I am being whupped by a buddy of mine at Scrabulous - consistently.
Yet the emails I get from him are riddled with spelling errors, and in the years I’ve known him, I’ve never know his vocabulary to be particularly large.
He’s coming up with vast and complex words that I scarcely recognise, using all of his tiles, and getting 50+ points per round. Either the guy is a secret, hidden verbal genius who never shows his prowess in written communications, or he’s a dirty rotten cheat. I favour the latter explanation.
So, what application is he using to beat me? And how can I use it to cheat back? Any ideas?
I think he may be using an anagram generator, but he does it so quickly, and in quite a versatile manner, whereas anagram servers don’t support a space that can comprise multiple letters. I was wondering if there is a Scrabble simulator out there?
Like Antinor01 said he is most likely using a word generator like this one to assist him with the game. A quick google search for “scrabble word generator” returns numerous sources so you have many options for which one you would like to use.
He might have a very large vocabulary, but write poorly anyway. A certain prolific poster on this board has this very same problem and is very good at Scrabble.
He might be using this wonderful tool. http://wordsmith.org/anagram/advanced.html with Show candidate word list only set to Yes and Minimum number of letters in each word set to 5.
I unpicked your link and see what you mean, but you don’t “write poorly” compared to this guy (or, indeed, at all).
He writes stuff like (copied from a mail he sent me): “tamara needs your help to build a web site for her new day care center that shes going to build can you do this for her??” and yet leads with words like QATS on the double-word-score. Bastard!
If you go back to my earliest posts here, you will see I was a very lazy writers. Dopers have caused/encourage me to improve my writing skills and another very handy free program called IESPELL has really helped. In 2½ years my writing and typing skills have improved back to where they were when I was at 17 and fresh out of High School. I got very lazy in the 2 decades in between. Actually I type better and faster than I ever did and I probably spell better than I ever did.
I really was about as bad as your friend. Many posters offered constructive criticism and others just razzed me. It forced me to become ‘unlazy’.
I have always been a very good Scrabble Player. I won a small tourney on the Carrier I served on. That was out of a pool of 5000 men and played with actual sets with no chance of cheating.
So it could be either or both of the reasons I listed.
You have it running in another window, tell it what dictionary you are using (TWL98, SOWPODS, ETC.) and enter the words as they are played. you punch in your rack and it automatically finds the highest scoring possible word on the board.
People can be lousy at vocab, grammar, etc, but still be good at Scrabble. If they’re one of these types who memorize word lists, work on hooks, know their two- and three-letter words, and so on. A lot of that is pure memorization, so it’s not inconceivable that a poor writer could do all that.
But as you suspect, probably more likely that he’s using something.
Some anagram finders also allow a wildcard character, so that would help a player figure out where things could go no matter what is available on the board. But to be a really good player, one would still need to know about two-letter words and other oddball Scrabble words that help slot a word into tight places and score multiple words in one turn.
I haven’t heard of the kind of thing MikeG is talking about, but that sure sounds like it could be a godsend for a lousy player. Although, if that’s how it works (and what he is using) what is the point of even playing?
I use it as a training tool. I play at www.isc.ro and when I play against the computer there I will sometimes use this to analyze my plays. I tend to remember the words better that way than by rote memorization of lists like some of my firends do.
My name is MikeG and I’m a Scrabble Addict. I play about 10-15 games a week.
Unless you’re against someone with an astounding vocabulary who can build large words with almost any rack, a better understanding of the strategy of the game will beat a somewhat better vocabulary.
I have just as good a vocabulary, am just as good a writer, as my wife, but I can’t beat her at Scrabble. She wins every game. I’m pretty good at it, but she’s even better than I am. Her vocabulary is very, very good, but what just kills me is the strategic play. She’s a master at moving the game in a direction to give her the triple and double word and triple letter scores. She’ll pass up a few points and get you building towards the big ticket squares so she can gobble them up; she blocks, she builds, she puts the right letters in the right position to make it unlikely that you can snag a multiplier yourself. Her game is knowing not just what the best word is on this turn, but knowing what word will make it likelier that you won’t be able to grab the big multipliers, or will be forced to give her a shot at them.
I think Scrabulous hates me though - I have five games on the go at the moment, and in each game I have a minimum tray of five vowels. And in one of them I have seven vowels, four of which are Es.
I play scrabulous with my girlfriend (the lovely doper Araminty) frequently, and AFTER I make a play I will frequently check scrabblewordfinder.com to see if I missed a better one. I’m very happy when I actually come up with the best possible play, which happens every once in a while.
(It’s very satisfying to spend a long time looking for a bingo, not find one, and then have it confirmed that there wasn’t one.)
When my wife and I started dating we would play Scrabble and I would play strategically. She would just put down the best score she could find not paying attention to opening up triple word plays and such. She quickly realized what I was doing and complained that I was playing “dirty Scrabble”. Of course she eventually started playing “dirty Scrabble” and now she beats me quite regularly.