From Novice to Expert with Scrabble World Champion David Eldar
David Eldar is a real estate investor better known as Australia’s top-ranked Scrabble player, a title he has held since 2014. David was the 2017 Scrabble World Champion and the 2019 World Runner-Up and is consistently rated among the top five Scrabble players in the entire world.
In this conversation, we explore the underlying principles of strategy, language, and gameplay through the lens of Scrabble. Pay attention to David’s approach to dominating the meta-skills of Scrabble to discover hidden dimensions in the games you choose to play.
See above for video, and below for audio, resources mentioned, and transcript.
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Links and resources we mentioned during our conversation:
Additional Forcing Function links:
Experiment Without Limits (peak performance workbook, free download)
Performance Assessment (quiz to reveal your greatest opportunity for growth)
Check out previous Forcing Function Hour episodes.
Topics:
(01:39) Getting started with Scrabble
(04:37) The King’s Cup: Bangkok
(11:27) Solving anagrams and encoding over a hundred thousand words
(21:04) Outlier personalities and intentional imbalances
(31:16) Strategy and self-identity
(46:48) Being number two
(51:56) Exploitative strategies: do you want to be 1700 forever?
(01:06:26) Challenging the phonies
(01:14:36) Computers aren't perfect
(01:21:01) Spreading the good name of the great game
(01:26:07) Sealing up the last two percent
Conversation Transcript:
Note: transcript slightly edited for clarity.
Chris (00:05): Welcome to Forcing Function Hour, a conversation series exploring the boundaries of peak performance. Join me, Chris Sparks, as I interview elite performers to reveal principles, systems, and strategies for achieving a competitive edge in business. If you are an executive or investor ready to take yourself to the next level, download my workbook at experimentwithoutlimits.com. For all episodes and show notes, go to forcingfunctionhour.com.
Today I'm honored to introduce my guest David Eldar. David Eldar is a real estate investor better known as Australia's top-ranked Scrabble player, a title he has held since 2014. David was the 2017 Scrabble world champion and the 2019 world runner-up. He is consistently rated as one of the top five Scrabble players in the entire world. When David is not memorizing word lists, he loves racket sports. I can personally vouch for his ridiculous spin at the ping-pong table.
Today, we are exploring the underlying principles of strategy, language, and gameplay through the lens of Scrabble. Scrabble is the most popular packaged board game in the world, with one hundred and fifty million sets sold. It's said that one in three American homes owns the game. As I detail in “Play to Win,” the top players are playing a completely different game. As we break down David's approach to dominating Scrabble, perhaps you will discover hidden dimensions in whatever game you chose to play.
Thanks for joining me, David. Honor to have you on the show.
David (01:34): Hey, man. It's a real pleasure to speak to you, and very well-spoken.
Chris (01:39): Likewise. Very happy to have you here. Why don't we start off with a little bit of your background and how you got into the game? What was your introduction to Scrabble?
David (01:49): Yeah. So, do you remember Yahoo Games?
Chris (01:52): I do.
David (01:53): Yeah. So there were games called Word Racer and Literati that you may or may not have played, but they were intensely popular. I used to spend hours and hours after school playing these games with my dad, and I used to do a lot of word searches, crosswords, and those little—I don't know where my parents got these, but they gave me these little MENSA workbooks when I was a kid, and I was enthralled with all the word puzzles and all of that, everything word-related. And yeah, when I was thirteen or something, someone suggested to me, "Hey, you should go to a Scrabble club," and yeah. From there, the rest is history.
Chris (02:32): Definitely some overlap there. I cut my teeth on Yahoo Games. In particular, Gin was my game, and that's how I—
David (02:38): Oh, amazing.
Chris (02:39): —that's how I got into poker.
David (02:40): Yeah.
Chris (02:41): But even before that in the AOL chat rooms, they used to have these scrambler rooms where you would go in and someone would post an anagram and you had to be the first one to type it in and hit 'enter.'
David (02:51): Oh, really? Okay. Yeah.
Chris (02:52): And I got into some serious trouble with my parents because I wanted to be the cool one running these scrambler programs, and you know, go to a random site on the internet and download a program. A lot of them contained things that you wouldn't necessarily want on your computer.
David (03:04): Oh, of course, downloading like an online auto-anagrammer to try and get a competitive edge. You would not be the first.
Chris (03:13): Hey, anything for the win.
David (03:15): Yeah, yeah.
Chris (03:16): So, starting from a young age, being really into words and crosswords, how did you get started playing competitively in Scrabble? What did that look like?
David (03:25): So, a friend of my mother's played in a Scrabble club, or she had some connection to someone who was into organized Scrabble. And they were like, "Hey, why don't you try a club?" And so I went with my dad and my best friend at the time, who was also a kid. And obviously, like, generally speaking the age for Scrabble is definitely higher—the average age is higher than thirteen. So you know, it was me, my kid friend, and my dad. And I went and I played a couple of people at the club, and my dad and my friend played each other. And they were like, "Okay, this kid is pretty good." And from there I started playing every week at the club, and I sometimes even played twice, thrice a week, and I was completely obsessed with it. And you know, I told my mother that I wanted to play internationally, 'cause someone had said there's international tournaments as well. And I remember, you know, she laughed, and I was like, "No, I'm serious." And, yeah. Then the very next year I played in a tournament in Bangkok, in Thailand.
Chris (04:33): Tell us about that first international tournament. What was that like for you?
David (04:37): Yeah, that was an insane experience. Especially in Bangkok. So, they have this tournament called the King's Cup, which was—I'm not sure it's even running right now. It may have ended in COVID. But it's one of the premier tournaments on the international circuit. And yeah, you know, they had a grand prize of first prize, ten thousand dollars. Which is a lot of money to someone from Bangkok. And you know, all the best players would come out for it. That's one thing. The other thing is it was run in a completely different fashion to any other tournament. I mean, for one, you know, I had to be escorted by my dad to Bangkok. And only a few other familiar faces were at the tournament, so I was, you know, way, way out of my depths there. And it was a really overwhelming experience, 'cause until then I'd been in a pretty small pond, playing with only Australian players, although Australia has some of the world's best players. But there I would play against, you know, the best several players in the world, many of whom at the time were Thai—there's like a hundred memories coming back to me at once here.
Yeah, so many of the best players in the world were Thai, and many of them weren't all that fluent in English. And you know, when you think of a Scrabble tournament, or when I think of a Scrabble tournament, I think of a quiet ballroom or just a quiet room, people sit quietly. But this tournament was held in the middle of a massive shopping center. And they blast music. I don't think they had the license for Scrabble, so I was playing a “Crossword Game Tournament,” and they blast the Crossword Game jingle (and there's ten or twenty of them) on repeat. You know, I could still sing a couple of them to you. And it's like, it's Thai kids singing this, so whoever sung this can't speak English. And you know, it's just like, "Crossword Game, the game we love, the game we play." And it goes over and over and over and over again.
And you know, there's—tell me if I'm going too far here—but there's this whole ceremony. Like a couple of local princesses came, and you'd have to bow to them in between games. There'd be like, and—actually, this is a great detail—there was a mock up game which I'm pretty sure was rigged between this white dude from Thailand and the reigning world champion, who was Thai at the time, a guy called Panupol. On the last two days, which happened to fall over the weekend, they'd also run all the kids' tournaments. And so I'm talking I think at least a thousand children playing Scrabble. So I mean it was, you'd look down—you'd be playing on a raised podium—and you'd look down and you'd see an absolute flood of Thai children playing Crossword Game (or Scrabble, sorry) or variants of it. And they'd be blasting the songs, and you'd stop and you'd bow to the princess, and then to top it all off, they played this exhibition match, and the white guy, you know, he hopelessly loses to the Thai world champion, and you know, the crowd's going totally nuts, and there's a commentator and he's yelling out, you know, "Bingo! Bingo!" And you know, "Thai world champion, he wins!"
Yeah. And you know, other crazy things. Like there were kids who wanted pictures with me. And many years later—I played in that tournament quite a few times, and when I got older, my face was on the billboard of it, so I would be signing autographs and doing, like, photo shoots, which was pretty—an amazing experience. And then, yeah, at the end there's a final, and the final is on a massive stage, and they don't play Crossword Game anymore when you're on that stage. They play on repeat during the entire duration of the final—which can go up to three hours—"The Final Countdown" on repeat. And the guy's announcing over it, like, "Bingo! Bingo! Bingo!" And I made that final once, and I lost, but you know, I'll never forget it for the rest of my life.
Chris (08:47): Wow. What a wild experience. I mean, it reminds me of a kind of fraternity initiation of playing the same song over and over again, driving you crazy.
David (08:57): Yeah.
Chris (08:58): And something that's come up as we talk about you know, performing at these high-pressure tournaments or events, is there are just so many variables that you can't account for. The same song playing over and over again, cultural differences, kids running around. And if you go in there expecting, "Hey, I'm gonna have a nice, quiet room where I can concentrate quietly," you're gonna be disappointed, and you're gonna set yourself up to be rattled. So there's an aspect of preparation which is getting comfortable with uncomfortable differences that you might not expect.
David (09:32): That's definitely true. And I mean, for a kid, as well, I mean I could not handle it. And I remember I lost this one game to this Thai dude in, you know, the most unexpected fashion. And I was in absolute tears. I was completely wrecked by it. My dad had to comfort me until I could recover. So I mean, you know, it's a real experience. Like, your first forays into major competitive anything, I would say.
Chris (10:01): Yeah. It reminds me a bit of a couple of friends who were professional video game streamers, and their first trip to play Starcraft in South Korea. It's like, "Oh, this is the big time. We're on the big stage here."
David (10:13): Yeah.
Chris (10:14): So, let's hear a little bit about Scrabble the game. It's a game that's completely unique in terms of the size and the intensity of interest, and it has a pretty unique history. It's a game that's been around for a long time, and it's been really consistently popular. What's so interesting about the origin of the game of Scrabble?
David (10:35): Yeah. Well, I was surprised to learn that Scrabble is the fifth-most sold board game of all time. Does that sound right? Yeah.
Chris (10:42): Yes.
David (10:43): So yeah, it's intensely popular, and that's not to mention all the zillions of offshoots, like Literati and, you know, Word Racer. I mean that's not quite Scrabble, but just word games, I think, are really fascinating to a very large amount of people, and linguistics. And it's hard to explain why. Yeah. I mean, I couldn't even ask you, in reverse. Like, what was your attraction to that Scramble game you were playing as a kid?
Chris (11:12): I think about the speed of it, and there's just a moment of insight where you're like, "I have no idea," and then it just clicks, and it's like receiving the largest pellet of dopamine ever. "I am the greatest person alive."
David (11:27): Yeah, no, solving anagrams is intensely satisfying. And you know, one of—Getting a bit off your specific question, but one of tournament Scrabble players' most favoritest hobbies, I would guess, at least definitely one of mine, is to give out long ridiculous anagrams, and you know, the five of you (if you're sitting at dinner or whatever) might be staring, staring, staring, and when you get it before everyone else, "Yes, I've got it!" It's intensely satisfying. And the strategy behind Scrabble has a million different ways and shapes, and the permutations are just endless. It's incredible. I've played probably over ten thousand games of Scrabble, and I've never gone to a tournament and thought, like, "Pfft. Yeah, I've seen this before." There's always—somehow there's always just an endless variety of options of situations to come up.
Chris (12:29): I'm gonna completely put you on the spot. This is unplanned. Would you be down if I gave you an anagram and you shared some words that came to mind?
David (12:36): Yeah. I could probably do it. But no promises.
Chris (12:41): Okay. I don't know if this counts, what about "Forcing Function." Does that work?
David (12:44): Wait. Oh, no, no, no. It doesn't—You'd have to—
Chris (12:48): It's gotta—Just a bunch of random letters?
David (12:49): You would have to have a word in mind, and then you would have to—
Chris (12:52): Oh. And scramble it.
David (12:54): —Re-scramble it. 'Cause unless the question is, "What are all the words inside of Forcing Function," like, there is—
Chris (13:00): That's what I was thinking.
David (13:01): Oh, okay. Like, there's thousands of options. Like "cuffing" is just the first thing that comes to mind, or anything ending in I-N-G. Well, yeah. I'd like to give you a bit of an insight here. Like, the first thing I'd be looking at is I-N-G. So there'd be 'cuffing' or 'tiffing' or, oh shit. I actually don't think there's that many. And then you would look for T-I-O-N or something. And that's an ugly set of letters, because there's a lot of 'U's and 'F's. And, then, yeah. "Functor" for instance. But to find common words might be a bit more difficult. So I think, yeah, I could probably do that pretty instantly if you gave me a specific subset of letters and asked me to unravel it. I could probably do that pretty quickly.
Chris (13:47): So one of the most common stems is "sateer," S-A-T-I-R-E.
David (13:52): Yeah. Or "satire."
Chris (13:53): "Satire," yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, pronunciation is optional in Scrabble.
David (13:57): Yeah, it is, actually.
Chris (13:58): Maybe give us some examples, you have these six letters, other letters that you could add to it to make big moves.
David (14:03): Yeah. So one of the first things you learn in Scrabble is—because it makes it quite easy for beginners to play—so, it's if you have these six really good letters, you can add one more, and it can be basically any letter, and you know, you've got a bingo. So you could add in—I mean, I can rip through the whole list here. I mean, "A" would be "atresia," "asteria," "aristae," "B" would be "barites," "baiters," "rebates," and "terbias," "C" would be "raciest," "atresic," "criaste," "D" would be—There's, I think there's like eight solutions for "D." "Astride," "asterid," "aridest," to look for a common word there. "Disrate," I guess is sort of common. "Fairest," with an "F." "Hastier" with an "H." "Retails"—I could go through the whole list. It's too easy. These words, funnily enough, are actually kinda shaky in my head, 'cause they're the first thing I learned. And after I thought I cemented it in my head, I pretty much never looked back at it. And occasionally when simple stuff like this comes up I'm not a hundred percent on it.
Chris (15:06): Yeah. It seems that progressing up the ladder, memorization is just a huge part of it. That, you know, the more words you know, the more words you know to look for. And particularly all of these bingos, because they come with a fifty-point bonus, they empty your rack, like knowing a majority of them, being able to see them is usually the difference in who wins or loses a game. So you're starting off with Scrabble, everyone knows that you start by memorizing all of the two-letter words. I think there's a hundred and twenty-seven of them. But then you realize that in the official CSW Scrabble Dictionary, there's two hundred and eighty thousand words. So even though the average English speaker has a vocabulary of about six thousand words, like, I'm willing to bet, David, you've probably encoded over a hundred thousand. Is that a fair bet?
David (15:53): That is accurate. So your ballpark of two hundred and eighty thousand is up to fifteen letters. Up to eight, which are the most useful in Scrabble, I think is a hundred and twenty thousand. And I think up to nine, which—nine and ten, which could still be played, is, well. Of the hundred and twenty thousand useful ones, I probably have about a hundred thousand of them down. And I'm starting to make inroads into the useless stuff.
Chris (16:24): So, it's clear that you have some sort of system. I remember we lived together briefly about ten years ago, and you would have these giant books of single-spaced tiny-type words. It was just a bunch of scrambled letters, usually in alpha-numeric order, and I would read them out, and you'd be able to say all the words that were in that.
David (16:49): Yeah.
Chris (16:50): Tell me a little bit about what your process of encoding words looks like right now. How do you manage to acquire such a large vocabulary?
David (16:59): So, right now as of this very year I use a program called Zyzzyva, Z-Y-Z-Z-Y-V-A, which is the program that all serious Scrabble players will use which performs basically a card box function. If you've ever used Anki you'll know what that is. And, yeah. What it does is you're given the letters "A," "C," and "T." Right? And the answers are "act" and "cat." And so I type in "act" and "cat." Correct. Then it appears tomorrow. You know, one more day, I get it right, I get it correct, then it appears in four days. "A," "C," "T." And so, then ten days, then twenty days, and then it doesn't appear for five years. And by simply doing that like a zillion times over, I've gotten most—Not most. A large percentage of the dictionary memorized. For some of the more confusing words which are similar and sound like each other, I've had to make separate special notes for those ones. Those words I find very hard to make stick. So, for instance, it's very difficult to remember which words that end in "I-N-G" take an "S." So, "forcing." Does that take an "S"? No, it doesn't. But there's, you know, there's "forcing," there's "farcing." And does "farcing" take an "S"? Oh. I think so. And yeah, stuff like that is just—I don't know. It's so difficult to get into your brain.
And the other thing is, yeah, as you were saying, sorry, just to quickly go back to what you were saying before, I used to use lists as well, which I think were probably more effective. It's just I don't have the patience for them anymore.
Chris (18:45): Yeah, that's an important part of study and any form of practice, it has to be something that you can stick with for long enough. So, as you long-time listeners remember, we had an episode called "Accelerated Learning with Dominic Zijlstra” where we talked about the power of Anki and spaced repetition for learning a lot of things. In this case particularly languages. And the power of spaced repetition is that you're presenting with information right at that moment that you're likely to be forgetting it. The challenge with learning words or anything else is that it's transferring things from your short-term memory to your long-term memory, and if you're actually able to store it in your long-term memory, our best understanding is that you could potentially remember something for life. So if you get presented with it enough, you get it to the point that it's encoded, so to say.
David (19:36): Wow. That's interesting. Yeah. Yeah, so spaced repetition is what I was talking about, obviously, and it is an incredibly powerful tool for memorizing things. But I do find that—maybe it's just in this specific Scrabble program—that once things get spaced over five hundred days apart that they tend to fall out of my head. Every tournament I play there'll be a word, it'll come up, and you know, I'll just be like, "Ugh. Is this valid?" And I'll get home and I'll look it up in my spaced repetition program, and it would be like, "You last saw this word five hundred and seventy-six days ago." And I'm like, "Wow. You know, how did I ever forget it?"
Chris (20:19): It also brings up an interesting meta-point, in I think we approach a lot of things in life as if we're cramming for a final exam and the last day or two beforehand we're going to just, you know, read as much as we possibly can and jam it into our brain, but everything that we have learned says that this doesn't work very well, that the best approach to learning or creation as well is to come at things iteratively, where you touch it, you put it in a drawer for a while, and then you come back. So if you have some sort of big thing that you're training for, trying to find ways to space that training out over time.
David (20:55): Yeah. Well, I mean that would explain my atrocious high school results and my excellent Scrabble results.
Chris (21:04): So, reading about top Scrabble players, it's hard not to note that many of the top players have what we would kindly refer to as "outlier personalities." Does this match your experience?
David (21:16): That's definitely the case in America. And somewhat the case in other countries. Actually, I find that in countries that aren't specifically America, Canada, Australia, and the UK (i.e., white countries, white English-speaking countries), that it's not the case at all. Yeah. I know what you mean, and I do think that's because of the stigmatization of anything that isn't sport, particularly in this country, and getting good at intellectual pursuits has historically been grossly maligned.
Chris (21:55): Oh. That's a really interesting—so you're saying that if there is the same environment as there was in Thailand, as you shared before, where Scrabble players were on billboards and cheered, perhaps the people who would be attracted to Scrabble would be a bit different.
David (22:11): Absolutely. I'm certain of it.
Chris (22:13): Given that Scrabble is the way that it is, that it's an intellectual kind of a niche pursuit in a lot of areas, like, how do you find that Scrabble players are wired differently? Do you think they differ from the general population at all?
David (22:28): For top-ranked Scrabble players, I would say that seems quite likely, yeah. There is certainly a level of obsession required, because you do need to devote a lot of time to this particular pursuit. But that said, I do think that applies to many other pursuits that are time-intensive.
Chris (22:50): Yeah. That reminds me of a great quote. You recommended a book called Word Freak, that documents the history and the state of the game of Scrabble for someone who is going from zero to 1700, expert level. And the quote that I like is, "Scratch the surface of any champion in any individual sport, and you're going to find an obsessive misfit whose deficit in many areas of his life because he devotes eight hours a day to it." That's a quote from the director of the National Scrabble Association. So—
David (23:21): Wow. That is an awesome quote. I think it's definitely true.
Chris (23:25): Yeah. That the sacrifice necessary, the obsession to reach the top is going to by definition cause someone who's a little bit unbalanced in other areas of your life. So if balance is something that's a priority to you, likely having to set your sights lower. That that is part of the cost of making it to the top, is neglecting other areas intentionally.
David (23:49): Yeah. I mean you only get sixteen waking hours a day, and to become the best at something, usually, there are people who are willing to devote more than what you would consider a normal amount of time. There's gonna be someone out there who will devote more than an hour a day, which is what I would call a normal amount of time to get pretty good at something. And then, you know, as you know the graph just goes like this. And if you really want to get to the top of anything, you really have to neglect some part of what you might call a balanced life. Yeah. And you have to pour in tons and tons of time. And I feel that's the case for ninety-nine percent of the people who are top field experts in anything.
Chris (24:34): That's an interesting question. What are you willfully, intentionally neglecting in order to maintain your place at the top of Scrabble?
David (24:42): Oh, man. That's a great question, actually. For many years I wasn't holding any stable romantic relationship. So I guess you can say that. And yeah, since past twenty-five, I've not been single for a particularly long period of time, and as such, yeah, my time spent on Scrabble has massively gone down. And I don't know if this is mentioned in the book, Word Freak, but there has never been a world Scrabble champion who was married. Who won when married, I believe. And I think, you know, I just—I would be really impressed with anyone who was able to win something that requires as much time as a world Scrabble championship. Or like chess, or anything to that. Or even, you know, professional sports as well. It just requires complete devotion of most of your free time.
Chris (25:41): Yeah. And it does seem part of the keys to a healthy, successful relationship is being on the same page, and having a partner who accepts and supports your decision to be obsessed with something, and that a lot of times it's going to have to come first, or it's going to come up at inconvenient times.
David (26:03): Ha. I really think if you wanna be the best at something, you can forget having a balanced relationship. And, you know, you see sports players who are, you know, incredible at their field and must just train essentially six to eight hours a day, and I sort of feel that I would love to see how it's going behind the scenes, because, you know, and I wonder if it's just "me, me, me, me, me, and you know, you can have a bit as well on the side." But you do have to understand. And, you know what, one anecdotal experience of that is, did you watch the movie Free Solo?
Chris (26:38): Mm-hmm.
David (26:39): Yeah. Like, that guy came across to me as like, the ultimate jerk. I mean he's, just like, "Yeah, you know, I don't care too much about my girlfriend. I mean, you know, climbing's number one, and you know, she's just like, 'well, I'm just happy to be with someone famous.'" And I sort of feel like—I mean, that's how they come across. You know, who knows what goes on behind the scenes. But I have a feeling that is how it goes for a lot of people in relationships who are the very, very best at something.
Chris (27:09): Yeah. We tend to put people who are successful in one area on a pedestal, as if we admire them. But we wouldn't necessarily want to change places with them. And I think that was kind of what was behind my question of how the top players are wired differently. We recently had another world champion on the show, and she was a world champion gymnast. Her name's Kristin Allen. And talking about that she wouldn't recommend her kid or others to pursue becoming the champion in anything, particularly gymnastics, because of the extreme level of sacrifice necessary, and that she would have preferred that she had a more balanced life. And this is coming from someone who made it to the absolute top of her sport. And I thought that was really interesting.
Speaking of sport, something that I know that you've continually prioritized is being active, playing sports. You play volleyball, I know you play a lot of tennis, table tennis. It seems that as more research comes out we're starting to see the role and the importance of being physically active, physically fit for mental pursuits. I know early days when I would go to poker tournaments, everyone was overweight, staying out late, drinking, and more and more everyone's wearing WHOOP bands and playing tennis every single day, working out every day before a tournament. Like, what role do you think your physical fitness has played in being able to maintain the ridiculous level of stamina of playing, you know, sometimes eight to ten games of Scrabble in a day?
David (28:46): Hmm. There's a few things there. And the first thing is—It was a gymnast you said, right? I completely endorse her sentiment. I would say that the people at the top of especially professional sports are revered, but I would say wrongfully so. A positive, is it's incredible to be able to devote yourself so much to that, but the negative is the sacrifices you make are I don't think worth it, and I agree that I would never encourage any children of my own to go down that path of over-the-top excellence. And I don't think—it doesn't come from a positive place for me. And I suspect for the vast majority of top competitors that it doesn't come from a good place for them either. But, you know, I'm just one guy here. And the other thing, yeah, about fitness—and yeah, serious Scrabble does require intense stamina, because it's, you know, it's a real brain drain, and after a day of playing, you know, you just can't think anymore.
One thing I noticed is that most of the top players are not overweight. When, you know, you associate like board games, sitting down, and it's gonna be more overweight people than playing sports, obviously. And it is. It's a higher proportion of overweight people than it would be in a regular population. But if you cordon off the top ten percent or so, most people are pretty skinny. Like me.
Chris (30:28): Well, they did a study of chess players during a tournament. And I imagine it's very similar for Scrabble, in terms of being cognitive athletes. And they found that players during an all-day chess tournament—despite not standing up—were burning over three thousand calories in a day. So that many players during a chess tournament lost ten, fifteen pounds.
David (30:49): Okay, wow. Yeah, maybe I need to switch to chess. I don't think I'm burning three thousand calories a day. But I'm not too surprised to hear something like that, because that does line up with the thing that I said previously. And, yeah. I've actually been thinking about this quite recently, although I haven't done any formal research on it, but there must be something there. It, you know, it can't be—It seems unlikely to be just a coincidence.
Chris (31:16): So, from the outside it seems like there are three ways to differentiate yourself as a top Scrabble player. Correct me if I'm wrong here. The first one we've talked about is just vocabulary. Like, raw quantity of word recall. The second one we touched on, which is anagrams. That you can have this random assortment of letters, and you can unscramble them to make words. And the third one I would loosely define as strategy. So, you know, what word to play when you have multiple options, how to manage the tiles in your rack, how to set yourself up for future plays while blocking your opponent. If these are the three ways to differentiate yourself (vocabulary, anagrams, strategy), how would you force rank yourself in these three areas?
David (32:00): Oh, that's a good question. Yeah. So in terms of raw word knowledge, definitely very high up there. But I think especially in America there's a real—the players in America really know a lot of words. I'd need to pull out the list of the top twenty players in the world, or something. I'm definitely—in terms of how many words I know, I must be in the top ten somewhere. Probably within fifth or better. And in terms of anagramming, everyone in high-level Scrabble is a very, very good anagrammer, and it's hard to tell who is more natural at it and who is more skilled at it. Hard to say. Just at a guess, based on my ranking and my experience playing Anagrams, if you know what that is?
Chris (32:53): But—
David (32:52): Anagramming and word knowledge are kind of interwoven. That is just too hard to say. Obviously, I'm one of—or—It would be obvious that I am one of the best in the world at it, but where in that ranking, impossible to say. And in terms of strategy, I mean, I think I'm great. One funny thing you'll find in Scrabble, and I don't know how much the book touches on this, is there's—So, I'll preface this first, and I'll tell you that a robot that knows all the words and sees every word—So, the first two, down perfect, will get you to about 1900, and if it plays the highest-scoring move every single time, which you can do if you know every word and see every word within one second, that will get you to about 1900. So that's already going to make you a very high-level expert, probably one of the best hundred players in the world. And let me tell you, that is an incredibly difficult task. There's only one person in the world who can do that a hundred percent of the time. And for the record I'm, in that regard, I would track at about ninety-seven, ninety-eight percent.
And then—So, to get you from—I'm rated about 2100—and to get from 1900 to 2100, those extra two hundred points, that's where the strategy comes in. But if you talk to any Scrabble player under the sun, they will not tell you for a second how good they are at anagramming. They're all going to tell you, "My strategy is great. Like, I'm a great strategist." And what's more is when they're talking about someone who they don't regard very highly but might be rated higher than them, they'll be like, "He just knows all the words." You know, "His strategy? Not important." So I mean it's—In a way, the strategy is the least important part of your game, but people have an incredible emotional connection to being able to outfox their opponents, and that is what this game at its core is all about. And I'm one of those people as well.
And the thing is, those extra two hundred points of rating that get you from world-class expert to one of the best, as I was describing at the start, are infinitely fascinating. Every facet of Scrabble strategy has so many ins and outs, it's mind-boggling. And it never fails to amaze me. And I'm sure there are—Everyone who's playing at such a high level is feeling the same way.
Chris (35:43): Yeah. I wonder if strategy is considered so important because it's both subjective, in that there's, hard to say, "Hey, this is the perfect strategy." There's no Scrabble GTO. But it's also most tied to identity. Like, people don't necessarily identify with their ability to memorize words, or unscramble words, but like, "I am a smart, intelligent, strategic player," that's something that no one wants to let go of.
David (36:09): Yeah. I think that's well said by you. So, I think, yeah. Part of it is a core identity, you know, "Okay, well anyone can memorize a book by reading it a thousand different times." But not everyone can, you know, be the smartest person, because there is no perfect answer yet. No one thinks there is a perfect answer, and—So it's very subjective, and that allows all sorts of interesting schools of thought to come out. And within that, and tying that to your identity is obviously very, very important to people. And that's how you can get, you know, people literally looking down on other people for not having as good a strategy as them, but still being better players. And if you ever talk to, you know, a Scrabble player, they won't tell you like, "Oh, you know, my word knowledge is top-notch, but you know, the strategy let me down in this tournament." They'll be like, "Oh, no, you know, if only I knew more words, then I would win more games. But, you know, I don't study, so." But, you know, that's not really the case.
And also, you see as people improve through the ladder, what tends to happen is not that their strategy was incredible and then they catch up with the words. What happens is they improve in one bit, and then they improve in the other, and then they improve in the other, and then they improve in the other, and then they improve in the other, and then they improve in the other. That's what will happen if you ever watch someone's rise from the bottom to the top. And the reason for that—I haven't thought about why that happens that way, so much.
Chris (37:53): It's something that I've found consistently when I was coaching poker players who had plateaued is that they had excellent explanations for everything that they did, and particularly they had ready-made excuses for any play or any result. Like you said, like, "If only I spent more time studying." Well, okay. Why aren't you doing that? It's like this narrative of self-sabotage. It's like, "Well, you know, I could, but I don't."
David (38:21): Yeah. And not to mention, "But you know, if I did study, I'd be so much smarter than everyone else, and then I'd win, because I'm the smartest."
Chris (38:28): So you never need to prove that hypothesis. You can just luxuriate in that fantasy.
David (38:33): That's true. Yeah. That too. And yeah, you know, maybe these people just don't have that killer instinct that's required to spend that extra time. And I do find quite often that many of the people who champion these kinds of ideas get super attached to the strategic prowess of a given game—cause this is not solitary to Scrabble. This is true in many games, when you hear someone say, "Well, you know, on my A-game, like, I'm so much better than this." Yeah. You understand the subtext of what I'm saying.
Chris (39:05): Yeah. Everyone wants to talk about how they play on their best day. But you're not gonna be on your best day most of the time. Right? It's not the quality of your A-game, it's how often you play it. And that's an underappreciated dimension of gameplay: execution. Like, your ability to show up, be present, and play at your best. And that seems like something that pulls a lot of people back, if they don't think about, "Okay, I have this strategy, but is this a strategy that you can actually execute?" Right? It's like the classic saying, "The best diet is the diet that you can stick to." The best strategy is the one that you can execute after twelve hours of play.
David (39:47): Yeah. And that's very well said. And this has, you know, come up recently. I mean, there was someone that's like, "Oh my god," you know, "Why aren't I winning? Like I'm 2100 in my room against the computer, and you know, then I go into a tournament and I play like 1900." It's like, well, you're only as good as the strategy you are able to execute. So if you can only execute 1900, you are 1900. And you know, that's—doesn't equate with people's self-identity, basically. And there's a lot of deep psychology going on here, and I don't, you know, because I haven't formally thought about this or written it down before, it's quite hard for me to word it perfectly. But there can be a mismatch between your core identity and then, you know, how you execute when you're in person. And that can be quite devastating when that comes to be.
Chris (40:38): Everyone wants to criticize the system of rating, but it seems like it's pretty accurate overall. It can't—Just like, you know, like eighty percent of people say they're above average drivers. It can't be the case that every single player is underrated. They're probably, on average, fairly rated. You mentioned the psychological aspects of the game. You know, it's important to note that you are playing live against an opponent. Do you find that there is a psychological edge to be had when you're playing against someone?
David (41:13): Yeah. Although I ideally wish there wasn't, 'cause I'm not a fan of those kinds of dynamics. I don't know if you've ever played this game—What's it bloody called? Mafia, or something?
Chris (41:28): Yeah. Also known as Werewolf.
David (41:29): Yeah. You've played Mafia. You've obviously played Mafia, Werewolf, or Secret Hitler, now it's called. Or whatever it's called, blah blah blah blah blah. And the goal is you have to lie to your friends, basically. I mean, that's the optimal strategy, you just lie, lie, lie, lie, lie. That game makes me intensely uncomfortable, and I refuse to play it. And you know, that kinda thing in Scrabble makes me really uncomfortable. I would like to just play the game. But I know that I have an advantage because people, especially lower-rated people, especially in Australia are completely psyched out when they play me, and very, very strange things happen. And I would be sitting here laughing if that exact same thing didn't happen to me when I play the only guy who's rated consistently better than me, and I just go to pieces every time. So I know that feeling.
Chris (42:25): Yeah. This is a common phenomenon, in that it's difficult to play your game when you're going up against someone who feels unbeatable. That, "Oh, this person isn't going to make mistakes, so I need to press my advantages, I need to take more chances." Or the opposite. You can freeze up and, "I can't open up a single triple-word spot, because they're just gonna seize it every single time." And it seems like—I like this concept of centrality when trying to conceptualize the psychological advantage, is that you gain from being able to play your game and to impose your game on the other player. So, in Scrabble, I'm guessing there's players who have more defensive inclinations, so if you can force them into opening up their game, opening up the board, it might make them uncomfortable—and vice versa.
David (43:19): Yeah. That's definitely the case. And there are some people whose games I know so well that they're overly defensive or overly aggressive, that you can use that to your advantage. And yeah, it causes—Especially when people get psyched out. I don't know how much racket sports you've ever played, or how much sports in general, but have you ever had the feeling of hitting what you'd call like a "typed shot," and you know, usually your arm just flows naturally and you hit the shot, but all of a sudden you're like, you know, something is wrong and your body doesn't move naturally, and you know you want the ball to go in but you're too scared to over-hit it but you're too scared to under-hit it and you end up doing this sort of middle-of-the-road terrible nothingness, and I think that happens to a lot of people in a lot of competitive pursuits. And Scrabble is definitely one of those. And you overthink, like, "Do I need to be more defensive? Do I need to be more aggressive?" And it just compounds, and it makes the whole thing so much worse. The disadvantage is so much worse than it needs to be.
Chris (44:21): I look to tennis very often when making performance metaphors. I'm a very, very, very average player. I just picked it up during the pandemic, but very influenced by The Inner Game of Tennis, as well as, recently, Winning Ugly, and the understanding that for a very long time in the game of tennis, and I would argue in a lot of other pursuits, the way that you win is to avoid unforced errors. That the player who wins generally is the one who makes the fewest blunders. You see this in chess, I imagine you see this in Scrabble, and it's trying just to hit the shot, do the simple thing, like stick to the fundamentals, and what tends to happen is you just overthink it. So, Inner Game of Tennis, he just tries to set up ways that you can't think. Like, you can overload your brain with one intention and like, "Hey, just watch the seams of the ball." And if you're focusing on that, you can't think about, "Okay, what's the perfect angle? Do I hit it to this corner or that corner?" And you just allow your natural muscle memory to take over. Do you find that there's kind of a muscle memory in Scrabble? It's a weird analogy, because obviously, the brain is a muscle, there's a lot of intuition there, but do you find that you can just react without having to think about what the correct move is?
David (45:38): There's a sequence in Word Freak, which you may remember, where he—Stefan—gets this song stuck in his head. "Something Feelings," or something. I remember it very vividly. I don't know if you know what I'm talking about. And he's saying, like, "I'm playing words, and you know, feeling, I'm playing words and feeling," and the song's just playing through his head and he's not thinking and he's just playing the words and it's going amazing, and I totally understand. That feeling really resonated with me, and that's a very nice feeling to have, when everything just goes to your brain, it's stress-free, and it comes on the board, and you know, it all works out nicely. And that is—In a way that's the feeling that I would love to have all the time when I play. And yeah, but the reality is my brain is too oppressive and makes it much more uncomfortable for me. But, yeah. I think if you could do that all the time—I mean, like Nigel Richards, i.e. the best player of Scrabble in the world, who never has any feelings about anything, then you would be a lot better than you are at literally anything you ever did.
Chris (46:48): So, let's talk about Nigel. I don't know if this is a thing in Scrabble. You know, a lot of these things are invented, but if you had a rival or a nemesis, it would probably be Nigel. So a little bit of background on what an outlier that Nigel is, he didn't play the game of Scrabble until age twenty-eight. He's now a five-time world champion, more or less the undisputed best tournament player of all time. Famously he entered into the French championship. Obviously, he does not speak French, and just spent a year studying French words, and his very first time competing in French won the world championship in French. It has a lot of this psychological advantage that you talk about, because he doesn't seem to care whether he wins or loses. And you know, he wins about seventy-five percent of his matches, which is a really absurd percentage at the highest levels. So, David, you've faced Nigel many times in the final rounds of tournaments, I'm sure you've studied many of his games. What did you learn from playing against him?
David (47:48): When I asked Nigel about the French thing—I'm interested to hear where you got that, 'cause he told me—I mean, maybe it took him the process of a year. He just told me he read the dictionary twice and he had it. But maybe I've misremembered that. So that's the kind of, you know, superhuman that we're dealing with here. And yeah, I have—I don't know where it's gone. There was a website called nigelrichardsscrabble.com, that had every recorded game that he'd ever played logged. And I've been through all of them countless times. And you know, the only thing I can discern from his is like, either I'm like the stupidest player ever, or I'm so much better or—in a way it's the one thing you can discern from him is that, I don't know if it's true, but it feels true after playing him—Well, after dealing with him for a decade, is that no matter how good you are at something, there will always be someone better than you. And that's what it's like to be number two. Because he is not realistically beatable by a human.
Chris (49:01): How does that feel, reaching arguably the top and recognizing that there is someone who likely you will never be better than?
David (49:09): Yeah. I mean, it kinda defeats the purpose of the game for me, 'cause I mean, my you know, dream was to always be the best, but as time goes on and I look through more and more of his games and I learn more and more about the game, I tend to get stronger and stronger in the belief that he is completely untouchable, even if I devoted eight hours a day to this game once again for the next five to ten years. And that's just sad. I mean, it's just sad. So I mean, okay. Well, I might as well go and get good at something else, then.
Chris (49:49): And yet, you persist. So as you said, you're no longer spending eight hours a day, maybe you don't have the attention span or the drive or the desire, but yet you're still one of the top players in the world, which requires quite a bit of ongoing maintenance and study. So you've already won the world championship, you've reached the peak there. You're never going to make a huge amount of money from Scrabble, so it's not super—This might change, but unlikely that Scrabble becomes like chess or poker, where the top players are making, you know, hundreds of thousands, millions of dollars. You won, I think, five thousand pounds for winning the world championship. So it's not making it to the top again, it's not fortune, it's probably not fame, knowing you. What continues to motivate you to play the game, to continue to sharpen your skills and improve?
David (50:43): I would guess—There's no certain answer here, but I would guess it's personality and self-esteem. And for me, I identify with being, I don't know, the second-best Scrabble player in the world. And I've been ranked second for some time now. I think. Don't quote me here, but I think I've been ranked number two for a number of years. And yeah. Just recently at the last tournament I played, I dropped that ranking. And the first thing I thought when I went home was like, "All right, I'm done with this stupid game." And then three days later, I loaded up the card box and I started piling words into it, and words after words after words after words. And it's that, you know, because at the end of the day when I look at myself in the mirror, I'm like, "Well, I'm number two." And you know, "If I'm not number two, then I'm gonna keep doing it, I'm gonna keep doing basically whatever it takes until I am." And so, yeah, I guess there's some sort of identity or self-esteem thing going on there, and I really imagine that's what's at the core of it. At a guess.
Chris (51:56): So, David. Poker and Scrabble are both games of imperfect information. So, in poker, you don't know the cards your opponent has in their hand. A lot of the game is trying to figure out what they could have. In Scrabble, you don't know the seven tiles in your opponent's rack, and a lot of strategy is trying to infer what your opponent could have and thus what he wants to play, and what you want to prevent him from being able to play. Could you share an example of ways that you read between the lines to infer or at least narrow down the tiles that your opponent has?
David (52:34): So, one of the quirks of Scrabble is that duplicate letters are quite bad, and the most, most, most obvious and classic example of this is if someone plays an "S" off for one point, then the chances are they're sitting on another "S." It's extremely likely. So the thing is, an "S," as determined by our current Scrabble AI, is worth eight points. Its equity is eight. So you know, an "S," it's actually worth one point. Like, literally, in the game of Scrabble. But on your rack, that "S" is worth eight points. The second "S" is not worth much more. I'm not even sure it's—It might even be negative. So it's not doing you any favors. So if someone plays an "S" for one point, a tile that would usually be worth eight—You know, all of a sudden you know they have an "S," basically. So that is the most, the most, most, most classic example of this sort of thing. And you know, using that logic and taking it to an extreme—And then, obviously, you would need to run it through a computer to get any precise results. You can start to figure out what tiles your opponent might have. And you know, the first tip is they usually have an "E." They're usually holding onto an "E," and then they're usually holding onto other good letters like "R," "S," blank, blah blah blah blah blah.
Chris (54:09): That's really fascinating, and I can't help but note the commonalities between Scrabble and concepts in other games. So, you know, first that this intuition, this trying to look into the black box that is another person's soul is really this combination of logic and probability. So logic, in that you have these sort of "if/then" type statements that are nested. "Well, if he did this, then it's likely that he has this." And probability as in that there's never any certainty. This is not a Rain Man type thing, and, "Oh, okay, she plays enough so there's a thirty percent chance probability based on the tiles left that haven't—" No. It never reaches that level. But you're trying to at least calibrate like a, let's say a range or a probability integral, yes, based on what has happened.
So, an example in poker is all of the actions that a player takes during a hand limits down the possibilities, allows you to narrow in on that range or to closer estimate the probability. They raised in an early position, they bet on a flop where a lot of the times the correct strategy is to check. They continued to play strongly when the board got a little bit scary. All of these individual decisions added up in a compounding probability format, where we can narrow in, "Okay, it's likely that these hands are the case." Or at least these are the most likely hands in this case. It's most likely that there is an "E" or an "S" on the board.
Another principle that I think really translates to poker an the rest of life is this concept of "weak means strong." So you mentioned your opponent plays a ten-letter word, something that is very weak, but that this weakness is actually a very good signal of strength, because it means they're trying to set themselves up for a better play later.
I actually have a personal story of this from chess. I had just arrived in Mexico, and I went to a chess meetup. I'd never done anything like this before, I'm a very novice chess player but I thought this would be fun. And I was getting really confident because I'm sitting down against all these older guys and kind of wiping the floor with them, playing a pretty strategic, methodical game. And there's this really cocky nine-year-old who's just making moves really quickly, not really paying a lot of attention. And I'm like, "All right, I'm gonna, like, teach this kid a lesson." You know, bad sign already. I'm starting—I'm out for blood. You know, I'm psyched out, even though I think I'm gonna psych him out.
Early on, he makes a couple of key blunders, and I'm already, like, underestimating him. It was like, "Oh, you know, he's just all flash." And we have a sequence where, you know, I skewer him and I take three pieces in quick succession. I take a knight, I take a bishop, and I take a rook in exchange for my bishop. So I'm up a ton of material, and the very next move he checkmates me. I'm getting all excited about—
David (57:19): Ha! Oh, no! Ha!
Chris (57:20): "Oh, I'm just like taking all of his material, I'm just going to, like, overwhelm him." And he has this, just, quick comeback, he's like, "Well, you should have noticed when I wasn't even trying to take your pieces that something was going on."
David (57:33): Oh, no. Shut up! Ha!
Chris (57:37): And, man, what a piece of humble pie. And realizing that I had just created this narrative of, "This kid just isn't very good," and I'm just like taking all his pieces, that he's sitting there hapless. And this was a really good lesson that I learned, to just assume that your opponent is good. Like, assume that they know what they're doing, and that they have a strategy. And it's very easy to fall into, "Oh, they're just making mistakes, and I'm playing really well." And this hubris caused me to overlook a very obvious checkmate that he was setting up for.
So I thought this was just a very transferrable lesson, if you see someone make a play and you're like, "Oh, that's not a very good play." Assume that there is a reason behind it.
David (58:24): Yeah, that completely exists in Scrabble as well. And my, you know, strategy is to play against all opponents as if they're on my level, basically, but with some minor variations here or there. Now, I'm one of the very few people who does this, but many, many players, many, many top players believe that an exploitative strategy is the way to go, and you know, if you play against weak players you should try and exploit them in so and so way, and take advantage. I actually don't do that at all, and I don't really endorse people doing—Well. Sorry. I don't endorse people doing it if they want to win. And, yeah. I think one of the things, you know, an interesting discussion point which is sort of related to what we were saying earlier is—So, were you playing chess on a clock?
Chris (59:13): Yes.
David (59:14): Yeah. So, people in Scrabble are obsessed with time pressuring their opponents, and they take great pride when their opponent, you know, runs out of time and screws up. And that kinda relates to the strategy category we were talking about earlier where it's like—And I don't time pressure my opponents at all. Like, if they have ten seconds left and I have five minutes, and I was going to spend five minutes, I spend five minutes every single time. But many people think that I'm totally insane for that. But personally, yeah, I'm just not that sold on the idea of trying to force your opponents into errors that they wouldn't usually make. You end up costing yourself more. But—And the reason I think people do it is because I think it ties into that thing that we were talking about earlier, where it's your strategy and your soft skills, should we call them, are so much better that you don't even need to learn all the words, you can just beat people by running them over time.
And I remember this conversation that I had with a 1700 player, you know, who I crushed. And like, and he asked me, like, something like, you know, "What could I do to improve?" Or something to that effect. I'm like, "Well, you could have spent, like, a little more time thinking about some things." Or, you know, he—He missed something super obvious. I'm like, "Yeah, I guess you could have spent a couple more minutes looking for that." And he's like, "Right, but like the reason I'm rated this high is because I play so fast, and people can't play against my fast play." I'm like, "No, that's not right. The reason you're rated 1700 is because you're doing this insane error and this insane error and this insane error, and they would all be fixed if you just played a little bit slower." And he's like, "No, you don't know what you're talking about 'cause you're not 1700 and you don't play against the people that I play against." I'm like, "Oh my god."
Chris (01:01:24): "Do you want to be 1700 forever?"
David (01:01:25): Yeah, yeah, exactly. Yeah. I mean, you know, listen to the—If you can't literally hear the words from someone better than you that they're giving to you, then I mean, yeah, it's a lost cause. But what that speaks to is how strongly some people are attached to that notion that we spoke about earlier. That, you know, "I don't know any words, but I mean, I'm crushing people by running them over time and, you know, outfoxing them or being extra-blocky or being extra-aggressive," et cetera, et cetera.
Chris (01:02:00): Something that I've seen in progression in everything is that it tends to follow an S-curve, so you have this rapid exponential improvement in the beginning, and then you have these declining returns, these diminishing margins of returns, in an economic sense, before you know, finally you have some form of punctuated equilibrium or breakthrough, where all of a sudden you get back on an exponential curve. And you've hit an inflection point, and that a lot of these points of diminishing returns where you stall out, you plateau, you're running into some block. And usually this block is, say, self-imposed. An analogy is in order to reach that next level of rapid progression, you need to start thinking out of the box. But the big thing is there is no box. That this box that you've put yourself in is completely self-created. The example you gave of this limitation, "I need to play fast," and treating something that it's just an opinion of yours as fact, as an assumption that's set in stone, is that, "Well, there's no other way to play." So it's something that I've found often in my life, if I feel stalled out or stuck in an area, it's like, "What are the assumptions that I'm treating as absolutely true that I haven't really validated?"
David (01:03:23): Well, I think there is kind of a box. So, what you're saying is right, that there's not a box. And the thing about Scrabble is that that box is broken, because my special opinion on this is that most people improve on something, and this flow of plateaus and blah blah blah blah blah is usually in relation to their closest rival. And right now that's happening in Australia, where my closest rival in Australia, the Australian number two who I have quite regular contact with, he's really improving, and he's studying a lot, and he's posting about his studying, and I'm seeing his results on the public study website. Yes, that's a thing. And I'm like, "This guy is gonna overtake me." But you know, then it's the same thing. Like, I look in a mirror and I'm like, "Nope, I'm number one in Australia." And then you know, I sit down and I open the program and I study the strategies and I spend hours like poring over games until I'm number one again. Because you know, I look in the mirror and I'm number one, and that's just it.
And I think that governs a lot of those, like, ebbs and flows, 'cause you know, my own personal progress when I reach number one in Australia—And I've been number one in Australia for eight consecutive years, maybe, since 2014. And I was miles ahead of the pack for a very long time. And just this year for the very first time someone has come quite close to me. And, yeah, all of a sudden, up we go. You know, the rating will start going up again as someone nears me, because, yeah. And that's tied to, I guess, probably my core identity of being the best player in Australia, or something like that.
Chris (01:05:23): It's definitely true that iron sharpens iron, where you see someone doing well and that illuminates you to the possibility. I think there's also, you know, working backwards from a self-fulfilling prophecy where, okay. What does the best player in Australia do? All right, he's studying, he's, you know, playing lots of games, he's working out regularly. Okay, I'm going to do that. Where the score takes care of itself, the rating takes care of itself in such a way that you put in the work. So having that motivator to stay hungry, even if it's relativistic, seems necessary, because it's difficult to keep your spot at the top when everyone's gunning for you.
David (01:06:02): Well, if you're number one by a million miles, there is just no incentive whatsoever to put in any work. And I think, yeah, there's much more incentive when everyone is gunning for you, as you say. Then the incentive is quite great, to stay ahead of the pack. Especially if you feel inside like, "Hang on." You know, "I need to be the best because of X, Y, Z." You know, emotional reasons.
Chris (01:06:26): Something that surprised me quite a bit about Scrabble is that a big part of the game is bluffing. So, quick context, you know, there's lots of different factions within Scrabble. You have different rules, different word lists, depending on where you're playing. There's a North American version that's American-based, there's a rest of the world version that's UK-based, and the rules are different, the word list (which is a really, really big factor in Scrabble) is completely different, and so a lot of players only compete at home, and a lot of American players have a lot of difficulty competing in the rest of the world, and vice versa. Within the North American Scrabble rules, there is the concept of a challenge penalty. So, realizing that when you play something like Words With Friends online, if you try to put down a fake word, it won't accept it. And so what you see is people who think they're really good at Scrabble 'cause they just keep trying words until they get one that's acceptable.
David (01:07:28): Ha. Yeah.
Chris (01:07:29): But in real Scrabble, there's no rule against putting down fake words, or what's called "phonies." The computer is not going to tell you, "Hey, that's not a real word." It's actually up to your opponent to challenge the word. So, my understanding, where you primarily play in the rest of the world, the UK-based in Australia and Southeast Asia, an opponent can just have unlimited challenges, so there's really no incentive to put down a fake word. But in North America, if you put down a fake word and your opponent challenges you, so the challenge is accepted, like, "Hey, that's a fake word," the word comes off, you lose your turn. This is true no matter what. But in North America, if you challenge the word and the word is legitimate, you actually have a penalty of losing your turn. So there's this gamesmanship of putting down a phony where you don't have a real word and sort of daring your opponent to challenge it. Right? It's like, "Oh yeah, of course that's a word." A hundred percent confidence.
So I know on occasion you travel to America to play, and because you like to win I know you play some phonies, even sometimes knowing they're phonies. So what's the key, in your experience, to bluffing in Scrabble?
David (01:08:38): So, the first thing is that double challenge as it's—What you've described, playing online, is called "void challenge," where you're just given infinite turns, and I'm actually a big fan of that in online play, especially for beginners, because it's very low—You don't have to learn anything, right? You can just keep trying and trying and trying. For me that's a lot more fun, because I don't have to have a heart attack any time I'm trying to remember if something's a word.
So, the one where you lose a turn for either challenging or playing a false word is called "double challenge." I think you said that. And that is only played in North America, but it's—The key there is it's actually only played in the North American dictionary as well. So I've actually never played it before. But they do have in prestigious international tournaments, and in some other tournaments, the penalty for challenging. So it's not losing your turn, but it's five points or ten points. And back in the day I would play all sorts of crap, and a lot of people would do that as well. And you know, there's a lot to unpack here. One of the things about playing phonies in America is that Americans—Well, I'm saying "Americans," but all people, but I'm just saying "Americans" 'cause it's only played in America—like pressuring people on time are very, very attached to bluffing people and how that makes them a great player. They, you know, they feel very strongly about it. I've run a lot of numbers and played around with analytical tools a lot in this game. I'm pretty sure that it's almost never correct to play a wrong word intentionally. Which is kind of a not-very-fun attitude.
But the thing is, when you lose your turn it's worth approximately minus forty points. Four-zero. So it's pretty much never worth risking losing forty points, because—Or it can only be worth risking if your play is—Well, I don't know the numbers, but it has to be probably forty points better than your next play. And the thing about plays that are forty points better than your next play is that they score an absolute boatload, so your opponent's going to need to accept something that scores a ton of points. And the problem with them accepting it is, if they accept it, then it's probably going to cost them the game.
So, yeah, you've gotta be pretty damned sure that you're gonna be getting away with whatever nonsense it is you're trying.
That said, people are really averse to challenging words. It's a real thing. And you know, when I was younger, even on the five-point penalty challenge, if I sensed that my opponent was just like—You, sometimes you'd get a player that you'd have a feeling that this player knows who I am, and they're gonna just let me do whatever I feel like. And then I'll be like, "All right, you know, if you're gonna let me anyway, I'll just start playing stuff." And that really was fun. Trying to make up words, but not push the limit of belief, is quite a fun process.
Two of my most risible words, particularly against this opponent I'm thinking about—I played "Finland," which is definitely not a word. And you know, I noticed I'd played some fancy, unusual words that this person definitely hadn't studied, and I'm like, "They're not challenging, not even for five points. There's no way they'll challenge Finland." And sure enough, they let it go. And then the next turn I'm like, "Oh my god, my letters are so bad. I've got A-E-E-U, whatever." And then I'm just like, "All right, what's the most plausible-sounding word I can make up out of this?" And I remember, yeah. So I played recuniae, R-E-C-U-N-I-A-E. And there's a couple of words that end in I-A-E, and I'm like, "This just sounds so bizarre that, you know, she's totally going to buy it." And sure enough, she did.
And yeah, I used to try stuff like that quite frequently. Nowadays, I'm more believing in just playing your opponents as if they're a genius.
Yeah, but actually the most famous, actually forget me. I mean, there's Nigel. So, you know, as you somewhat know, Nigel is basically a human robot. But about twice a year he makes an error, and he makes the same error once every six months or so, the exact same error. And that error is he puts two tiles in the wrong order. He sees the best move in his brain, and then his hands go to put the tiles on the board, but then two of them are in the wrong order. And where this very famously happened in America is he went to play "hairnet," you know, the thing you put on your hair when you're cooking food, a hairnet, but he in his once every six months or so mistake he played "hiarnet," H-I-A-R-N-E-T. And his opponent was just like, "Well, it's Nigel. I'll let this one go." So he ended up getting away with it, which is hilarious.
Chris (01:14:23): Power of reputation, right? Being known as someone who doesn't make mistakes. Self-fulfilling.
David (01:14:26): Yeah. By being the guy who never makes a mistake, you can get away with a surprising amount, even something as absurd as that.
Chris (01:14:36): So, speaking of never making mistakes, we touched on AI a little bit, but I think this is a really rich topic of discussion. So in exponential progress—And you say, Narrow AI has had a massive effect in the game of poker, for example, particularly in the past five years. It's widely accepted that today humans have no chance against the best AIs, and that the fastest path if you wanna be a top poker player is just to run endless simulations and to memorize the computer's solutions. You put it really eloquently before, it's essentially reading this ten-thousand-page book over and over again and it's in the hopes you can replicate that strategy when you need it.
Now, AI has a very long history in Scrabble. I think the original program, Maven, goes back to the '80s. And you've mentioned that AI is a big part of your study. How have you seen the impact of AI on Scrabble in terms of what's considered a best practice, the best way of playing, and the methods/tools available for becoming a top player?
David (01:15:38): Well, the development of AI in Scrabble is very interesting, because running parallel to the development of AI is Nigel, who beats the AI, still. And the development of AI has incredibly impacted the game, because it taught people many important concepts. I mean, the one concept it taught people is how, you know, an "S" is worth eight. How else would you know that an "S" is worth eight points? Well, the only way you can really truly know that is by getting the computer to play itself a bazillion times and spitting out a value. So knowing how much each letter is worth is tremendously valuable information in the game of Scrabble, and that would not be possible without an AI. And over time, as AI has developed, those numbers have changed and changed and changed. And there's a lot of important concepts like that. Like defensive prowess. A computer can tell you by definition what your most defensive move is. So you can—The current most popular program is Quackle. So you can put your move into Quackle, all your candidate moves into Quackle, and then it'll tell you, "Your opponent scores the least after this turn." So, this turn is your most defensive possible turn. It may not be your best turn, but it's your most defensive.
And you know, where it all goes haywire is that we know these computers aren't perfect. They're really good, but they're not perfect. And then there's just this one guy who's better than them. And you look at his plays, and a lot of them line up with the computer, but some of them are completely off the planet. Like, it doesn't make any sense at all. And he refuses to give any information to anyone. So there's like a black box as well with the advance of AI. And yeah, for a long time I studied his games and I tried to emulate him, and eventually, I think I realized it was just too hard to figure out what he's doing, because it's not really consistent, and it's much easier to decode what a computer does, because a computer also spits out a lot of stats, and gives you an easy program that's quite easy to follow. So my strategy is heavily based on the computer, despite the fact that I'm very well acquainted with Nigel's strategy, and I have some elements of what I've learned from him over the years peppered into my game as well.
I'm very interested to see when an AI comes that is game perfect how it's going to perform against him.
Chris (01:18:42): So, you mention that there is this last mile in Scrabble, where an AI playing just the highest-scoring word can get you to 1900, but if you're trying to get to champion, around the 2100 level, a lot of that is the intuitive (for lack of a better term) gameplay that's knowing, "Hey, there's a lower-scoring word, but it actually does better in the long term because of how it sets me up or how it prevents my opponent from playing what they want to play." Do you think this last mile is surmountable by the AI? Do you think that Scrabble will become a solved game?
David (01:19:21): I mean, I think so. Like, I'm not sure what's technically possible with computers, but my guess would be "anything." So, yeah, I guess it's perfectly solvable, but we're yet to see it, and I do know that the current batch of programmers are producing an update to Quackle, a long-overdue update, which will be out in the next couple of years, but I'm pretty sure even that update is still not gonna be better than Nigel's current skill level. So I think, yeah, I think it's gonna be a while. I imagine it's gonna come eventually, because what isn't in the way of computer AI. But I think we've still got some waiting to do. And I personally am dying to know the answers. I would love to know how to play Scrabble perfectly.
Chris (01:20:13): That does seem to be the drive, right? The ever-receding horizon of perfect play, where the better you are at something—
David (01:20:20): Yeah, yeah, exactly.
Chris (01:20:21): —the more painfully aware you are of your own deficiencies. And that gap, ever narrow, becomes wider and wider.
David (01:20:29): Well, yeah. You know, the computer is very good and all, but the utter beauty of watching Nigel play Scrabble is an unparalleled experience, and that unfortunately can only be experienced by people who have expertise in this obscure niche game, is to really understand. I mean, this was a bit off what you were saying, but to really understand the true, just absolute genius of what's going on there.
Chris (01:21:01): So, let's bring it into the common day. So during the pandemic, a lot of people were spending time inside, and you saw a real surgence of streaming. So, streaming had always been big in the video game world, but it really exploded within poker and within chess in particular. Obviously, you know, having an award-winning Netflix show come out of either game is pretty good for bringing in new interest, but it does seem like streaming—and particularly Blitz streaming—has had a huge effect in getting you know, younger viewers and players from other games interested in chess, which had been kind of considered as a, you know, old-timer old-fashioned type game. I know you're a streamer on Twitch yourself, you know, deldar182. Do you see streaming or Blitz having an effect on the future of Scrabble? Do you think it could bring in new players? Is it an interesting dimension for you? What are your thoughts on streaming?
David (01:22:06): I think streaming is a very good avenue for increasing the popularity of anything. Which is why I stream a bit of Scrabble in my free time. A, for personal enjoyment, but you know, B, to spread the good name of the great game. But at the end of the day, Scrabble is such a niche thing that I don't know how much effect it has. And I think one thing that boggles—I mean, it doesn't have any effect compared to the effect of having an award-winning show released on Netflix, which—It boggles my mind that chess has suddenly exploded in popularity, because if you ask me, I can't imagine a more boring game than chess, where if you're better than someone you win every time, and if you're worse than someone, you lose every time. You know, to really enjoy chess, you need to find someone that you're pretty much perfectly matched with, and already that's a hard ask.
And yeah, I think streaming is helpful, but when you think about what made things popular—So I think about my age and people I know, what are the two biggest trends or let's call them fads, perhaps (might make some people angry) over the last decade or two. I think of chess (award-winning show) and rock climbing (with a hit movie). And Scrabble also had a massively popular book—which you've read—released. And I believe in a very similar year to that, it was broadcast on ESPN. And that is when there was a massive influx of players that joined the scene. And that's around when I joined, too. And I think in terms of proliferating the game, yeah, you probably wanna get your game on a TV screen.
Chris (01:23:59): It's hard to beat having your game on ESPN legitimized. I think there was a five-year period, 2003 to 2008, where Scrabble was on ESPN primetime. Not as much as poker during this time, which seemingly was twenty-four hours a day, but exposure does a lot for bringing new players into the game. So any aspiring Netflix producers out there who wanna make an award-winning series about poker or Scrabble, you have lots of interest and potentially some technical advisory services available.
David (01:24:34): Yeah. I think there would be more people interested in that than you would know what to do with.
Chris (01:24:40): David, this has been amazing today. Thank you for, you know, sharing a bit of your brain, some of the intricacies of the game you love so much. I've learned a ton about strategy, not even being a devoted Scrabble player, but getting a little bit of insight to your approach to the game. It seems like you're back in the Scrabble streets, that three-day period where you were thinking about quitting didn't last very long—
David (01:25:03): Yeah. Boy, that was rough.
Chris (01:25:06): I know there's a—common phenomenon. I've been there with poker many times. It's very much a love/hate relationship. It seems like many players in the Scrabble world are really excited for next summer when both the American championships as well as the world championships will be taking place in Las Vegas. So, for poker, the world series of poker for two months in Las Vegas every summer is sort of our South by Southwest, Burning Man, et cetera, like festival, conference where all the players who normally only see each other on the internet get together and compare notes, hang out, and talk about the things that only other people who are obsessed with the game get. So, I'm looking forward to Las Vegas. You know, a more interesting location than perhaps, you know, Reno or Albany that a lot of these things get hosted. What do you think your preparation is going to look like in attempts to sweep these two parts of a Triple Crown next summer?
David (01:26:07): Yeah. It's funny, because I've sort of reached all of the goals I want to in Scrabble. You know, I've won a World's—I was ranked one of the highest for a zillion years, and yeah. I achieved a lot of my goals. So the only goal would potentially be to be the best. And I don't really think in reality I could ever beat Nigel, but the seed is there. And so what that would require is to know every word and see every word. And part of knowing every word and seeing every word is knowing the nine-letter words. So, on Scrabble, you get seven letters, and you play through an eighth letter to make a bingo, sometimes, so it's very important to know the sevens and the eights. But the nines are not very important. You might get one a day, if you're lucky. But Nigel knows them all, and he sees them all with a hundred percent accuracy. And I have started learning them all. And that'll probably take me about a year.
And then with that other next year, I'm gonna—If I continue with like the current pace I'm going, I'm probably gonna consolidate a lot of the old stuff that has started to fall out of my head, just because I've been—Rather than be, you know, when I was younger, I used to study and study and study and study. But I've been in maintenance mode, which is a lot less intensive and doesn't require as much time. But, yeah. I may basically fix up a lot of the holes in the maintenance, and also learn all the nine-letter words. So I'll have finally completed the full dictionary. And by the way, Nigel knows all the words. I don't think anyone knows how long he knows them, because he's been caught playing tens, elevens, twelves. The thing is, a twelve-letter word comes up once every ten thousand games or something. But I'm pretty sure he knows them all.
Chris (01:28:15): Fun stuff. Ninety-seven to a hundred percent. It's a long road.
David (01:28:20): I mean, that's basically what I'm doing. I'm sealing up the last two percent here.
Chris (01:28:25): A last question for you, David. Someone who's listening to this is an aspiring serious games player. So this could be Scrabble, could be chess, poker. Any game. Any advice that comes to mind, things that they should be thinking about in terms of accelerating their progression through the ranks?
David (01:28:44): If you want to accelerate your progression through the ranks of anything, I think that you would need to set aside time every day and really fence it off and say, "I am going to spend one hour a day learning all of the openings in chess," and then you sit down at the start of that hour and you don't do anything except learn the openings, and then at the end you finish. And if, by the end of that hour, you are hating your life, then don't worry about being an expert and just have a good time.
Chris (01:29:23): Understand the costs of the goal you are pursuing upfront, to know that you can stick it out to make it there and avoid the heartbreak of falling short just because it wasn't something that you were ready to put the hours in. That's quite okay. That there's nothing wrong with that.
David (01:29:39): Yeah. And there is nothing wrong with that. There really—You know, I would go almost as far to say as there is something wrong with the opposite. Ha.
Chris (01:29:50): So, David, where can we find you if we want to watch you streaming Scrabble online?
David (01:29:56): Yeah. I stream on Twitch once in a while. On twitch.tv/deldar182. If anyone sees this and catches me there, well, I'll be thrilled, seriously.
Chris (01:30:12): There you go, right? This is what it's like. You're thrilled to have someone come and watch you play a game of words.
David (01:30:18): Yeah. Yeah, exactly. That's what it's like.
Chris (01:30:22): David, you're the best. Thank you so much for coming on. This has been a total blast.
David (01:30:27): Really good to chat. I really enjoyed it.
Chris (01:30:30): All those who are listening, thanks for joining us for another insightful episode of Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture to a select group of twelve executives and investors in meaningful companies. If you're ready to raise your game, download my peak performance workbook for free at experimentwithoutlimits.com. If you're listening to this episode as it's posted, you should know that we just opened applications for our fourth cohort of our flagship group coaching program Team Performance Training. At Team Performance Training, I teach my complete system for peak productivity and performance as a ten-week program. There are fifteen places available by application only. You can learn more at teamperformancetraining.com. Thanks for joining us today, David. See you all again soon.
David (01:31:11): Thanks, dude.
Tasha (01:31:13): Thank you for listening to the Forcing Function Hour. At Forcing Function, we teach performance architecture. We work with a select group of twelve executives and investors to teach them how to multiply their output, perform at their peak, and design a life of freedom and purpose. Make sure to subscribe to Forcing Function Hour for more great episodes, or go to forcingfunctionhour.com to sign up for our newsletter so you can join us live.