The French Scrabble Champ Does Not Speak French

HughPickens.com writes: On July 20, Nigel Richards won the French-language world Scrabble championship. Richards does not speak a word of French. "He doesn't speak French at all, he just learnt the words," says Liz Fagerlund. "He won't know what they mean, wouldn't be able to carry out a conversation in French I wouldn't think." Richards reportedly memorized an entire French dictionary in the two months leading up to the competition. For living-room players, Scrabble is a test of vocabularies but for world-class players, it's about cold memorization and mathematical probabilities which is why top player are often computer programmers or mathematicians, not poets or novelists. Think of the dictionary as a giant rulebook of valid text strings not as a compendium of the beauty and complexity of the English language. A good competitive player will have memorized a sizeable chunk of the 83,667 words that are two letters to eight letters long. Great players will know a lot of the 29,150 nine-letter words as well.

To the uninitiated, a scrabble game played by top players looks like they had played in Martian. Here's a taste: In a single game in last year's Nationals, Richards played the following words: zarf (a metal holder for a coffee cup), waddy (to strike with a thick club), hulloed (to hallo, to shout), sajous (a capuchin, a monkey), qi (the vital force in Chinese thought), flyboats (a small, fast boat), trigo (wheat) and threaper (one that threaps, disputes). Richards has a photographic memory and is known for his uncanny gift for constructing impossible words by stringing his letters through tiles already on the board. "He is probably the best Scrabble player in the world at this point," says John D. Williams, Jr.. "He's got the entire dictionary memorized. He's pretty much a Scrabble machine, if such a thing exists." So, really, how does he do it? As Richards said in an interview posted on YouTube, "I'm not sure there is a secret. It's just a matter of learning the words." All 178,691 of them.

Comments

Is this a surprise?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Scrabble is only a game about words at fairly low levels of play. If you have two otherwise unprepared people stuck in a room with nothing but scrabble for amusement, yes, the one with the better vocabulary likely has better options. Outside of the amateurs, though, memorization of the approved dictionary(starting with words chosen for good point values, the ability to dispose of letters that are usually tricky to get rid of, and other helpful features; but ideally progressing to all of them) supplants knowledge of the language and the remaining challenge is board control and optimizing the conversion of tiles into points over the course of the game.

There would certainly be additional prep time, even for the unusual characters who are really good at this; but the skills that the game demands for high level play should be transferable to any language(or even a nonsense dictionary) that works reasonably well with representation by a relatively small alphabet.

Re:Is this a surprise?

[ebh]

Those of us who play tournament Scrabble are only mildly surprised that Nigel learned all the words in that short a period of time. But what makes Nigel the best is much more than knowing all the words. There are a few dozen players, and a number of computer players, who can credibly make that claim.

Nobody has Nigel's combination of word knowledge, board vision, and ability to calculate probabilities.

Re:Hobby vs Professional

[ebh]

if you want to be a professional game/sport player, Scrabble is not the way to go. One year, the top prize at the US National Scrabble Championship, attended by about 700 players, was $25,000, the highest it ever was. Someone pointed out that year that $50,000 was the top prize of the national championship of Tiddlywinks.