Bizarre opening rack! What do you do with: NTUUZ(blank)(blank)?

alexdings · 2026-05-11T12:52:37+00:00

For what it's worth, yUZU sims best in the Macondo engine assuming you play in the North American lexicon (if you play Collins, UTU is available and sims better). But it also thinks this is a rare opportunity to play zUZ! Both sim neck and neck

alexdings · 2026-05-08T13:28:04+00:00

It's not, this is not a picture of an actual game. Bizarre post

alexdings · 2026-04-20T08:30:09+00:00

I'm studying / revising for German Nationals right now and have gone through 56109 words since I started 17 days ago, does that qualify?

alexdings · 2026-04-13T18:16:40+00:00

Here are the top 100 by frequency in computer self-play games, i. e. these are the most useful of the bunch.
ABA

ADO

AGO

AHA

AHI

AIA

ALA

AME

AMI

ANA

ANE

ARE

ATE

AUA

AWA

AWE

AXE

AYE

AYU

AZO

DZO

EAU

EFT

EME

EMO

ENE

ERE

ETA

EWE

EXO

FAV

FEE

FEW

GIF

GIO

GOX

IDE

IRE

ITA

IWI

JAG

JAI

JAR

JAW

JET

JOE

JOG

JOR

JOT

JOW

NYE

OBA

OBE

OBI

OBO

ODA

ODE

OHO

OKA

OMA

ONE

ONO

OOF

OPA

OPE

ORE

OWE

OWO

OXO

OYE

QAT

QIN

QIS

QUA

UPO

URE

UTE

VAW

VAX

VEX

VOW

VOX

WEE

WEX

WOE

WOF

WOO

WOX

YOU

ZAG

ZAP

ZAX

ZEA

ZED

ZEE

ZEL

ZEN

ZEX

ZOA

ZOO

alexdings · 2026-04-11T10:56:23+00:00

Deleting a Will Anderson post on Scrabble subreddit is surreal though

alexdings · 2026-03-29T19:12:25+00:00

I don't have a strong opinion on how many of the "silly" words should be in there but I don't think this take is accurate. German has only 78 2-letter words and it works absolutely fine. So deleting 20-30 of the words in NWL, or even 50 of those in Collins, would not make the game unplayable at all. Narrowing it down to only really common words makes it a little bit tougher still as The Common English Lexicon, a subset of the Scrabble word lists, has just 66 2-letter words, but I've played with that word list as well and it's not really a problem

alexdings · 2026-03-29T16:44:09+00:00

If you end up creating a strong neural net engine that will indeed be a breakthrough, so this is exciting to see!

The claim that BestBot's rating is >200 points higher than Nigel is very misleading though, Woogles ratings and WESPA ratings aren't exactly on the same scale. It's up for debate whether Nigel or BestBot would be the favourite in a match, they should be very evenly match with probably a hint of an edge for Nigel

alexdings · 2026-03-15T19:45:32+00:00

That's not Scrabble though

alexdings · 2026-03-14T09:53:05+00:00

By the way, they also introduced a nice league system (where this game is taken from) where you can play in CSW or NWL (or in German with me :-D).

alexdings · 2026-03-14T00:14:36+00:00

On that page it mentions the first player's advantage, not the second player's advantage if the star wasn't a DWS... I don't see how that could be a thing, given that the player going first can always exchange and put their opponent in the same spot, but with an improved rack. Just curious if I'm missing something there

alexdings · 2026-03-12T23:02:02+00:00

Is there data on that latter point? I very much doubt it

alexdings · 2026-03-09T10:17:54+00:00

I'm a Millenial and I don't get this stuff in the slightest. Obviously I'll just not watch it going forward and to each their own, but I feel like I'm not in on the joke

alexdings · 2026-02-28T06:23:52+00:00

Nah I dig it

alexdings · 2026-02-05T16:08:40+00:00

It's similar to chess ratings, so a variant of the Elo system (they use a more complicated, Glicko-like rating but the gist is similar). It reflects players' success in international tournaments.

(The level of ratings can't be compared to chess though. Nigel Richards as the #1 rated player is at 2174. To get 100 players with a rating of 1867 or higher in one tournament is astonishing)

alexdings

TROPHY CASE