Hardscrabble Spotlight

Hitting TheWall812

by Ember Nelson

When I first started playing SCRABBLE online, I used MPlayer, a now-defunct gaming site, as did many of our SCRABBLE brethren. I used to love to frolic in the lobby, exchanging witty reparté with this extremely knowledgeable and funny character named TheWall812. Playing SCRABBLE on MPlayer, for those of you who are not familiar with the site, was like going on a wild SCRABBLE ride. You launched from your "room,” which you created whenever you and a friend decided you wanted to play a game, and then you each got 30 seconds or 1 minute (depending on your room preferences) per turn to find and type in your play or bingo. I was alphadoc29, and my room was the Alpha Quadrant. The better the player, the wilder the ride would seem. TheWall812 had an especially rough ride, and playing him was literally, at times, like "hitting a wall", or like you just got hit by one. My nickname for him was Wally.

Wally's real name is Brian Williams.

Some of us who attended Lori Gaut’s seaside bonfire party at the San Diego Nationals may recall him as the guy playing the guitar while we all sang "American Pie" (come to think of it, we all had an awesome time singing the same song at Annette's barbecue this year in Albany, and I am just shy of dubbing that song the "SCRABBLE Player's Anthem").

Brian played on MPlayer until it went defunct, then played on The Zone (there are lots of "Zoners" in our midst, ah, but that is another story), and finally ended up where most of us play: on HYPERLINK "http://isc.ro/"isc.ro. Although Brian is not an official “helper” on ISC, he adds pizzazz to the site by supplying information to both regulars and newbies, always with a witty twist or a joke that cracks up the entire online community. We all love "Wally".

But for some time now, when I ask him for a game, he says he is working on some stats or lists. He isn’t playing online much anymore. Math has always fascinated him. He takes the math and the strategy of SCRABBLE to lengths that I think would do all of us some good to try to understand ALL of the nuances of this game.

I’ve asked Brian, who was once in the 98th percentile of SCRABBLE players, and who has hovered for almost a decade in the 90th percentile, to share his background in SCRABBLE and to try to explain his perception of the game.

My father was a highly respected British educator who moved to Canada in the 60's. He had a peculiar reverence for the English language and literature. Clarity of expression was a concept of inherent beauty to him. Of course, his influence greatly shaped my development as a youngster, and I couldn't help seeing words as being more than just component bits of conversations and written dialogue.

I was exposed to SCRABBLE early in life, but at first it made little impression on me. My family moved to a farmhouse in a somewhat isolated area, and until I learned to drive, it was often a challenge to occupy myself in ways other than watching TV, reading, or training at table tennis (I was the junior champion of the province, and I spent a lot of time being driven to provincial squad practices or flying to tourneys around the country).

So I had some time left over to consider what made SCRABBLE tick, something I found more interesting when I came to understand that mathematics, not English, drove the game.

And once you look at SCRABBLE mathematically, you see it can be modeled as a resource competition—analogous to a micro-economy from a financial standpoint, or a microenvironment from an ecological point of view.

Your success largely depended on out-competing your opponent for resources (be they premium squares, profitable hooks or extensions, the tile supply in the bag, etc.), exploiting your resources efficiently, and denying resources to your opponent.

To me as a kid, this approach made SCRABBLE far more interesting than a mere exercise in seeing if you can plunk down a particularly unusual word.

I didn't have any knowledge of high-level competition SCRABBLE, didn't know it existed, didn't know there were even books on it, so I tried to figure out winning approaches on my own.

Going for maximum efficiency, even though it minimized tile turnover? Going for maximum tile turnover, even though it minimized efficiency? As I expected, there seemed to be a situation-dependent middle ground that worked best.

SCRABBLE took a back seat during my high school and university years, and I became more involved in music.

After graduation, I had all sorts of difficulty finding a job, but spare time was suddenly in no short supply; so I read voraciously, played and wrote music voraciously, returned to competitive table tennis (as a player and a coach), and started to renew my acquaintance with SCRABBLE — especially once I got a computer.

My first introduction to a high-level player only came about after starting to play on line sometime around 1999. I went through the inevitable initiation process of finding out people actually memorized word lists to improve their prowess at the game. I remember being shocked to have ANESTRI played on me and thinking (after looking it up), "What the hell kind of person not only knows 'anestrus,’ but knows its plural is 'anestri,' and sees it in under a minute???"

Ah, word lists. Made sense. Because, as I'd discovered as a teenager, SCRABBLE is a resource competition, and every extra word in your vocabulary is another resource.

My vocabulary was already good — Dad’s influence — but it wasn't a SCRABBLE vocabulary. I'd play UNCIALS out of ACILNSU easily, but I wouldn't yet dream of something like SENARII or ENOLASE.

Thousands of online games later — and exposure to many experienced opponents — I’d basically learned the basic stem bingos through osmosis.

By spring of 2000, primarily due to the coaxing of online NSA buddies William Shipe and Lori Gaut [AHEM! Don't forget that I and the ENTIRE online SCRABBLE community also egged you on, Wally!], I made my first club appearance. At the time, the top players at the Winnipeg Club were maxing out at about a 1200-1300 rating.

I had been playing Maven regularly, and noticing that it rarely played a stem bingo. I began analyzing the bingos it DID play most often, and decided that the common vocabulary-building approach of studying stem lists was very much a hit-and-miss affair.

I later began compiling a database of bingos reported in clubs and tourneys, which after about 7 years is nearing 180,000 bingos. By cross-referencing the two lists (bingos played by computer programs and bingos played by human beings), I could determine which bingos were most understudied by tournament players at large. The last such comparison I made suggested that our most neglected bingo is FILARIAE.

Anyway, I remember being challenged on ALEURONE during my first-ever club visit, by the guy who was (until that day) the club's top player. ALEURONE was a bingo favored by Maven over almost all but the top few stem bingos like ERASION and ATONIES, and I'd duly noted it. My stem-studying opponents had never encountered it in their regimen.

Fortunately, within a few months of my arrival, Dave Huebert started to attend club regularly, and I had a self-described “expert manqué” to push me. He was about a 1650-1700 level player, but work and family commitments ultimately saw him vanish from the local SCRABBLE scene again.

I spent 2002 and 2003 in a quest to see if I could really compete at the highest levels — which meant I had to invest in some major traveling, as there were no experts within a 9-hour drive of me. By 2004, with an improbable Twin Cities Division 1 win and a rating over 1850, I felt I'd answered that question sufficiently, and I no longer had anything to prove to myself.

I went on a sort of SCRABBLE hiatus where I merely attended my local club, played in local events, and that was about it.

I continued, whenever I had time, to keep expanding my SCRABBLE databases. I was more interested in discovering the mathematical guts of the game than actually playing it.

I learned, for instance, that we are more likely to miss a Y-containing bingo than any other letter.

I learned that H and M have a hidden strength: they are the least likely (not counting the blanks) to be the worst or most unwelcome letter on your rack, a quality I think is very difficult to discern unless you figure out, as I did, an experiment to actually rank tiles on this characteristic.

I learned that, as far as 7-letter bingos are concerned, the stickiest tile in SCRABBLE is an S in the first position (72.5% of the time, the S in first position will be involved in a hook).

An S in the fifth position (the least “hookiest” position in a 7-letter bingo) only hooks in 28% of situations.

Most of this doesn't help me play better, but that isn't the intent. I'm just interested in ways to define the behavior and characteristics of different words and different letters as they are used in high-level SCRABBLE — and to see if it can all be described in a predictable, mathematical way.

So now did we ALL get that? Brian says that at the moment he is working in a large insurance/financial services corporation while playing guitar and keyboard in three bands.

I always knew that besides board vision, strategy, word knowledge, and a very impressive end game, there was so much more to SCRABBLE! NOT! Thank you, Brian, for giving me even MORE studying to do and variables to consider (after I figure out just exactly what you said) on my way to becoming a mediocre player! Sigh...........

Hardscrabble Spotlight Word: HOGMANAY = MAHOGANY

Ember Nelson has been playing tournament SCRABBLE for ten years and is the author of
The Race Towards the Light: Hardscrabble, available on Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/.