Scrabble

I’ve never been a Scrabble fan. And yet I found this extract from Oliver Roeder’s book fascinating. He hits the nail on the head as to why kids dislike the game:

“The problem when you start playing Scrabble—​especially if you start as a kid—​is simply that you don’t know many words… You spend a lot of time trying to figure out how to make a word, any word, with the tiles on your rack, and then trying to figure out where to play them, and discovering that the whole enormously frustrating effort was worth, like, six points.”

 

One has to rise “one step above beginner” to begin to enjoy the game:

“Anagramming is an addictive intellectual rush. Unscrambling AAABLOPR, DFGGHIOT, or EILLMNOU for the first time feels like exercising a minor superpower.”

 

But if you want to be really good, like competitive good, then the process begins to sound like chess:

“One must study. One first learns the “twos,” or two-​letter words… Many of them are already familiar: AN, IT, OF, WE. But many are not: AA, AI, XI, XU (There are 107 of them). Then one moves on to the threes, of which there are 1,082… Then the fours, of which there are 4,218.”

If that sounded like memorizing chess openings, endings and everything in between, then you’re absolutely right.

 

Indeed, that’s what Scrabble masters do – they memorize as many of those words as possible. Most adults know around 30,000 words; Scrabble allows for 192,111 words. So no, the game can’t be mastered by improving ones’ vocabulary. This explains a lot of things:

“A number of the world’s best English-​language players come from Thailand and barely speak English. And recall that the world’s best English-​language player won the French-​language championship without speaking French.”

 

Memorization, getting good at solving anagrams, and of course, lots of practice – that’s what makes the best Scrabble players, not their vocab…