels it's all about math it's all about probability there's strategy there's words there's timing there's a lot more skill in the game then look you're juggling so many different skills and tasks so this is the all-time favorite most frustrating most improbable most transformative worst play I can ever remember making so in this situation this is a tournament I'm going second in the game I'm sitting on the rack of BK n SS T blank the crazy thing is if he plays just the two letter word up like operation I will have the bingo of stop banks right off the bat on my first turn of the game the chance of him playing this exact word must be at least one in a million probably one in too many millions I see Larry take two tiles from his rack and get ready to put the towels on the board so I'm sitting there and my eyes kind of widen like okay so I'm just sitting there kind of waiting for him to play damn down it goes he plays up and I just started laughing I'm just cackling like a hyena and I play stop banks and he's never seen this word before if I had just played the word normally he probably would have challenged the word it is a valid word he would have lost his turn but instead I'm grinning like a fool that's like maybe the most improbable thing that's ever happened to me in a game of Scrabble should have played the lottery that day I guess so this was the 2012 National Scrabble championship I was playing David Gibson getting down to the end here actually had a lead of about 20 points the tiles remaining weren't great which was bdh lor s so what I ended up playing was hob H OB on the left side making hae and VI 431 which at face value looks like a pretty decent play the only problem was that I completely ignored this top right part of the board and allowed him to do what we would call forking the board or opening two separate quadrants that I would not be able to block on my next turn what I really needed to do in this case was play something like blush because it doesn't give him this chance to you know open the board he ended up playing found fo und through it you know I drew pretty terribly made up play and he'd been got out with I think eight or something for 142 win by over a hundred and I was just shell-shocked and then I had to play the next three best players in the tournament after that and it was it was all downhill from there so it was October of 2000 I had been playing competitively for less than six months who were in Lake George New York my rack here was a DGL i/os and she plays her on the board so I was moving the tiles around and they wound up in the order of GDI Ola s and I said gee whiz if there's an L a on the board I could play gladiolus it's a nine-letter word I had never played a nine-letter word I was so excited and what we do to end our turn is we had our clock and as I'm hitting the clock I said oh no there were two LA's in gladiolas I could have hit the triple word score and a double word score for the D which is two points and I would scored 89 points instead of 60 tip all I had to do was wait and look a little further and so it was a lesson but for me that was a personal milestone to make aliyah a nine-letter word it's one of those games where I was a reasonably new high level player I was playing a former national champion for the first time David Gibson and I had basically lost this game with five or six plays to go I was pretty sure I was going to lose I kind of given up I was probably not been going and then I randomly drew a bingo the played and ended in the seat so I played the word pathetic there was one tile in the bag when I played pathetic so I pulled it out of the bag and it was an A so the play was that you can put an A in front of the word pathetic you can make the word a pathetic it wasn't sure if the word that he played was a phony word or a real word so eventually I decided to challenge whereas if I just played my way then I would have won by one point now I will actually hold a tile up above a board and just like stare at it and see does it play in any of these squares that was something I learned from my a pathetic game this was the middle of the championship game back in 2000 and this game was the final game if I win this game I win the championship I have a slight lead and it's my turn I have recently good tiles I can score with the MP and Y and a nice collection of owls I'm going to score 30 35 points on the sofa board my choices were to play Mayo and that was for the most points but the other thing is I could use the Y for points later for instance I could play it next to the E and block the board later or block it now perhaps or I could have played py a for 31 points which also blocks the blocks the D and an e also very open and also scores nearly as much as Mayo but again mi AO is not a very good lead so ultimately I thought you know what given the openness of the board I shouldn't concern myself so much with blocking that I should just consider been going myself I decided that playing Mayo would give me the best chance to bingo and then of course I picked up Cee KS and I don't see a bingo right away but then I look at the end immediately I see Cape skin and it puts the K on the double letter and it gets a wonderful double word that's 92 points and that turned out to be the play of the game it didn't win me the game immediately but it gave me a huge lead so that was very satisfying to find capes together it's not a word you see every day two years ago at the 2015 National Scrabble championships I'd made the final of the playoffs become a national champion it got to a point in the end of the game where I felt pretty confident I was going to win somehow with the clock running down he had just played barf any scoring play at this point would probably win me the game with the clock running down I put a play on the board but in the process without realizing it I played a fake two letter word I played IR a lot of the time I don't even need to check if the two letter words are correct it is so instinctive that it would be the equivalent of going to work without shoes on he challenged and I thought he was just desperate and trying to challenge liar and I had to take the play off not only that he had a response cooking barf for a lot of points and under the time pressure I lost by two points you know it was a disaster but the final was consists of four more games I was really proud of myself because I think I played the best Scrabble from that point onwards that I've played in my entire life even though I lost the championship I still realize at that moment that I can be as good as anyone out there Travel is kind of a microcosm for life in some ways the game is so deep I could never finish learning about it basically it makes you a little bit more weary and better at making good decisions a lot of my closest friends now we're from Scrabble we get together at tournaments around the country around the world I still go to tournaments I all direct tournaments I directed a tournament in New Orleans in the San Francisco Bay Area it's giving back to the community that's given me everything my goal in Scrabble is to be recognized as the second best player in the world because I think Nigel is going to be number one and I accept that nobody likes to lose I would always rather win but if that's not why I'm playing it's really more about the journey than the end [Music] you

Channel: The New Yorker

Views: 3,486,159

Rating: 4.7612796 out of 5

Keywords: scrabble, professional scrabble, professional scrabble player, best scrabble plays, le scrabble, scrabble game, board game, board games, how to play scrabble, scrable, super scrabble, scrabble championship, best scrabble, comeback scrabble, scrabble games, scrabble players, scrabble tournament, how to win at scrabble, playing scrabble, word games, word game, scrabble letters, tabletop game, words, letters, the new yorker, new yorker, new yorker video

Id: O3eO646jjzQ

Length: 9min 4sec (544 seconds)

Published: Thu Nov 16 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/LackLoudmouth]

I never realized that scrabble had all these different strategic techniques like the "blocking the board" that some of them mentioned. Very interesting video.

[u/stufoonoob]

This was a very well made video. I played Scrabble competitively for a long time and my last tournament was in 2015. It really is a huge subculture with many different kinds of people and personalities. I always liked Scrabble because it has the strategy of chess with the added variables of word knowledge, anagramming skills, and luck. I was a middle of the road player - placed 2nd in my division at Nationals and won a few local tournaments. Spent probably 6 months studying every night for 3 hours and memorized probably 15,000 words over the years.

If anyone is interested in learning more, there is a fascinating book called Word Freak (link) by Stefan Fatsis, where he documents his journey from newbie to professional. Also a great movie called Word Wars (trailer) following 4 of the top players including Joe Edley and my Scrabble mentor Marlon Hill

EDIT: to anyone interested, Conrad from this video did an AMA a while back.

[u/UniqueHash]

First time I played Scrabble was on a date. I was semi-familiar with the rules via osmosis, but once I started playing I realized the game was much more deep than I had expected. I got completely distracted from the date coming up with and applying strategies and beat her pretty badly. Only after we finished did I realize that she had not been enjoying it as much as me. Did not get another date. I'm not a smart man.

[u/thehomie]

This dances a thin line on the border of quality satire.

[u/RockbetweenHardPlace]

My mom is a big reader and whenever we play scrabble, she’ll play words that I’ve never heard before. Don’t even sound like words at all. Yet, I always challenge them, and always lose my turn. Read books kids

[u/Only_Account_Left]

I found the Internet Scrabble Club on the Scrabble subreddit, and it's a wonderful little community.

Wordbiz, the client program the club uses is absolutely ancient, but it's a blast. It also allows you to observe some of the best players in the world. As I write this there's a game going on that contains the words "gennaker" and "squeg."

The game can be incredibly addicting, particularly when time constraints can allow you to play four or five games in an hour. There's a very active global community playing just about 24/7 at nearly every skill level.

playing regularly and trying to keep track of new words can be really rewarding if you love the acquisition of useless knowledge as much as I do. The number of nautical terms, foreign currencies, and questionable loan words is crazy.

It and chess.com are definitely my favorite free competitive online game communities.

[u/paper_paws]

I really enjoyed this vid but couldn't help but be reminded of Rimmer and his game of risk

[u/allocater]

TIL those are all correct words:

• oe
• al
• da
• xi
• qi
• pa
• ow
• od
• ag
• yo

(Firefox even only questions "ag" with the spellchecker)

[u/GenuineFriction]

Towards the end of the video, one of the guests mentions Nigel Richards. Aside from being regarded as the greatest Scrabble player, he won the French World Scrabble Tournament despite not speaking French fluently.