Carpenter Breaks Previous Scrabble Point Record

theodp writes "Unimpressed by Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game? Think Don Larsen's perfect World Series game was no big deal? How about Michael Cresta's 830-point Scrabble game? Not only did Cresta shatter a 13 year-old record for the highest sanctioned Scrabble score in North America, he also set a new record for the most points on a single turn — 365, for QUIXOTRY."

Comments

'zas', 'em'?

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah I think they may be using the Klingon version. I know you can use slang in the official rules but some of the words I saw on their board I couldnt find on dictionary.com at least.
Strictly the Queen's English when I play. ;-)

There's room for debate

[Chris Pimlott]

Scrabble is very much a tactical game; what you can do at any time is dependant on the actions of the other players. For example, you could get a much higher score than normal if you had a poor opponent who kept setting you up for easy triples,

In this case, though, it doesn't look like that was going on. The other player had a pretty strong game himself. In the end, the comments from the 'serious' players just sound like bitterness.

Congrats to the new champ.

Re:Daft words....

[mikael]

It's the same in just about every game - even with the platform video games. You could play Super Mario just to complete every level as quickly as possible and not care about collecting every gold star and coin. Alternatively, you could take as long as you liked in order to get every last coin and star. In this case, you would have to know every secret hiding place, combination move and portal.

If you wanted to play those games that have skill levels with high scores but with no save feature, then you would eventually reach a point where the only way to get a new high score was to get a perfect score at the very beginning. Otherwise, there is no point continuing.

Then for those cable TV settop box games with cash prizes, there is a financial incentive for knowing how to win a game, either through skill or AI programming.

My favourite story was when the amusement arcade manufacturers came out with Trivial Pursuit video games for pubs and bars. Initially, revenues were high since the machines were a novelty and the punters didn't get the answers right. Then, paradoxically, (at least to the owners), as the number of punters went up the takings actually went down, until the machines were actually making a loss. Research revealed that the punters had gone down the local library, brushed up on their general knowledge and started to treat the machines as nothing more than pop quiz ATMs to pay for their drinks.