I am here, take me scrabble!
Posted by Megel Barker on Saturday, April 5, 2014
I have decided to devote the rest of my gaming life to improve my scrabble. I have played a bit of chess but alas no improvement. To be fair, I struggle to remember the variations and always missed tactical moves even novices find easy. So after years of buying chess books and watching chess videos and joining ICC and playchess.com, I gave up - for now...
Aerolith.org was first introduced to me by the scholarly ebook - The Scrabble Players' Handbook- a masterful collection of important insights into the technical side of scrabble. Immediately I realised how little I knew of scrabble.
Once I started to play competitively, I reflected on my game and concluded that
1. I had a good retention of words
2. I had a good base knowledge of words
3. I knew all the two-letter words
4. I could find bingoes on my rack
5. I could waste lots of time searching for bingoes that did not exist
6. I wasn't sure of words my oponents played - so inevitably I challenged basic words
The list goes on. I assessed that my biggest strength, was bingoes. I could anagram fairly well but I was limited to playing words I knew... I would lose my play trying for a words outside of my knowledge.
This really bothered me, I couldn't see how to improve. I remember one night playing against a guy from Bahrain and he played ERIONITE, I observed another game and I saw TEOSINTE (NOISETTE). I was in awe. I didn't even knew these words eisted in the first place yet players were not only playing them but were doing so unchallenged too! It dawned on me then I needed to learn new words and I needed a plan. NOW!
I tried a Wordwall (on Aerolith) and could only muster about 12% in 4 mins. Someone had gotten 100%! Wow. A wordwall looks like this:
After a few days I realised that while a learned a few words, I was not progressing systematically. I couldn't track my improvement or even measure it. Then I stumbled onto probability search. Eureka! And Alphagrams. I selected 7s and 1 to 10. Effectively, I asked the engine to challenge me on the first most probable alphagrams on 7-tile rack.
I set myself the challenge of learning 10 new alphagrams per study session. My first 10 are shown bleow:
Next post, I will talk about what I learnt from the WW above.
Aerolith.org was first introduced to me by the scholarly ebook - The Scrabble Players' Handbook- a masterful collection of important insights into the technical side of scrabble. Immediately I realised how little I knew of scrabble.
Once I started to play competitively, I reflected on my game and concluded that
1. I had a good retention of words
2. I had a good base knowledge of words
3. I knew all the two-letter words
4. I could find bingoes on my rack
5. I could waste lots of time searching for bingoes that did not exist
6. I wasn't sure of words my oponents played - so inevitably I challenged basic words
The list goes on. I assessed that my biggest strength, was bingoes. I could anagram fairly well but I was limited to playing words I knew... I would lose my play trying for a words outside of my knowledge.
This really bothered me, I couldn't see how to improve. I remember one night playing against a guy from Bahrain and he played ERIONITE, I observed another game and I saw TEOSINTE (NOISETTE). I was in awe. I didn't even knew these words eisted in the first place yet players were not only playing them but were doing so unchallenged too! It dawned on me then I needed to learn new words and I needed a plan. NOW!
I tried a Wordwall (on Aerolith) and could only muster about 12% in 4 mins. Someone had gotten 100%! Wow. A wordwall looks like this:
After a few days I realised that while a learned a few words, I was not progressing systematically. I couldn't track my improvement or even measure it. Then I stumbled onto probability search. Eureka! And Alphagrams. I selected 7s and 1 to 10. Effectively, I asked the engine to challenge me on the first most probable alphagrams on 7-tile rack.
I set myself the challenge of learning 10 new alphagrams per study session. My first 10 are shown bleow:
Next post, I will talk about what I learnt from the WW above.
Tags: scrabble oman muscat "megel barker"
A teacher of mathematics who enjoys playing scrabble, and who has naively saddled himself with the goal of improving his game to an expert level.
