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August 28, 2015

Episode #479

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How People Play Scrabble in Different Parts of the World

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Today I have the second part of my visit to the North American Scrabble championships. If you missed part one, it’s Grammar Girl episode 477 from August 13, so you can find it at iTunes or Stitcher or wherever you listen to podcasts, but this week, the co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association, John Chew is going to tell us how people win Scrabble tournaments when they don’t even speak the language, what some of the tricks are that Scrabble masters use to memorize words, how Scrabble is played differently in other countries, why it would be extra cool to go to Thailand to play, what one thing you should focus on if you want to be a better player, and finally how you can compete in the national championship—it’s not as hard as you may think, but it requires mental focus.

Playing Scrabble When You Don't Speak the Language

FOGARTY: There was a lot of buzz at the champions because a rock star player named Nigel Richards, an English speaker, had just won the French world championship—after studying the French word list for just a few months—but it’s actually not a new thing for people to play Scrabble in foreign languages. Here’s John Chew.

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CHEW: It’s not the first time that anyone has done this. I believe a Frenchman has won the Spanish world championship, and more than one Thai player has won the English language world championship with very little spoken fluency in English, but certainly the ability to memorize a large number of words in a foreign language . . . it’s interesting playing some Thai players because their approach to the English language is very different from native speakers, and there’s something very alien about it.

FOGARTY: What he means is that foreign players need to study the English word list efficiently—to optimize their mental effort—so they study the good Scrabble words, not everyday English words. So foreign players often don’t know common English words like hitch.

CHEW: No native speaker of English would ever challenge the word hitch in a Scrabble game, but that would be the sort of word that a non-native player might easily challenge because when you study words systematically, to optimize the mental effort of studying word, you study the words that are going to be most useful. The odds of actually playing the word hitch in a Scrabble game are very low because there are only two H's in the bag. You’d need to have both of them and one of the two C’s, so their type of play tends to be, very Scrabbly, because you get a lot of Scrabble words, and you don’t get eight- and nine-letter words that are everyday words away from the Scrabble board but are almost never played in Scrabble.

Tricks for Memorizing Scrabble Words

FOGARTY: So how do people study these words lists? It’s all about memorization, so what are their memorization techniques? Stefan Fatsis—you remember him from the Scrabble episode a few weeks ago; he’s the guy who wrote the book Word Freak—he uses free training software put out by NASPA called Zyzzava, but other top players have devised their own methods.

CHEW: There’s one former world champion named David Bois who came up with his buddy system for learning words. He takes each word and assigns it a buddy in the dictionary. It’s a word that reminds him of the other word, and it’s like when you’re in kindergarten and you’re holding hands with your buddy on a field trip. You’re far less likely to lose two kindergarten kids or two words from your vocabulary than you are to lose one. So I don’t know if he still uses that, but I know he hasn’t lost any of his three kids, so there’s probably something.

Another champions named Joel Wapnick has a page-based system.

FOGARTY: John is going to mention alphagrams next. The word was coined by Joe Edley and Jim Homan, and it’s when you take all the letters in a word and rearrange them so they’re in alphabetical order. The alphagram for the word car is acr—you’ve rearranged the letters C A R so they are in alphabetical order. A comes first, C comes second, and R comes third. Here’s an example of a longer alphagram that contains seven common letters that can make nine different seven-letter words: A-E-I-R-N-S-T:

CHEW: Those seven letters, A E I R N S T, you can make any of the nine seven-letter words. anestri, antsier, nastier, ratines, retains, retinas, retsina, stainer, stearin. There are different techniques.

FOGARTY: Back to Joel Wapnick’s method for memorizing words.

CHEW: He doesn’t use pure alphagrams; he takes all the vowels first and puts them at the beginning of the alphagram and then all the consonants, and sorts them separately alphabetically, which kind of .. I can see why he does that because vowels and consonants are different in the way they interact, and it’s good to know how many vowels and consonants you have in a word, so he takes all of those possible pseudoalphagrams and prints them out in alphabetical order and then, a certain number, like 200, to a page, and then he sits down and memorizes them page by page.

A Way of Thinking That Will Improve Your Scrabble Score

FOGARTY: Let’s say you don’t want to memorize 90,000 words. Let’s say you’ve just memorized the two-letter words, and the good Q-words, and you want to get a little better. Here’s John’s advice.

CHEW: When you’re playing Scrabble seriously, there’s strategy to it as well as word knowledge. And the most important aspect of strategy is to plan ahead. Even a casual player, if they’ve played enough, should have developed some sense as to what’s going to happen when they put a word on the board. Is their opponent going to be able to easily respond to that? Are they setting themselves up for a bigger play the next turn? And so I always tell people if they want to know how to increase their Scrabble scores, after you learn the basic tools of the lexicon, what you should really do is instead of thinking what’s my highest scoring play, or worse, what is the prettiest word I can make with these tiles, you should think, what can I do now that will see me ahead by the largest number of