“That’s what you do.” Stefan Fatsis, author of Word Freak and expert-rated Scrabbler, was one of the first to point out that Lewis’ findings, though interesting, misinterpreted how a typical Scrabble player plays.
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“You learn how to use even if you have a rack with five vowels on it,” Cleary explains. But some Scrabble enthusiasts think it’s because of players’ adaptive strategy. Why did the amount of luck in Scrabble stay approximately the same even after shifting to Lewis’ tile values? The tests don’t give a definitive answer to this question: Scrabble’s complexity makes any clear-cut answer inherently difficult. But Lewis’ suggested values not only fail to reduce this difference, they actually cause a small (but statistically significant) increase: from 18 to 19 percent. Thousands of self-play Scrabble games revealed that the traditional tile values produce an average difference of approximately 18 percent in final scores between two identical players. Williams’ estimate turns out to be pretty accurate.
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The program was developed by competitive Scrabble players at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and is commonly used in the professional Scrabble community to train. I set up a Scrabble AI program called Quackle to play against itself with various tile values. This fact can be used to test whether Lewis’ new tile values actually reduced the role of luck, and increased the role of skill, in Scrabble scores. In theory, the slimmer the average difference in score over many games between two identical opponents, the less luck is inherent in a game. Scrabble’s complexity makes any clear-cut answer inherently difficult. His results recommended, for example, that “Q” remain at 10 points, but that “Z” drop to 6. He wrote a program that used multiple metrics, considering a letter’s frequency in the dictionary and the typical word length, to calculate the difficulty of placing it. Lewis calculated new tile values, reasoning that after 80 years, with new words added to the dictionary, Scrabble could use an update. The creator of Scrabble, Alfred Butts, first determined the values by hand in the 1930s by studying letter frequency, including of articles published on the front page of The New York Times. Somewhere in that range.” Lewis’ hypothesis is that the degree of luck can be tuned by changing the point values of tiles. “But some people say it’s more like 20 percent. He mentions the same number in his book Word Nerd. “The community mostly agrees it’s around 15 percent luck,” said John Williams, the former head of the National Scrabble Association. The professional Scrabble world is well aware of how important luck is to the game. If we want to make Scrabble scoring more indicative of skill, we’ve been looking at the wrong part of the game for years. The tests also show, however, that traditional tile scoring isn’t more fair than random tile values. His values don’t reduce the element of luck in Scrabble. Recently, I conducted my own tests to see if Lewis’ values really make Scrabble more fair. John Chew, then the co-president of the North American Scrabble Players Association, titled a two-part, 2,600-word diatribe in response to Lewis’ suggestion, “Catastrophic Outrage.”
As you can imagine, traditionalists like Cleary were dismissive of Lewis’ suggestion.
The suggestion was picked up by the BBC, the Huffington Post, and TIME, among others. Therefore, it’s luckier to draw a “Z” than a “Q.” Lewis argued that the traditional values associated with each letter diminish the role of skill in the game, and recommended changing them to make Scrabble scores more indicative of skill. His study showed that there are “lucky” tiles in Scrabble: A “Q” is harder to place on a board than a “Z,” and yet both are worth 10 points.
candidate at the University of California, San Diego, it isn’t a sensible one. It’s a sweet sentiment, but according to a 2014 statistical program written by Joshua Lewis, then a Ph.D.
When I asked her if she’s ever disappointed to draw certain tiles, she looked surprised, even hurt. Cleary, a 68-year-old retired financial consultant, has been playing every week for 20 years since founding the Princeton Scrabble Club in 1998. You can find Lynda Woods Cleary playing Scrabble every Tuesday at a Panera in Princeton, NJ.
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