The French Scrabble Champion who doesn't speak French

this is Merry intensely a math professor and clergyman who also happened to be the greatest Checkers player of all time there was a stretch in his tournament career where he played 501 games of checkers and lost one of them a single loss in two decades the man was basically unbeatable at this good old board game even the first check as AI never beat him in a match and I find it intriguing to learn about people like this who randomly stumble upon their perfect Niche and become a genius not in particle physics or something but in a board game this video is not about Tinsley though his story is fascinating but if you want to find more about that check out this fascinating book by the researcher who developed the AI that was on the brink of beating Tinsley just before Tinsley's unfortunate and untimely passing instead I want to tell you about the merry intensely of the board game that I happen to play competitively I don't have a clue about Checkers but I know a lot about Scrabble and the gentleman with the affectionate smile over here is of course Nigel Richards known for winning the French Scrabble championships without actually speaking any french and chances are you've actually heard of that somewhere before because this story gained so much traction outside of our little niche of Scrabble enthusiasts but the reason you should still keep watching even if you've heard about this and read about this before is that the reporting on this guy actually undersells what a crazy story this really is man eats dictionary and proceeds to beat everybody at Scrabble is typically the gist of it and while that is bizarre enough it honestly leaves out the most interesting parts now there are some fantastic videos on Niger by world-class Scrabble player will Anderson which you might have seen but they focus on specific games or moves what I'd like to do is talk more about the background and the context to tournament Scrabble so that you can really appreciate what Nigel has accomplished in this game because the more you know about this the more jaw dropping it gets so please spare with my German accent for a while and let's jump into the rabbit hole of competitive scribble so Nigel was born in a country that is probably not on the radar of many people when they think about French Scrabble not that they would do that very often he's from New Zealand and you know from looking at him you do wonder why they didn't cast him as Gandalf when they made those movies over there or as a French player put it he could well be part of a quiz hipster or serial killer anyway we're not here to mock the guy the first thing that we need to establish for our story is that Nigel wasn't exactly a new name in Scrabble when he won in French this didn't come from nowhere he'd long established himself as the greatest Scrabble player of all time in English which is of course by far the most widespread version of this game which can be played in any language in principle when you look at Nigel's game stats though they look far less lopsided than Tinsley's he loses about one in four tournament games not one in 500 but of course there's a simple reason for that unlike check because Scrabble as a game has a large luck component you can draw lousy combinations of tiles from the back or great combinations and you're virtually no control over that so winning 75 of your tournament games in the game like that is quite remarkable and of course over the 20 or so rounds that make up a tournament luck will more or less start to even out with the result that Nigel has finished every single world ranking tournament that he's played and he's played more than 150 of them with a positive or even record he's never had a negative record at the end of such a tournament as of the time of this video he is also in a streak of 28 top 3 tournament finishes in a row so basically when Nigel has bad luck in the tournament he gets third place instead of first and when he has all the good luck the result can be something like this winning an elite tournament with 10 wins over second place and of course you know the guys a five-time world champion in English nobody else has even won more than once so far so it makes sense that Nigel might have been looking for a new challenge and he stated that this was his motivation he likes trying new things and so he decided that he was going to Feast on the World Elite of players in a different language and of course the first step to doing that is to learn the words in that language so how on Earth do you learn a dictionary well I can tell you how a normal person learns the dictionary or at least a normal scribble player there might not be that much overlap to a normal person but Nigel obviously isn't the first player to realize that to get better at Scrabble you should memorize as many words as you can because in a way that's the equivalent of just reading the rules the words are in effect nothing but an extremely long list of legal moves in this game and so a word list is nothing but the world's longest game manual so why don't we just all read that manual because it wouldn't work that's the first thing that to me is missing from media reports on Azure they often make it sound like it just took someone who is obsessive enough to do this but it isn't just the question of putting in the effort it's also too difficult to do I mean try it yourself here's a part from the French Scrabble word list what do you even do with that if you simply read through that list there's no way you will still know all of these words in a few weeks from now and probably even in a few minutes even if we just pick out one word like how will you make sure that this word is still there in like 15 minutes or 15 days then in 15 weeks and even if you somehow manage to etch this entire page into your brain perfectly well you've now done 0.2 percent of the job you need to do this 500 times over to get through the entire list and the fact that we can't just do that checks out with what research has found about human memory in general one of the major lessons from psychology in that regard is that in order to remember something humans need context every Scrabble player knows the phenomenon where there's actually one Surefire way of remembering a word and that is having somewhat played against you as a crucial winning move you'll never forget that word it now has a vivid context to it so people use all kinds of tricks to give the words context and most players use one particular method for this namely alphagrams an African is just the alphabetical version of a word for example a g i l n p y is the alphagram of the word playing and a e i l n o s is the alphagram of a word that you probably don't know but that gets played in Scrabble a lot and if so this is a combination of letters with a relatively high probability of showing up in the game and so you would like to know this word which you don't know from everyday language so you quiz yourself repeatedly on the alphagram aeilnos until you have that Association in your brain and then while playing the game you will always put the letters you draw on your rack in alphabetical order so that if you draw these particular tiles you get the exact same prompt that you saw when studying the words and that hopefully evokes that Association hey there's a word in there that I studied that process doesn't happen half as effectively when you just read a list of words but even with this little trick it obviously still takes a huge effort because for the most part you will need to quiz yourself on the word repeatedly just like you would when learning the vocabulary in a new language so doing this for the entire dictionary takes years of study and you really have to enjoy the process to do it or be extremely driven by competitiveness I guess but a few people have taken this all the way and learn the entire list of allowable words in English language Scrabble at least two eight or nine letters up in length some even beyond that but longer words hardly ever come up in the game although we will get back to that later and I wanted to emphasize that this takes years because it really puts into a perspective what Nigel did which is to learn the entire French dictionary in nine weeks not years not month weeks the crazy aspect here really isn't that he was studying a language that he didn't speak he's not the first to do that players from Thailand for example have had great success in Scrabble tournaments including some world championship titles with some of them barely being able to communicate in English it's a foreign language to them and if you think about it even native speakers are basically studying a foreign language when they go through the English language Scrabble dictionary I mean just look at the sport for mobile championship game that is hardly more intelligible to you than a French game right what's crazy is that Nigel does this so much faster than us without even using their tricks we use because he doesn't use alphagrams he reportedly read the list up to 11 letters twice he also reportedly goes through this list in his mind while going on long bike rides and that's it that's apparently all there is to it and honestly nobody knows how this is possible so if you were looking for an explanation in this video I have to disappoint you now maybe you might be thinking well he's got a photographer memory but all that really gives us is a label not an explanation because nobody truly knows how photographic memory works there are some indications about which brain areas might be implicated in it but we don't have a clear understanding of the processes and you might even read that literal photographic memory is regarded as a bit of a myth by many researchers in psychology there are a lot of similar cases though outside of Scrabble including the artist Stephen Wiltshire who can draw cities after seeing them in flight and every single window is in the correct spot here I've been to this place numerous time this is cologne in Germany but I I would have no chance of drawing this even remotely closely for memory this is basically a photograph for memory and there has been an NBA player who is capable of memorizing pages in a phone book which is so impossible to do for a normal person that the famous computer scientist Douglas hofstetter cited this as an example of a story that you can dismiss without any further research just because Common Sense makes it clear that it cannot be true but it is true he's proven this in public and there are lots of other similar cases I would say the same as hofstetter about memorizing a dictionary it's not humanly possible to do perfectly but it's a simple fact that Nigel has done this and he can't tell us how that is possible for him but maybe that shouldn't really surprise us because there are so many things that everyone does in the subconscious and implicit way like imagine you were on an alien planet where bicycles don't exist you wouldn't be able to tell the mind-blown aliens what exactly you're doing to balance on that thing it's just possible and effortless to you it would look impossible to them and maybe it's the same from Nigel's perspective maybe it's strange to him that we can't all do this in any case it's understandable how some of the French expert players reacted to this some of them were hesitant to believe that he should really have learned their entire language in like two months and so when Nigel actually showed up at the world championships in Belgium some of them tried to trick him and played fake French words in their games against him now that might sound a bit unfair to you maybe but it's a perfectly legit strategy that is part of tournament Scrabble in any language actually you can put any word on the board real or fake and it's up to your opponent to call you out for a fake War to challenge it so that you have to take it back and sit out your turn as a penalty so it wasn't dirty or anything of them to try this but it didn't work Nigel knew the word list with such certainty that when he didn't recognize the word he knew it couldn't be in the list and we should take a moment here to discuss what it means to know the entire word list because people are sometimes confused that the headline suggested Nigel won without speaking any french because you know he knows more French than literally any french person how can we say he doesn't speak French someone was even so adamant about this that they made this hilarious edit to Nigel's Wikipedia page to make sure that everyone was aware of this point but this person is wrong this edit didn't survive very long Nigel doesn't speak French because he didn't learn the meaning of the words he only memorized them as valid letter strings to use in this game he read the manual and this is the ultimate proof by the way for something that most expert Scrabble players will tell you we are not really playing a language game Scrabble is a language game on the surface of course and almost all Scrabble players are very interested in which but when it comes to winning your games you need different skills you need pattern recognition numerical skills and intuition of probability and accordingly the top players are often computer scientists or statisticians like myself or Architects because you're not trying to write poetry on the board right but what is an Earl King and has it ever praying the blehem who cares Scrabble players don't care about definitions they just care that they're words Nigel e even got into Scrabble because his mother wanted to find a board game where she could finally beat him for once and the guy who would go on to become the greatest scrubber player of all time was so bad with words that she hoped to beat him in Scrabble I'm not making that up although we do have to trust one newspaper articles on the story I don't really know if it's true so apart from the basics like bonjour Maxi volleyball and so on Nigel can't use French to communicate as far as I know maybe he's learned it a bit by now there's one other funny exception to this he needed to announce the score of his moves in French because the rules said so so at the French World Championship Nigel made it to the final where he played shelik from gaboon one of the many french-speaking countries in Africa friend Scrabble is very much a worldwide Affair here's the deciding game of those finals look at this the noble language of French in all its beauty and the twist at the end of this game is another fake french word by shalik who tries playing fanatida when the actual French word is fanatiza since it's the end of the game Angelique doesn't have a legit way to win anymore this makes sense as a Hail Mary but neither wasn't having any of it he challenged the word off and goes on to win the title with shalik showing some nice sense of humor playing Finney on the next turn literally ending the game so Nigel wins Niger goes to the price ceremony [Music] at that price ceremony needs someone to translate for him as if people needed any further demonstration that he literally doesn't speak their language and the ensuing q a is so great in showing what different worlds are colliding here question Nigel do we just suck or are you just the best better of course not these are some excellent players question so how long have you been studying the words Nigel since the end of May so that makes it about two months and you have to imagine that the guy reporting on this interview is a tournament player himself who like all the players has been trying for years to painstakingly drill tens of thousands of words into his head and he finds a convincing way to express his sheer disbelief by means of orthography last question do you have any particular method of learning the words in the subtext of this question is loud and clear if you do please tell us the secret neither foreign but as the French would say celavi so this Victory came as a shock even to most people in the Scrabble scene even though we already knew what Nigel was capable of but you know who wasn't impressed the Icelandic Scrabble Federation they pointed out that French really is for beginners Icelandic grammar is so complex that they are worthless includes 2 million words but unfortunately Nigel politely declined to take them up on that challenge so that's the story of how Nigel won his first French championships but you might notice that there's still a lot of video left here so what's still to come well the second and third part of Nigel's genius and the second part comes to you as a puzzle can you solve this Scrabble position what's the highest scoring move available with the letters you see at the bottom where the question mark denotes a blank that can stand for any letter feel free to pause the video and look for it because the point here is that the word we're looking for is pretty common English you most likely know it do you see it here it is a movie that goes over the top in trying to make you cry is often called a tearjerker neither played this in a tournament game if you saw this move as well please sign up for the next Scrabble Championship near you I hope this makes it clear that annoying a word and untangling it on the board are two very different tasks so let's make the next puzzle a bit easier what is the everyday word that you can play here as a bingo might still be a difficult task if you're not used to playing Scrabble a lot but for tournament Players this is a routine play with no vowels on your rack the E on the board jumps out to you as the letter to play through and that gives us the word children doesn't take a world champion to find that but there's a catch it isn't the best move there's another bingo and it is this absurdity of a Scrabble move there are lists of word frequencies and Scrabble games generated from millions of rounds of computer programs playing against themselves you know how often the word chlorodine shows up in that data set of millions of games not even once you can play Scrabble millions of times and you never need this word and I couldn't quite verify the following maybe somebody can help me out in the comments but the story goes that at the time when this game took place 1998 Scrabble wordless only went up to 9 letters in length nobody had even bothered to compile the longer words let alone learn them that's how unlikely they are to be useful in the game the only one who cared was our friend from New Zealand who had read the literal dictionary rather than word list and remembered this one obscure entry in a situation where he has an obvious fine move I want to be clear though that Nigel is not the only player to find Spectacular moves in general not at all actually there are tons of fantastic moves by many other players here are some nice example but for one thing chlorodyne stands out even among those moves and more importantly for other players finding such a play once in a blue moon is a highlight it's the exception not the rule for Nigel this is the rule he keeps finding this place when they're available they're not available very often but if they are just spots them every time the longer you watch his games the more you start to wander wait does this guy ever miss anything I'm hesitant to claim that he really never does but I also had a hard time finding evidence to the contrary this is the one example that I could find of Nigel just straight up missing a Bingo but this relies on the game protocol by a third person and it almost seems like the likelier option that he actually didn't have these exact letters and that this was misrecorded I couldn't find any other misses I'm sure they must have been more glitches in the Nigel Matrix please leave a comment if you know of any weirdly enough occasionally Nigel does make mistakes but of a very technical and basic kind like accidentally putting the tiles down in the wrong order misspelling a word like hair nets as higher Nets which amazingly stayed on the board but beyond these basic mistakes that almost seem like Hardware bugs they appear to be no genuine mistakes in Nigel's games as far as worth finding is concerned so why is this so remarkable I mean probably you already find it remarkable but I want to emphasize this it's completely out of reach for anyone else Scrabble as a game is deceptively simple because the task is easily defined combine your letters and those on the board in the optimal way but the permutations between all the words in the dictionary the combination of letters on your rack and the spots on the board are so vast that there's just no chance of always spotting every possibility especially under time pressure in the tournament you can get to 90 95 percent if you're an elite world-class player but not to a hundred percent the brain will automatically simplify such a complex situation just out of sheer necessity and no matter how hard you try you'll always have blind spots typically because a move is counter-intuitive it's not obvious it has an unusual pattern for example every top player knows the word that is the best play here it's a very strange word but Scrabble experts would know it because they study the keywords but finding it in this situation is another matter because playing a work through two letters and sticking the Q at the end is a very rare pattern and you might easily miss this this is of course A Move by Nigel I don't know which other players would have found it but I'm sure that they wouldn't find it with a hundred percent success rate similarly there's an obvious bingo in this situation obvious to top players which furthermore easily wins you the game here so you don't even have to find the perfect move if you for example want to conserve some mental energy during a long tournament but the perfect move squeezes a word into this corner forming a bunch of overlaps again top players will usually find this but it's impossible to have a perfect success rate for moves like this every other player right up to the second best player in the world has to accept as a simple fact of life that this is impossible and it's inexplicable how one guy can just break that rule by the way if you're wondering who is the second best player in the world after Nigel that is a very interesting conversation because there are a lot of candidates you could you can see in that spot it might well be David Elder from Australia and look at what he said about Nigel that should tell you all about the status that Nigel has in this community and this play finding scale is why it's a bit regrettable that the media articles on Nigel mostly don't go beyond look at this guy he read a dictionary because as crazy as that already sounds it isn't even the hardest part and ironically Nigel seems to think that it's the easier part because in the one interview snippet that you'll find of him on YouTube he says that his success really is only a matter of learning the words and that's so funny to me because he's basically contradicting what I'm trying to tell you here so you'll just have to believe me that for anyone else that's just not how it works anyway this brings us to the punch line to all of that which is Nigel's other French World Championship it isn't often mentioned in the media reports but he actually won two different titles this is because the French like to do things their own way and what we know as Scrabble is a bit of a variant in French tournament they call our game classic and only started holding World Championships in it in 2006 but since the 70s they've been battling it out in duplicate this game duplicate works by giving each player their own board in the same seven letters to start the game and now the goal of the game is simply to find the highest scoring move with these letters which might sound like the same thing that you're trying to do in regular Scrabble but it's not because in Scrabble you will very often routinely sacrifice some points for strategic reasons like you wouldn't play the blank tile for just two additional points you would keep it to wait for a better opportunity because it's so valuable in duplicate points really are all that matters so everyone starts with the same tiles writes down the highest scoring move they can find and then everyone is told the optimal solution and puts that on their board regardless of whether they found it so that the game stays identical for everyone and at the end of the game you can simply compare which player missed the fewest points compared to the Perfect Solutions overall or as the French put it who has the smallest croissant of course they call it that all of this means of course that the luck Vector is completely eliminated and annoying and spotting words is all that matters so you can guess what happened when Nigel joined this competition well this happened he had some trouble in the beginning but most of the points that he missed there came from technicalities in writing down his moves he made some formal mistakes there and they are very strict about that thank you [Applause] but since he got a hang of that what you see denoted here by the word top means that in each of these competitions Nigel didn't miss a single point on any move and every competition consists of several games so all in all these are several hundreds of moves in a row where Nigel literally played like a computer in French just in case you forgot this needless to say and at the risk of repeating myself is so difficult that nobody else can do it and not for a lack of trying duplicate like I said is the more popular variant in French Scrabble their world ranking includes more than 15 000 players which is kind of wild and in previous championships one of them had done the impossible before and won the tournament with the Perfect Score once and then here comes some block from New Zealand who can't even order croissant without butchering the pronunciation we can get some Frappuccinos or some cappuccinos or a croissant and he just does this every year like it's nothing it's understandable that not everybody like that some players have argued that Nigel shouldn't play in these tournaments because that just takes away the competition it's like playing against the computer there's nothing to play for of course some also suspected him of cheating which just to be clear is not what's happening here there's zero evidence of cheating but to their credit most of the French players seem to take it in good spirits they just play as well as they can and let Nigel be Nigel yeah so here's one of the duplicate moves that Nigel played and I want to give you this one as a puzzle because While most of you surely don't speak French you should all be able to find the solution in theory can you feel free to pause the video the solution is the nice word of e but which is the word that we highlighted earlier and I sneakily asked you whether you'll still know it in 15 minutes well here we are and correct me if I'm wrong but I don't think many of you were sitting there just now and we're like and neither were the French expert players because this move being a nine letter word in difficult to spot was missed by 90 of the players who played in this tournament that's how difficult it is in this situation similarly Nigel was one of only a few players to find on broncha another nine letter word and in this situation from a Blitz game where you have less than a minute to spot the highest scoring move Nigel was one of only eight players to find the same move with a bunch of overlaps one of their players put it like this we knew he was a monster who just didn't know he was a computer but as you can still tell from the video timeline there's yet one more level of Genius to unpack and that level is strategy because after all we're not usually playing duplicate we're not just looking for the highest scoring move a killer move like chloridyne is of course best just because it scores by far the most points but a lot of the time the equation isn't simply score as many points as you can to win your candidate moves usually all scores similarly well and you need to figure out which of them gives you the best chance of winning the game in the end and this is a surprisingly tricky and obscure question to solve Mary intensely the checkers Champion once said that chess is like looking out over a vast open ocean Checkers is like looking into a bottomless well Scrabble is also a bottomless well and it's in fact so complex that it remains in unsolved game which might surprise some of you Scrabble AI exists and is very strong quackle is the state of the art AI at the moment and it can evaluate most situations very accurately and is used by virtually all top players to improve their game there is still a lot of improvement possible a lot of intricacies in the game that AI hasn't figured out yet but there's one exception to this the end game in the Scrabble game both players have their last tiles there aren't any left in the back and this allows both players to figure out which letters their opponent must be holding because you know if the queue hasn't been played yet and it is not on your rack and the back is empty it must be on your opponent's right so all of a sudden Scrabble turns into a game with perfect information and in theory you can now go through every possible sequence of moves between the two players to figure out the optimal cost of action in practice it is usually not feasible to literally go through everything because even with only a few tiles left to be played there are often hundreds of possible moves for both sides and the three of possible sequences becomes humongous luckily for human players you can stick to some basic rules and quickly concentrate on a few candidate plays in order to play a pretty good end game most of the time but doing it perfectly requires such extensive calculation that even quackle the Scrabble engine doesn't even try and uses heuristics for some of the more complex cases most of the time almost all of the time this will work perfectly but there can be Scrabble and games where a very sneaky low scoring move gives you the best course of action and that is so difficult to figure out but of course it is possible to program a software that is a truly complete endgame solver and then be very patient while it does its job because this can take hours or maybe sometimes even days and this is what Francis digiada and Jill bronchat did a while ago I was surprised that they are French I don't think so Francis is an elite tournament player and Jill is a software engineer as far as I know [Music] they did this fantastic analysis where they took almost 600 of Nigel's English language games basically all of his games where we have a game protocol and their exhaustive endgame solver compared Nigel's moves at the end of the game against D mathematically optimal sequence and you'll probably have a vague notion where this is going so they did found 11 Mistakes by Nigel and confirmed that he is in fact human but only barely really because they also looked at what quackle would affect the state-of-the-art Scrabble Ai and this engine made 41 mistakes in the same games which also proves in the funniest way possible that Nigel can't be cheating because using an engine would actually make him worse let alone the fact that the engine often wouldn't be able to give a solution in time in the tournament game where you only have a few minutes to figure this out and of course Nigel was always playing against someone and we can look at those opponents moves in the same games in the end game phase and even if we only filter out those players who at some point had been in the top 10 in the world ranking Elite scrubby players they did make 11 or 41 they made 200 mistakes in half as many games because we filtered the data set they lost 60 times as many points as Nigel and look at this line here when there's only one optimal move in this situation rather than several ones that are equally good these Elite opponents only play the correct move about half of the time because end games are this difficult and Nigel is at 99 percent honestly I challenge you to find any statistic in any game or sport that is this lopsided between the best player and their very best competition maybe Donald Bradman and Cricket qualifies so this is the third time in this video where we have to conclude that it just shouldn't be possible to be this good and yet Nigel somehow does it and he does it intuitively and apparently effortlessly it just seems to click for him so let's look at an example this is my favorite Nigel endgame Nigel is trailing by 67 points here but he has some great titles left like the Zed which scores 10 points on its own and his opponent has f x and V left over clunky titles and one of them the V cannot be played at all on the spot and that allows Nigel to do some end game trickery he plays off his ass a place of his n so far this all looks unspectacular meanwhile his opponent does tip the best he can with the X and the F but now he's stuck on the B and Nigel can play his letters one turn at a time while his opponent is forced to always pass the turn back in return and Nigel uses that to play Pi then play add and then finally plop The Zed down for 64 points thanks to two of the most notoriously bizarre Scrabble words ads with all that and Tsar for pizza I wish that was a joke Nigel had a 57 point move available from the start Zaza over here but this isn't the optimal sequence although it also edges out the wind but he wants to find the optimal sequence and that is this funny sequence but now what if I told you that this was in fact Nigel's worst end game in the entire data set he technically blundered here because the way he set this up allowed his opponent to interfere because the opponent doesn't need to play the F immediately he can pass his turn in this spot and then when Nigel tries to do these Shenanigans over here head blocks the Z play which is why this is technically a losing sequence Nigel what Nigel needed to do was to first block the highest scoring at export which is in any case weird that he didn't do this and then played this same setup with the s in this spot rather than taking it at the end of this word as he did earlier like this the F can't be blocked to use to block the setup so just to recap neither have phoned this exotic sequence that most players wouldn't spot in the first place he just missed this subtle way his opponent could in principle have prevented the sequence and that's the worst move Nigel has ever played in an end game that we know of that tells you all you need to know so much for end games the perfect information part of Scrabble the chess part of Scrabble the rest of the scribble game which of course makes up the Lion's Share of gameplay is a different piece because you obviously don't know the titles your opponent is holding and you don't know what you're going to draw from the bag next so it's a game with imperfect information meaning that the best move is not deterministic in nature but probabilistic optimal strategy in a game like that means playing in a way that has no systematic flaws that an opponent could exploit the strategy will not always work but it has the best chance of working in that sense even games like Scrabble can become a solved game in a broad sense of the word as you might know some variants of poker the game with imperfect information have for all intents and purposes been solved but Scrabble remains unsolved as of today meaning that we can't judge Nigel's or anyone's gameplay with like mathematical certainty but unsurprisingly for all we know Nigel is as close to playing optimally as anyone this is what a strategy expert Kenji Matsumoto says about Nigel and it's telling that when a game is commentated live and the computer analysis and Nigel's move disagree commentators usually look for reasons why the computer isn't playing the Nigel move rather than the other way around not all top players would agree many would be of the opinion that you need to question Nigel's moves as well that you don't need to blindly follow his strategy and there are examples of moves played by Nigel that are generally seen as highly dubious and that the AI also judges as mistakes but overall Nigel is seen as the player to learn from in terms of strategy and to me this is where it really gets interesting because knowing the dictionary by heart and having computer like board vision is extremely impressive but it's also robotic in a way it feels a bit like you're up against the bot but strategy brings an aspect of style and creativity in the equation and to me the way Nitro plays strategically and tactically is so stylish it's so elegant and I've learned so much from it for my own games it's like watching Lionel Messi or Wayne Gretzky the best players who often make the difficult things look really simple it's also reminiscent of the style of play we've seen in games that have been Mastered by AI Alpha zero in chess Alpha go and go have through neural Nets learned the optimal strategy for those games and turned out to play in a pretty unique creative way that often goes against the intuition of top human players and I find it really telling that niger's way of playing Scrabble is often described in similar fashion he plays unorthodox moves counter-intuitive moves moves that require you to think outside the box and not follow conventional strategy to blindly many people say that he plays moves that nobody else can understand that are just mysterious I don't agree I think the top players it's often pretty straightforward what he does it's just that he does it in a very unusual way or in a way that other people wouldn't think about I'd like to show you three examples and the lesson from them is similar to what I said earlier about spotting moves on the board Nigel isn't doing some 200 IQ level stuff that nobody else could understand the difference again lies in something like open-mindedness and alertness to the possibilities that are available in the situation in every game situation expert players will immediately notice a bunch of candid moves they know pretty quickly what they want to do in the position in principle and then they narrow it down to the moves that achieves their goals in the best way and this immediate simplification of this situation is an automatic thing it's how the brain works in any domain where you have a lot of experience and that is complex it's difficult to prevent but it can result in missing a weird outside the box idea that happens to be the best way to go in this specific situation in Psychology in research on creativity this is called Divergent thinking and Nigel is so good at finding these hidden possibilities here's what I mean Nigel is trailing here late in the game and he has the Q which is the worst letter in the game contrary to what many beginners assume and it's strategy 101 here to get rid of the queue and try to get a bingo in the next moves to make up the deficit and score and that's the problem because you've immediately narrowed the problem down to which of the moves that get rid of the queue is the best in order to do that you can place some nice Arabic loanwords here the Arabic words that made it into the English dictionaries really are godsend for Scrabble players because they often use secure without a u and the commentators on this game which was live broadcast were debating the merits of all of these moves and then I replace this is going just 12 points and keeping the queue once he played this the commentators immediately realized what he was doing which is to try and draw one of the remaining use three are still in the back to hit the word Quail up there for 68 points with the Q triple and the word doubled doubled and there's a second idea because not only eroid is valid so is leroid and Nigel is keeping the L so he's setting up two different ways he can profit from this next move computer analysis agrees that this is the best move but it wouldn't have occurred to most players we wouldn't generate this move because it doesn't follow the pattern of what we usually do in a situation like this here's another situation where again the obvious thing to do jumps out to strong players because they simply have a bunch of bingos they can play Here Again trailing late in the game and so playing bingo seems like a good idea obviously but Nigel decides that the best way to give himself a chance to win is to play the move for nine points why on Earth does he do that because he realizes that the timing doesn't work if he plays a bingo now the temporary lead dead in score that he gets is an illusion because his opponent will often be able to overtake him again in the resulting end game and etch out a win his opponent gets to play first in that end game and that can be decisive we don't need to get into the details here but Nigel realizes that he has a better shot of actually winning the game in the end if he plays all five of his titles now so that he leaves just one tile in the back and after his opponent plays his next move the opponent will draw that last tile and if neither then plays a bingo they'd move ends the game and this opponent can't do anything to get back again the other crucial thing here is that there's enough space left on the board that after Trigo his opponent can't just block the spaces where Nigel would play Bingo he's got several spaces computer analysis again confirms that Trigo has the highest chance of winning you really have to know what you're doing in order to pull the trigger on such a weird silly looking play in a tournament game and last but not least here's my favorite Nigel move because here we are in a world championship final and Nigel does something that to me is the equivalent of the famous penenka penalty in soccer or to choose a metaphor that our American friends can understand he throws one of the most disgusting curveballs in Scrabble history Nigel has the X and he's got an obvious simple play of scoring with that X the French word as it happens of Zhu which triples the X but the commentators on the live broadcast here which of course Nigel couldn't hear were like well we know Nigel likes set up so what if he doesn't play the X in the world what if he just plays j e u which is also valid for just 10 points rather than 34 but setting up a potentially huge score on the next move with the dangerous double word triple letter combination and the letter here would be six to build or whatever the word is because it counts in both directions but they immediately dismiss this idea because it's just too crazy even for Nigel and just as they were getting to that conclusion Nigel played this move so this is by far not the first such playoffs he loves set a place where he creates a hot spot for a letter that he's holding back but this one is so in your face in this world championship final that it put his opponent into the think tank for like seven minutes or something and that's part of the strength of such a move you force your opponent to react which you can't do as much in Scrabble as in other games and you take over the initiative they were perhaps planning to play a move somewhere else on the board now they need to react to this somehow because it's completely obvious what you're doing and they will sometimes maybe most of the time be able to stop you from Catching another setup but in doing so sacrifice points themselves and the cases where they cannot stop you are so profitable that Nigel thinks it's worth sacrificed 24 points here again computer analysis agrees but very few players would have played this move I almost want to move on without showing you what happened because in theory that doesn't actually matter we're playing a game of probability and which particular scenario happens to take place in this one instance doesn't tell us much but I realized that would be a bit cruel so in this specific case his opponent did play the best blocking option available to him but Nigel still got 60 or so points for exec because CH weirdly enough is a valid word and Nigel went on to win this game and if you're wondering about the other examples after Trigo Nigel did win the game with the Bingo the aeroid move was less successful as his world-class opponent had an effective way to block and Nigel ended up losing that game actually all of his opponents in these examples were world-class players but sometimes you just can't do anything alright I hope it has become clear why our little bubble of Scrabble aficionados use Nigel the way we do but before we finish this video it might occur to you that I haven't given you any background on Nigel other than that he's from New Zealand there's a good reason for that Nigel is absolutely not interested in public attention he doesn't give any interviews like I said the reason being that he just doesn't like the questions he has no online presence he keeps to himself and even though you can't find some information on his biography if a person is so adamant in privacy I think we should respect that but such an in-depth video on the story would simply not be complete if I didn't talk about this guy's personality for a minute because it is an essential part of Nigel's Mystique in Scrabble because for one thing people who become the very best at some game or sport are often somewhat difficult characters they might be extremely competitive and driven by ambition they might be a bit arrogant and looked down on the mere mortals but in a very Wholesome Way Nigel is the exact opposite to all of that by basically all accounts he's the most down-to-earth guy you could imagine likes to keep to himself but is friendly to people no arrogance whatsoever and apparently another characteristic of this guy is a great sense of humor be honest would you have guessed from this photo that this is a funny person well he just doesn't like to be photographed which is why Nigel is celebrating a world championship title looks like this so as the saying goes don't judge a walking dictionary by its cover and then there's the second aspect that needs to be mentioned which is the approach to the game the mindset because Scrabble like many games has a mental aspect that really shouldn't be underestimate that the game is all about decision making and that has so much to do with your mental state and one challenge in this regard that all tournament Players face is the random and unfair way that variance in luck can influence the game every Scrabble player knows that you just have to accept good and bad luck but it's easier said than done not to be frustrated when the tile back just won't cooperate with you of course every sane person also knows that winning or losing in the board game doesn't ultimately matter although admittedly in some cases there can be quite a lot of price money at stake but staying perfectly rational and not letting your decision making be clouded by emotions is a crucial skill in this game and the top players either bring it as part of their personality or develop it through experience as a necessity but Nigel as with the other aspects of the game apparently does this as effortlessly as anything else and often says that he simply doesn't care about winning or losing he's just there because the game is fun and if he happens to play so well that he wins the world championship well that's just a byproduct congratulations to David Eldar and winning this ridiculous game David's showing significant amount of emotion the ideal showing exceptional emotion as well right the man is destroyed now whenever someone points out how little they care about something I tend to suspect that they are lying to themselves and they wouldn't need to emphasize this if they really didn't care but with Nigel it really seems genuine he's the perfect impersonation of that Russian hockey player it's just a game why you have to be mad it's only a game why you have to be mad thank you so much for watching everyone if you're still stacking around here you're probably interested in Scrabble in that case check out will Anderson's videos which I've linked in the comments also maybe check out the Discord of Scrabble players that we have if we want to get into the game we are happy to welcome you it's a fantastic game it's a wonderful game it's really fun and you don't have to be slightly bad for us long lost cousin who didn't make it back to micro Thea to enjoy it and to play it well

Channel: Alex Dings

Views: 814,911

Keywords: Scrabble, Nigel Richards, French, Francais, Nigel

Id: T-8NrvVqbT4

Length: 48min 59sec (2939 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 06 2023