![]() What’s the fastest way to improve your Scrabble game? Memorizing tricks. ![]() You have to get the spelling correctly or else your turn could be challenged. After all, the letters in Scrabble are appointed with a point value. More than just a family favorite, Scrabble is also a great way to build your memory and spelling skills. It's also considered a game of chance due to dice rolls, and can be played with 2-4 players. The winner is the player with the most points at the end of the game. You rack up points by playing and 'building' letters on the board. I welcome comments from any readers (and Scrabble players) who can provide additional information about this curious anomaly.Scrabble is a tile-based board game in the same vein as dominoes or monopoly. “I still have no idea why the game is biased,” he says. Robinove contacted the game’s manufacturer, but received no reply. How pervasive was the problem? Was it an isolated case, affecting only Robinove’s particular unit or perhaps one manufacturing run of the device? If not, was the problem ever identified and fixed in later production runs of the handheld game? Was the problem caused by a programming error or the use of a faulty random number generator? Was it precipitated by the implementation of the wrong letter distribution? Was the game changed in some way to fit within the limitations of the chosen electronic format, leading to anomalies in the letter frequency? The results of Robinove’s investigation leave several mysteries. Rounding to the nearest integer means that the total number of tiles isn’t precisely 100. “The huge difference in letter-frequency deviation reinforces the conclusion from the analysis of vowel frequency that the pick of letters in a hand does not represent a statistically random letter selection and is therefore unfair to the player of the game.” “There are too few vowels and too many rare consonants such as Q, W, and V in the Scrabble Express game,” Robinove concluded. In contrast, the handheld Scrabble Express unit produced 23 hands with no vowels. Moreover, out of 100 hands, the Scrabble computer game produced only two hands with no vowels. Scrabble Express provided only 1.36 on average. The computer version of Scrabble provided an average of 2.84 vowels per hand, quite close to the expected number, 2.94 vowels per hand. Robinove describes his findings in the current issue of Chance.įor each of the two versions of the game, Robinove drew 100 initial hands, totaling 700 letters, then looked at the vowel frequency. He decided to investigate the situation by comparing the performance of the handheld device with that of a computer edition of the game. While playing Hasbro’s Scrabble Express, Robinove got the impression that he was drawing too few vowels and too many low-frequency (high-scoring) consonants. Robinove of Monument, Colo., tried out an electronic travel edition of the game. That’s what happened when retired geologist Charles J. When you find yourself drawing seven-letter combinations such as NQWZCGJ more often than you would expect, however, it pays to take a closer look at what’s going on. An unlucky player can occasionally draw a seven-letter hand that contains no vowels, but the chances of doing so are relatively slim given the letter distribution. Players start with seven tiles, then draw additional tiles to replace any that are played on the board.
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